Gut Brain Glow Up

I'll be completely honest, before now I'd never been a big yoga fan...There I said it! But oh my how my opinions have changed! I've gone from avoiding it to looking forward to the weekly sessions I attend.  Before now, I'd had a couple of goes at yoga and found it not the slightest bit relaxing; for one I couldn't shut the chatter in my brain off, I also struggled to get my head around these strange positions that I was being told to put my body in... It also wasn't helped by my social anxiety being heightened due to the association between yoga positions and the accidental letting out of our bodies natural gasses...! On top of that, the only other time I'd tried a yoga class was admittedly with my dad, who fell asleep and snored very loudly during the final relaxation causing a then 19 year old me extreme embarrassment and stifled giggling... Needless to say it was not a class we returned to!  So how did I go from actively avoiding yoga to looking forward t...

So, I had initially planned to start focusing in on each of the different things I'm doing to help get better this week. However, after a couple of recent set backs, and a catch up with my consultant, I've taken a bit of a side quest and decided to focus on how easily it can be to get frustrated with progress and the unfortunate ease with which it can feel like you're going backwards.  If I were to look at a typical week, there are certainly good days where I'm starting to feel improvement, then do way too much and suffer the consequences of it for multiple days afterwards, this is known in some circles as 'boom and bust'. This can be immensely frustrating in itself as ultimately I only have myself to blame for over doing it, so learning to pace myself is a serious requirement! What's lead me to swivel on my planned topic today though is the more significant relapses than just the 'I've done too much' effect. This has happened a few times for me ...

I've blabbered on a lot about what my experience of gut brain disconnect is, however this week I wanted to touch on how/what has helped me to start improving.  Initially I want to give more of an idea of just how far everything changed when I got poorly. I went from being a regular gym goer, runner and walking my dog 3x a day to being unable to walk further than the end of our drive and having to be pushed in a wheelchair and struggling to even dress myself in the morning. Now even though i managed to make some improvements from this point, my progress to December was very slow. From getting my rough diagnosis, I was given a pathway forward, this consists of: - Continuing aiding the symptoms with medication to enable some functionality - Trauma Therapy (EMDR in my case) - Pelvic Floor Physiotherapy  - Working with dietitians/nutritionist to control weight loss - Yoga and other nervous system calming treatments - Gut lead Hypnotherapy In summary, my consultant concluded that, a...

As I mentioned in my first post, my rollercoaster started a year ago on 29th April. I woke up with what was a rather uncomfortable stomach, thought it would settle and tried to carry on. By 1pm that day I was in A&E with severe abdominal pain and no idea what was wrong. After a week in hospital, multiple scans and tests later we were still none the wiser. One suggestion was a burst ovarian cyst, but this was quickly ruled out.  Fast forward 1 month, I was still in a lot of pain, unable to work and we were still clueless; so seeking help privately became the only option. Queue up more tests and scans trying to identify the issue or rule things out and being sent to different consultants. This lasted until December when I finally got some answers, albeit through exclusion of everything else. I was told I likely have gut brain disconnect with visceral hypersensitivity and a pelvic floor that didn't work properly, all ultimately due to trauma.  Getting my head around this was ...

Trauma, I guess, is quite a wide term if you think about it. It can be physical or mental, and also cover things that you didn't necessarily class as 'trauma' and just thought of as a 'rough patch'.  Once my consultants started to ask me about trauma I had a real 'oh' moment. I realised that things I thought of as a 'rough patch' or 'normal' weren't at all. I also realised just how much my mind, and subsequently my nervous system and body, has been through over my relatively short life span. This realisation lead to a lot of 'well sh*t' moments because I suddenly came around to the fact that what I've been through isn't 'normal'. Then there was the things I've never felt able to talk about to anyone, not even previous counsellors; suddenly I had to open up the locked down chest around these things, and it was scary, but at the same time freeing.  For me the trauma leading to the GBD has all been mental, but I...

So what are the symptoms of gut brain disconnect (GBD)? This is a pretty difficult one to answer from what I've understood about it... Though I'm still learning so feel free to take it as a pinch of salt! In always happy to be disproven and keen to keep leaning. As suggested by this entries title, the symptoms seem to be different for everyone. Though some symptoms may be the same, how they present maybe completely different...! For me, the main symptoms I've consistently experienced over the past 12 months are as follows: - Abdominal pain - being constant in my lower right side and regularly becoming acute  - Nausea - Fatigue and lathagy - Brain fog  - Absence of any kind of appetite  Unfortunately these symptoms can be associated with any number of issues, hence GBD seems to be something that can only be diagnosed through ruling out everything else, and even then there's no 'absolute' test that can be done. Like I say, this is my experience, and I'm sure t...