I have suffered from digestive issues all my life. I can’t tell you when I realised that not everyone suffered when they ate, but I learned early on that one didn’t talk about what happened inside the body. It wasn’t until I went to live in Italy at 23 that I found a nation who thrived on conversations involving the condition of one’s internal organs. But it is difficult to change more than two decades of conditioning and, even though I lived there for 9 years, I never contributed anything of interest to these intimate discussions. I suffered in silence.

Through the years, I approached numerous doctors with my symptoms only to be told that I had irritable bowel syndrome and to eat more fibre, whole grains, fruit and vegetables. Each time I diligently went away and obeyed their instructions and felt worse than ever. They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. I guess I was insane. For years!

Several years ago, I started this blog as a way of exploring food and the effect it had on me. At first, I cooked mainly fast, healthy, real food dinners since I worked full time and had little energy in the evening to cook complicated meals for the family. I joined a few groups of bloggers who were focused on eating and living in a healthy way and discovered the different eating regimes they were following which helped their health issues. I tried the well-documented Paleo diet for several months and ultimately it made me worse. I lost energy and my digestive issues got worse. This is not a testimonial against the Paleo diet. It helps many people – I was just not one of them. So I Googled the heck out of my symptoms for the zillionth time and the low FODMAP diet came onto my radar and I realised I had seen it mentioned before but had glossed over it. I found an article that described the symptoms of someone who was intolerant to FODMAPs and a light bulb went on. This person was describing me, right down to how ‘healthy’ food made me worse. I investigated further and fructose malabsorption was mentioned. I knew almost immediately that I had hit the bullseye. The puzzle pieces were falling into place.

My life has been completely revolutionized by this diet and other lifestyle changes I have made. I used to sit in a crappy office with a cranky boss giving me headaches while trying to minimize my visits to the toilet – because that’s frowned upon – productivity is the name of the game in a corporate office. Now that I am out of that, I can say I was a mess, barely hanging on by my back teeth. So, I eventually sorted my health, and because I was finally getting the nutrients from the food I was eating, instead of them passing down undigested into the bowel where they caused havoc, energy flowed back into my body and my brain and I made the infinitely sensible decision to get the hell out of that office.

I now work from home as an online coach teaching people how to implement this fabulous, but complicated low Fodmap diet, and how to make the necessary lifestyle changes to support their IBS. I help people every day to become well and I work with people from all over the world. I’ve had clients in India, China, Belgium, Colombia, Serbia, Mexico, Japan, Ecuador, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, Spain, Norway, France, Finland, Luxembourg, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and of course many, many clients from the US and the UK. I now live life on my own terms and all because of a little thing called the low Fodmap diet which finally lifted an impossibly heavy burden from my life – IBS.