Ep. 78: Real SIBO Recovery Stories (And What They Had in Common) [SIBO mini series part 4]

You’ve done the SIBO antibiotics. Maybe even two or three times.
But you’re still bloated, still stuck on five “safe” foods, and wondering…
“Why isn’t this working?”

In the final episode of this SIBO mini-series, Dr. Heather shares 3 real client stories that show that SIBO recovery is not one-size-fits-all. Each client had the same diagnosis on paper, but needed a completely different plan to actually feel better.

If you’ve been told “you’re fine” despite ongoing symptoms, or you’re burnt out from restrictive protocols that go nowhere, this episode is your reminder: there’s a better way.

You’ll learn:

✔️ Why killing bacteria isn’t enough—and what to do instead
✔️ How mineral depletion, bile flow, and scar tissue can stall healing
✔️ What true gut repair looks like after a SIBO protocol
✔️ The difference between managing symptoms and rebuilding resilience
✔️ Why your recovery plan should start with you, not the diagnosis

If these stories resonate, you’re not alone, and there is hope for healing. 

Resources & Links:

🔍 Take the Free Gut Health Quiz to start identifying your root causes
📝 Apply for 1:1 support through gutTogether®

📲 Connect with Dr. Heather on Instagram

🎁 Special Giveaway:
Leave a rating and review on Apple or Spotify, screenshot it, and email it to happygut@drheatherfinley.co with [PODCAST RATING] in the subject line.
You'll be entered to win a FREE HTMA test + consult package!

(We pick a new winner every month!) 

