Calm Your Gut: A Mindful and Compassionate Guide to Healing IBD and IBS - Tapa blanda

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Cara Wheatley-McGrain is an expert patient, mindfulness and meditation practitioner, and educational consultant. She's been living with IBD and IBS for twenty years. When Cara was hospitalized and hours away from losing her colon, she experienced an 'out of body experience'. This spiritual awakening gave her the knowledge that she could heal, and she has taken a 'whole life approach' to healing IBD ever since.

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ABOUT CALM YOUR GUT

Hey there. Don’t skip this bit. I know you’re tempted. That’s you all over, rushing through to get to the main event. I want you to take a moment to understand the healing journey we are about to embark on. You won’t need to acquire a whole new skill set or lots of facts. Oh yes, in Part I, there will be some new knowledge, but otherwise, it’s more about taking stock, slowing right down and letting go of some stuff. To create a space to assimilate where you and your gut are right now and how to calm and heal.

I did my assimilating when my life veered off course in my twenties when I ended up in the hospital about to lose my colon. Well, that doesn’t happen to everyone every day. Except it does happen to someone, somewhere every day. I now know a lot about the gut and even more about the lifestyle changes to keep my dear gut calm and healthy.

I hope you’re reading this because you care about your gut and want to sort it out. Although, to be honest, I’m not going to tell you how to sort it out or fix it. No, I’m going to tell you how to love it. How to love your gut so much that you learn to calm your gut naturally and organically. Those changes might happen slowly, but they will happen as sure as night turns to day. Because when you know just how to love and calm your unique gut – and I mean in a deep, gut-loving, wholesome way – it will change your life.

So, I wish you and your gut a big hug on the journey because, honestly, I’ve thought a lot about your gut. Yes, I really have. I thought about nothing else except your gut as I wrote this book: what it might need to know and what it might want to share with you.

The gorgeous 4Gs to calm gut health In creating calm gut health, we will explore the 4Gs: gut knowledge, gut compassion, gut healing and gut integrity. The 4Gs are not linear. Rather these four elements interweave to support you to live an authentic gut-led life.

Part I: Gut Knowledge shares the beautiful biology of your small and large intestine, so you can get to know your own gut and how it’s doing right now. These are exciting times in the scientific understanding of the gut microbiome. We now know gut health is inextricably tied to the immune system and our susceptibility to disease. So, in a time when we want to stay well, getting to know our gorgeous gut has never been more important. The research is ongoing, so I encourage you to watch out for updates at carawheatleymcgrain.com to renew your own unique healing journey.

I’ll also introduce you to the core practice of base belly breathing. This practice is a foundation training in mindful abdominal breathing to support your gut healing at both a physical and an energetic level. We’ll spend a bit of time investigating the roots of your gut trouble, including a questionnaire to see how you’re currently showing up for your gut, and we’ll consider how you can reframe your gut story in a whole new way.

In Part II, we develop Gut Compassion. The practices here are designed to encourage you to complete an honest appraisal of your current stress points and where balance is missing in your life. We’ll explore our sometimes-hidden gut-twisting emotions. I’ll share the mindful food flow principle, which aims to reawaken your gut instincts through more mindful shopping. Throughout this section, we’ll come back again to the mindful base belly breathing and deepen this practice with the addition of Belly Metta Bhavana. We’ll also write a love letter from your gut.

Part III contains the practical steps to Gut Healing by being more mindful with your food and lifestyle choices. By this point, you’ll have gained the confidence and motivation to follow the best advice available to construct your personal elimination diet – one of the keystones of good gut health. As Hippocrates said, ‘Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.’

While recognizing that there are times when the only immediate solution is prescribed meds or even surgery, the scientific evidence is clear: diet impacts gut health. So, we will examine the radical impact of diet on your microbiome. I can attest personally, as can countless others, to the healing power of finding the right diet, physical movement and lifestyle choices to help heal your uniquely gorgeous gut. We will also discuss what we can do when things aren’t going so well for our gut, and I’ll share calming practices and affirmations to help you heal the fear in flare.

In Part IV, we’ll continue to move towards physical and emotional Gut Integrity. Honouring your gut transforms illness into an opportunity to take stock and reflect deeply on your true purpose. We’ll also explore what it means to be health articulate and how you can create a gut gang – a trusted network that will support you to maintain gut health and integrity. This includes preparing for medical appointments and strategies for difficult food situations. Alongside this, I want you to have fun with the 30 ways to love thy belly. This practice aims to inspire you to be creative and playful in cultivating a loving relationship with your gut.

