Eliminating irritable bowel symptoms is tough and requires real fortitude on the part of the sufferer. You need to eat five small meals a day, you need to eat breakfast as soon as you get up, you need to avoid alcohol as much as possible and you need to stick to your final version of the low Fodmap diet. However, we are all human and we will err occasionally. The problem arises when your rebellious nature prevents you from complying with the rules out of pigheadedness. And so you suffer. In this video I tell you about a particularly stubborn client and how you are only hurting yourself if you are making her mistakes.
Don't Shoot Yourself in the Foot
Today I want to talk about how not to shoot yourself in the foot.
I have a client at the moment who’s 23 years old and she’s on the fast track in London in the insurance world, and she wants the coaching program to rotate around her lifestyle and not to be changing anything. She thinks she should be allowed to have as many alcoholic drinks as she wants because part of the insurance world is to socialize and you have to do that. I’m not sure how an alcoholic would get on, or at least a recovering alcoholic, but anyway according to her, she has to drink. Now it’s entirely up to her if she shoots herself in the foot. It’s not that I can change how IBS is to suit her and it’s not that you can change how IBS is to suit your lifestyle.
You have to make changes if you want to feel better. You don’t have to make them all at once, and I know in my coaching programs I expect a lot right at the beginning, but for you, you can do it in small steps, but just make sure that you’re always making the steps forwards with only the occasional step backwards. And the best way to do this, of course, is to journal so that you’ve got it written down in ink what your progress is and you can look back and see that you’re making those steps forwards. Now you might think, “I’m not going to have breakfast when I get out of bed, just because I’m told I should. That’s not the way I do things.” And I hear this a lot, in particular from the younger clients, surprisingly enough. And that’s fine. You do what you want to do, but the fact is that we now know what works and what doesn’t work, and I know it from having dealt with hundreds of individual one-on-one coaching clients. So don’t have your breakfast as soon as you get out of bed, but you’re the one who’s going to suffer. Have your three or four drinks so that you can keep up with the others and you’re the one that’s going to suffer, possibly for a couple of days before you back to being symptom-free. You can make these choices but make them knowingly and don’t do it out of a rebellious spirit against what you are told is the best way to do things. Do it for yourself. Do it for your gut. So you can have that one drink of dry wine. Stretch it out by putting some ice cubes in your glass and have two. But don’t just go and get your normal rum and coke and have two or three of those. Then you’re going to be as sick as a dog. I know I would. Or whatever your thing is. Seeing the cheesecake and wanting to eat it because nobody’s going to tell you what you can’t do. And nobody can. Just yourself.
So reflect when you’re feeling that rebelliousness and don’t shoot yourself in the foot. Good luck with that and remember we are all human though. Goodbye.
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