Transcript

Dr. Heather Finley: 0:03

Welcome to the Love Your Gut Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Heather Finley, registered dietitian and gut health specialist. I understand the frustration of dealing with GI issues because I've been there and I spent over two decades searching for answers for my own gut issues of constipation, bloating, and stomach pain. I've dedicated my life to understanding and solving my own gut issues. And now I'm here to guide you. On this podcast, I'll help you identify the true root causes of your discomfort. So you can finally ditch your symptoms for good. My goal is to empower you with the knowledge and tools you need so that you can love your gut and it will love you right back. So if you're ready to learn a lot, gain a deeper understanding of your gut and find lasting relief. You are in the right place. Welcome to the love your gut podcast. Welcome back to the next episode of the Love Your Gut podcast and the last episode in this SIBO series. I hope you have loved this series as much as I have, and I'm really excited to dive in today with some different SIBO cases that hopefully you will resonate with. I hope that you listen to these stories and are able to see why. SIBO and getting a diagnosis of SIBO is just scratching the surface to actual healing. I'm going to share with you three different client stories, and all of these clients either thought they had SIBO or were actually diagnosed with sibo, and the way that we approached it for each of these clients was actually completely different. If you've been following along, SIBO is a symptom, not the root cause, and that testing and treating sibo, whether that's through antibiotics or herbal antimicrobials, without understanding your whole gut terrain. We'll only get you so far and that's why so many of the SIBO clients that we work with come to us after having treated sibo. Three, four, sometimes five plus times. So I wanna close out this series by just giving you a little bit of hope and also a little bit of insight in what that could actually look like for you if you were to. Really understand all the pieces of your puzzle. So instead of more like what to do, I want to show you just what it looks like when this works and how your life could be different and how it doesn't actually have to be so complicated because I know it's super frustrating. When you've tried so many things and you still feel bloated, you still feel reactive, you still feel constipated. Maybe you're having diarrhea and you're stuck on five safe foods. So like I said, we're gonna walk through three real client stories. All women who had SIBO on paper. Or thought they had SIBO and needed a completely different treatment plan to finally feel better. And so if you hear your own story in one of theirs, like I said, I hope it gives you hope. Just quick reminder, if you are ready for personalized support, now is the time to. Apply for get together. We always get really full as back to school happens and people are preparing for the holidays. You might still be in summer mode and I'm definitely getting out of summer mode. We had the first week of school last week and things are getting a little bit more routined in a good way over here, but we're about three months out from the holiday time. And that is when people end up panic, calling us wanting support because they don't want to spend another holiday restricting foods or being doubled over in pain or bloated or whatever it might be. So, jump on my calendar. Let's have a discovery call. Let's chat through your case. Let's make sure it's a good fit to work together, chat through options, and get you feeling better. So let's dive in. I wanna share with you about this client. We'll call this client the tried Everything client. This is probably the most common case that we see, the clients that come to us with a super long history. This specific client had treated SIBO four times. She had worked with several practitioners. Her GI doctor, as well as another dietician, she had worked with a naturopath kind of more in the functional space and felt like she was just on this merry-go-round that she could not get off of. She had taken antibiotics, she had done low fodmap. She had done several other elimination diets, AIP low oxalate, biphasic, you name it. She had tried it, but she had several things that would happen to her. First when she treated sibo. She felt better while she was on the antibiotics, and then the second she got off, she felt worse. Even worse than before she started, and then she took the antibiotics again. Proceeded to do that four times, and as she got close to the fourth time that she was on the antibiotics, she didn't notice a single thing. She was more constipated, more bloated, and more terrified to eat more than just a few foods. She told me in our first. Discussion that we had. I feel like I'm never gonna get better because I'm actually just getting worse. So here's what I told her. I'm like, we actually see this a lot. So not that this is the club that you wanna be a part of, but. Here we are. And there is a way for you to feel better, and I imagine that part of the reason that you're feeling worse is because your body is really depleted. It's a lot of work for your body to try to push out infections like sibo H Pylori, whatever you have. It's a lot of work, and especially if you're really stressed about it. You're restricting foods. Your diet is really limited from a mineral perspective. You're also gonna get really depleted. And if you've been around here for any amount of time, you know how important minerals are. They're the foundation for every metabolic process in your body, including digestion and energy. So. We actually started by running an HTMA test on her and what stood out on her testing. So she did an HTMA and a GI map. What stood out wasn't her bacteria. Sure there were bacteria that we needed to address, but I wasn't that concerned about it. It was her minerals. Her body was completely burned out. When we looked at her adrenal ratios, when we looked at her sodium and potassium, she was completely burned out. They were completely in the tank, and that is part of the reason why she was barely having bowel movements, maybe one every three to four days. We hit pause on pretty much anything related to gut bacteria and we took a step back and zoomed out and here's the deal. If you're not pooping, you cannot clear anything. You can't detox. You can't get rid of sibo. You can't, your body cannot heal. You can't ask your body to do the hard work of clearing bacteria if your exit roots aren't open. I don't know a better way to say that. So instead of another round of antimicrobials, her plan looked a little bit like this. We supported her motility because we had to get her bowels moving and contracting. We focused on foundationally supporting her minerals. This