Finally, in Part V: Gut-loving Food and Recipes, I share a few of my everyday gut-healing recipes. We’ll explore ways to naturally diversify your personal food map and build up confidence in using the secret gut-loving power of the 3Ps: probiotics, prebiotics and polyphenols.

My gut story I’ve been tracking the latest gut health developments because I am deeply invested in what it means: I’m living with incurable IBD (inflammatory bowel disease). IBD is a chronic health condition that causes sections of the bowel to become inflamed and painful. I have pan ulcerative colitis (the whole of my large intestine has been affected by inflammation) and suffer from IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). This functional gut disorder leads to bloating and discomfort.

I’ve been successfully managing the conditions with as few traditional prescription drugs as possible and finding alternative healing approaches. Over the last two decades, I’ve been fortunate to have long spells of deep remission and rare early-stage symptoms, which I have managed to heal. As I do this, I continue to ask challenging questions:

• How do we make sense of the science to commit to the right actions to heal our gorgeous gut?
• How can we understand our illness to heal ourselves, not just of the symptoms of IBD and IBS, but also of the underlying causes?

And the million-dollar question:

• How do we make sustained positive changes in our life?

I’ll leave those questions there for now, but we’ll come back to them. For now, I’d like to share my gut health story.

In spring 2001, I was at university, having recently been diagnosed with IBD. I’d been fine, almost like the whole thing (the diagnosis) was a mistake, a one-off. But despite trying to convince myself that I wasn’t sick, I had become too weak to walk, hadn’t been able to eat a proper meal in months, had a gnawing pain in my gut, and spent so many hours on the toilet I had set up camp in the family bathroom. Little did I know the disease had sparked a fire in my system, and it was getting worse, and the day my lovely mum drove me to the hospital is distilled into distinct slices of memory.

The serious face of the A&E registrar who set up my drip. The shock of seeing the dark globules of blood pouring out of me. The moment the gastric consultant took my mum to one side and told her I had 48 hours to respond to the intravenous steroids before they would need to operate to remove the overheated twist of flesh – the remnants of my colon.

That night on the dark ward, I wake to see shifting pinpoints of light and the voices of two women nearby. I experience a strange sensation. I am no longer in my body but at a distance, stretched out and shapeless. An intravenous drip seeps its steady stream of steroids into my blood, waves of a deep tiredness wash over me. I try to tune in to the women’s voices, ‘Her blood pressure’s still way too low. She’ll need another drip.’ I fall into darkness.

The next day I wake up to my exhausted body. I feel overwhelming compassion, like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Like I have stepped away from myself and can see this other me.

Weeks of hospital recovery are followed by slow months of rehabilitation as I’m weaned off intravenous steroids. Back home, I start the real healing as I begin to learn about the forgotten inner world of my gut. And, well, my colon and I are here to tell the tale – I was one of the lucky ones. The moral of this story? Sometimes to survive, you have to take some heavy-ass drugs. Each of our gut stories is unique to us. But I say with my hand on my heart and my gut: the key to thriving with IBD or IBS is vastly different.

My gut tells me compassion is the key.

When I started my journey, there were no studies to back up my idea that radical self-care can calm and heal the gut, just a deep instinct that I needed to make profound changes to how I was showing up for my gut. What’s exciting now is that science has caught up, and recent studies show that self-compassion can reduce inflammation in the body.

What I hope you take from this book is that your gut is made up of some tremendous organs that daily transform the food you eat into energy for life. They do this tirelessly, quietly, in the background of our lives, but every now and then, you get a message from your gut’s deep, dark recesses that things are not quite right. So, if you’re suffering from IBD, one of the best things you can do is get curious. Really curious. When you get compassionately curious, you might start to ask: Why do some folk get sick, and some don’t? Why do we sometimes get so seriously ill with IBD, and other times we manage to step back from the brink?

This book will help you tune in to your unique gut story and answer these questions. My aspiration would be for you to learn to love, cherish and calm your gorgeous gut.

So, take a deep breath. Yes, don’t skip past that part either.

Take a deep breath, and let’s begin.