5 Basic Rules for Eating with IBS

The low Fodmap diet is magical – no doubt about that, but it has to be accompanied by some basic rules on how to eat and not just what to eat, or you won’t get the results you want. As I have said many times, there is no magic button for IBS but gather all the bits and pieces together and you will start to see a difference. Watch my video to find out what the five basic rules are for eating on the low Fodmap diet.

5 Basic Rules for Eating with IBS

Today I want to go over some of the basics of how you should be eating during the day.

• You should be eating five small meals a day and why they have to be five and why they have to be small is because big meals will hurt us and cause more symptoms. But we still need to get in a certain amount of nutrients during the day so we split it into five small meals.
• You should be getting at least two fruits a day, five to six vegetables, and since we can’t have all those vegetables in one meal, which traditionally you might do at dinner time, you need to get at least one vegetable with every meal. That’s the best way to spread them out and reduce symptoms.
• You have to eat as soon as you get up in the morning. It’s called breakfast for a reason. It breaks the fast of the night time while you’ve been asleep. If you don’t eat immediately your gut will start to accumulate gas because it’s empty and we know that gas is what causes us most of our problems, so don’t let that happen. Get up, go to the toilet, clean your teeth, whatever you need to do, and then go and have your breakfast, your first meal of the day. Don’t go and do some exercise and then eat afterwards or you’re causing issues for yourself. Have your breakfast and then three hours later have your snack.
• Keep the gap between your meals around about three hours. Why do we do this? We don’t want it to be too much less than three hours because we want the motility cleansing wave to pass through our body and that happens, we know, after about two to three hours, but for some people it might take up to three hours so let’s wait for that long. If you leave longer then you’re going to have that issue that I mentioned about gas pockets accumulating in your digestive system because the food has moved on. So make sure that you don’t fast for very long. So we don’t want snacking. That hurts you. And we don’t want fasting. About three hours apart. So a really good timetable could be eating 7 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 1 o’clock, 4 o’clock and 7 o’clock again.
• Make sure that you eat at least three hours before you go to bed so that that digestion has happened and you’ll have a settled night.

Well, that’s some of the absolute basics of how to eat as opposed to what to eat. Put all that in place as well as the actual diet itself and you will find that your symptoms calm down. Thank you for watching and goodbye.