for her looked like a custom mineral blend. Sounds fancier than it is, but it's a really great way that we can support our clients. Once we have HTMA testing, we can custom blend a mineral powder for them. Like I said, it sounds fancier than it is, but it actually ends up being way more affordable than buying a random. Electrolyte drink or buying this mineral drink. And it's something that is exactly what that person needs based on their test results. So she started on that. We also introduced a lot of nervous system regulation because she had this belief that she was never gonna get better and that food was scary, that her symptoms were scary. Eating out was scary, and she was the mom with the symptoms. So we had to do a lot of rewiring around that, how food is not scary, how eating out does not have to be scary, how her body could heal, how our bodies were designed to heal, and that was a big part of her process. Then later on we supported. Her beneficial flora and the bacteria in her gut. We added in spore based probiotics, some gentle gut support. We didn't do any major killing. And so I, what I want you to hear from this is once we got her testing, her testing actually didn't look at all like sibo. Although she had positively tested for SIBO in the past, that's why the antibiotics weren't working anymore. She probably had cleared the SIBO maybe the first time, but she had a lot of other stuff going on, and whether she still had SIBO or not, I don't know because she hadn't done another breath test. But from a large intestine standpoint. It didn't totally look like that, and we were able to help her get better, which is great. Slowly, everything started changing. She started pooping daily. Her energy came back. She felt safe to eat again. Adding foods back in. And this is 75% of what we see in practice. It's not that the treatment that you're doing is failing, it's that your body is too depleted to heal and it's that maybe it's not the treatment that you need, which is where some additional testing can be helpful. I think SIBO testing, there can be a time and a place for sure. And I have other episodes on that. If you wanna go back to part one, two, or three of this series, I'd chat more about that. But what we were able to do with this other testing was look at why her body wasn't responding to it and create a plan there. So that's. It's case number one. That's a really, really common scenario that we see. Let's contrast that with a completely different case. Someone whose main roadblock wasn't minerals, it wasn't motility, but it was actually fat digestion and bile flow. So this is the gallbladder case. This client came to us feeling like everything she ate made her bloat. Which is why she had this belief that she still had sibo and why she might need to treat her SIBO again. But the reality was she had no gallbladder. She had had her gallbladder out, I think like 10 years prior to working with us, but no one had ever really helped her understand what that meant or why that mattered. Every time she ate fat, she felt terrible. She felt like she was burping constantly. Her stools were really sticky. Her stools were greasy. She couldn't tolerate probiotics. She could not tolerate fermented foods. And when we ran some testing on her, what we found is she had really high scr, which shows undigested fat in her stool, and really low elastase, which shows really poor pancreatic enzyme output. So basically she wasn't digesting her food well at all, and especially fat. And that's the problem because bile flow is very essential for more than just digestion. I always tell the practitioners in my practitioner program that bile is seriously the real. MVP of digestion. Because it's antimicrobial, it stimulates motility. It's kind of the detergent that your gut needs to stay clean and clear. And so when you've had your gallbladder removed, you still have bile flow, but you don't get this like surge of bile like you would if you had a gallbladder. If you have sticky stool burping after high fat meals, this really applies to you. Whether you have a gallbladder or not, you can still have gallbladder issues with or without a gallbladder. So for this client, her plan really focused on supporting bile flow. By looking upstream and seeing why was her bile flow stuck? Obviously getting her gallbladder out was a big piece of that, but she had low stomach acid. She also had an h pylori infection, which was likely suppressing stomach acid. So this was making the bile flow piece worse because we need stomach acid to stimulate bile flow, and h pylori suppresses stomach acid. So we supported her stomach acid. We supported bile flow with. Bitters and Toine and just some gentle digestive support. We had to rebuild her stomach acid by getting rid of the h pylori infection and then giving it the tools that it needed to create stomach acid and then reintroducing enzymes and and fat in small digestible amounts. So. Using targeted enzymes to help her body break food down. Eventually getting off of those enzymes and focusing more on nutrients that can stimulate that. But temporarily, we use some enzymes to help with symptom relief, which sometimes that's what you have to do if you're miserable. Let's give your body the tool it needs to feel better so you can make progress, and then you can slowly. Fill in the gaps and come off of some of those things. And the main thing was strengthening. Strengthening her upper GI function, starting with chewing and salivation. Digestion really starts in your mouth and helping to improve that north to south pathway so that when she was eating, the whole system was communicating with each other. Her bile was flowing and digesting and cleansing the digestive tract. If you don't have enough bile, it creates an environment for bacterial overgrowth. So when she was finally finished up, she could finally eat fats without pain. Her bloating was gone. She was able to add small amounts of fermented food and eventually tolerated. Some prebiotic rich meals. So many people with SIBO have a bile flow issue, and if your upper digestion isn't working, your gut becomes a perfect environment for overgrowth. It's very common that we see clients who have SIBO 3, 4, 5 years after getting their gallbladders out. They're usually told you don't need to change your diet. You don't need to take anything. Everything will work just fine. And then a couple years later, the bill comes due and so. It's just something to be aware of. If you have had your gallbladder out and you're having symptoms, there are ways to address it and there's ways to not be miserable and not have symptoms. So let me share one more story. Someone whose test results didn't even show sibo, but she felt like she had it every single day. And this is common as well. Her doctor just treated her for it without even testing. For it. So if you relate to this, you