R: Welcome to the Healthy Gut Podcast Kristy Campbell. It is great to have you on the show today

K: Thanks Rebecca. It is great to be here.

R: You are one of my many listeners and you have reached out to me when I announced that it was possible for people to come on the show and ask me questions live. You were one of the first people that put your hand up and said, “I would love to come on the show!”

So it is really great to have a real life healthy gut podcast listener with me today. You are a mum to a 5 and a 7 year old and you are in the process of switching careers from software into health, wellness, and nutrition and you have just completed a year studying holistic nutrition and you have SIBO yourself. So you know firsthand what it is like to be living with this condition. I would love for you to tell my other listeners a little about yourself and why you ended up coming on the show today to ask me a whole bunch of SIBO related questions.

K: Yes. Thanks for that opener. So as you mentioned I am actually changing careers for a really couple different reasons. One, my own health journey as I had SIBO and actually a pretty strong case of it. I was initially diagnosed in March of 2107. So last year. Just following a lot of symptoms, going to a lot of naturopaths and getting back to them a little bit. But basically when I first did the breath the test, my hydrogen peaked at 268. So it is a case that it was so high that my naturopath hasn’t seen it like that before and it sounds like maybe the top 1 percent or so of numbers that people get.

But before that I have a history of antibiotic usage. Within my childhood, I had a lot of ear infections. Following the birth of my first child in 2010 I ended up having a pelvic infection and secondarily my appendix was inflamed. So 3 weeks in to having my first baby I had to go and have my appendix removed. I had more antibiotics after that. So it was really after that I started to see a naturopath. I was having fatigue and brain fog and starting some digestive symptoms and then I was seeing someone here and there. She was having me on supplements. I started really working on the diet both for myself as well as now that I was a mother I wanted to make sure that my children were growing up healthy while starting with my 1st child.

In 2012, I then had my 2nd child and my 2nd child had issues actually. Some reflex when he was several months old and when he was starting solids and he is a little bit low weight so he was around the 3rd percentile of weights and so some issues that might stem from own issues. Yeah the naturopath helped a fair amount. I had some procedures like hydrotherapies done and nutrient infusions. And it just felt like I was feeling a little bit better here and there but then I had sort of nagging symptoms coming back.

So doing a lot of research on my own online, I got really into understanding some of the stuff that I’m really interested in it and I came across SIBO probably in 2016 and started talking to my naturopath at that point but she wasn’t very familiar with the condition and she sort of continued promoting some of her methods and she is really an expert in cleansing and detoxifications. So we continued kind of pushing from that angle which again as I mentioned was helping temporarily.

So I found a new naturopath where that clinic is aware of SIBO and I got the breath test and again that was a year and a half ago. And found out they did had SIBO. So I think that many people listening on this show, the initial moment was excitement and wow I finally know what is going on and I can finally sort of work on this and kind of nip this in the bud for good. But as many of you also probably have experienced what followed then was you know honing in the diet. So I went on the SIBO specific diet. For several months I went on several rounds of antimicrobials I then went on to rounds of Rifaximin and then I retested in August last year and I was down 68 hydrogen which was pretty much a celebration for me because it felt like such an improvement from the 268 that I ended up doing one more antimicrobials and I kind of decided to go into maintenance mode and take a prokinetic. But really 68 is still pretty severe SIBO.