might have the story of, all my tests are normal, but I have constant gas, constant bloating. I have brain fog, I have mood swings, fatigue, I can't eat without discomfort. This client came to us really frustrated and said, you know, I've done the SIBO test, I've done the stool test. Everything says I'm fine. I do not feel fine, and as we really dug into her history, the missing piece became pretty clear. Number one, she had multiple C-sections. And you might be thinking, why does that matter? I'll get to that in a second. She had a history of past trauma and she had zero support for her nervous system and her scar tissue from the C-section. So we had to work with other providers to help her as a result of this. She did have some things on. Our stool testing that showed up that we needed to address, and we did of course, but this was very much a team effort. She was working with a visceral manipulation therapist to help with the scar tissue. She was doing pelvic floor PT to address the adhesions and get everything working back together again. We really supported her nervous system from both a food standpoint of my body can digest food, my body can tolerate food. I'm not gonna always be bloated. Working on kind of the mindset beliefs there. Vagus nerve support. And she also was working with a therapist on her history of trauma, which was so. Brave of her to finally get support for that. We needed to support her gut lining. She was severely depleted from a gut immune standpoint, which makes sense with multiple C-sections. History of trauma. There's actual research that shows that negative thought patterns and trauma directly. Decreases your secretary, IGA, which is your gut immune system. Your gut immune system is kind of like the bouncer at the bar in your gut and decides to keep the riffraff out. And so if your secretary, IGA is really depleted. Then it has a hard time protecting you. So we really had to focus on supporting her secretary, IGA, supporting and rebuilding her minerals reintroducing some nervous system support around meals. Her life was just really chaotic, really stressed all the time. And after six months, she was seriously a different person. Even though her SIBO test had been negative, she still had a lot of the symptoms, the painful bloating. The food intolerances, the constipation, all of that. And the reason was obviously the things that I mentioned, but as a result of those things being unaddressed, her gut terrain needed a lot of repair and a lot of support. So similar to the first case where we didn't really need to do a lot of quote unquote killing, we didn't need to. And go on antimicrobials or anything super strong. But her gut needed immunoglobulins and it needed minerals and it needed stomach acid support and it needed motility support. And that's what get mi gets missed all the time when we don't take a full look at the picture. So let's zoom. All three of these clients came to us with some version of, I've done everything and I feel awful. And what made the difference for all three of them was they stopped asking, what other protocol can I do? Or what antimicrobials do I need to take? Or maybe I need to. Switch up the antibiotics and started asking What's not working in my body that allowed this to happen in the first place. We had to zoom out and take a look at from birth till now. What were all of the triggering events? What was the domino effect that got us here? What do the day-to-day patterns in our symptoms look like? That tell us a lot about why you're having symptoms. What also do the patterns in past treatments tell us about your symptoms. So, although the recovery plans really looked totally different, it's because their root causes were different. But what they had in common was we had to support their north to south. Digestive process. We had to understand all the kinks in the plan and what wasn't working, and not just focus on the small intestine. We supported their gut terrain. We had to make sure that they had beneficial microbes, that they were eating prebiotics to support their gut, that they had the minerals they needed, they had the enzymes they needed, they had. The secretary IGA and gut immune barrier that they needed and we rebuilt a lot without restricting further, we're not weed whacking foods out of their diet. We're actually adding foods back in as we're supporting their body's ability to be able to digest food and tolerate it. So hear me when I say this. True gut healing really happens when you rebuild capacity and you don't just focus on managing symptoms. You can do low FODMAP and probably find some symptom relief. But for how long? When is that going to go away? You can take these bloat pills that some influencer tells you to take. You can take antibiotics for sibo, but you're never gonna fully. Heal if you don't understand why and you don't truly rebuild your digestive capacity from start to finish. So if this is you, you've done protocols, you've tried supplements, and nothing's really changed and you've never had somebody fully understand your case and fully understand. The whole process, you're not broken, you're just missing the right roadmap for your body. So I hope that this series has been informative and helpful. I know I've chatted with several of you already on discovery calls and you're like, I've learned so much about sibo. Why is my doctor not sharing this? And the reason is because SIBO is. Kind of a new-ish in in the context of the medical world. It's a new-ish thing and there's still obviously stuff that we learn all the time about sibo, but your GI doctor is trained to diagnose. What you have, diagnose you with sibo. Say you have IBS, whatever, not necessarily spend the time to help you figure out all the pieces of the puzzle. So that's the first step. The second step is going beyond that and understanding why, which is exactly what we do. So once again, jump on my calendar if you're ready to get one-on-one support. If you're ready to finally feel better. And then lastly, before we wrap, remember about the giveaway. So leave a rating and review for the podcast, screenshot it, email it to Happy gut@drheatherfinley.co with the subject line podcast rating, and you will be entered to win a free HTMA test. So the mineral test plus a consult with our team totally free. We pick a winner every single month. So go ahead and enter if you haven't already. But thanks so much for listening to this miniseries. If you loved it or if you have suggestions for another series, maybe like a candida series or whatever you think would be interesting, please reach out and let me know. Um, I would love to plan some fun series coming up. So if it gave you a new lens, um, hopefully a lot of clarity and. The biggest thing. Hopefully it gave you a whole lot of hope. So thanks for joining and I'll catch you on the next episode of the Love Your Podcast.