Case Study: Digestive Healing for Stress + Antibiotic Induced Constipation
Functional Nutrition is a vital addition to your self-care strategies. It's not just about finding flow in your food life and helping your body become fully, deeply nourished.
Functional nutrition is a deep investigative, scientifically and clinically proven set of powerful strategies to understand what's really going on in your body, what's triggering symptoms, imbalances and disease, and what can be done to bring real balance and real healing to the body and brain.
While good food is essential to living a healthy, happy, thriving life, in functional nutrition, we look beyond food and into the much deeper healing needs of the body.
Whether you are moving through life exhausted, in pain, inflamed, sugar-addicted, lacking the joy to be your true self or enjoy your life, or suffering with serious or mysterious chronic health problems, functional nutrition must be part of your healing strategy.
In functional nutrition, we understand that our bodies have an amazing, innate, built-in ability to heal themselves. We understand the body has a powerful drive to regain balance. Our job, then, is to understand what has gotten out of balance and what we can do to feed the body the ingredients it needs to do its miraculous job of healing itself, while also removing the stressful, inflammatory and toxic inputs that are contributing to imbalances and symptoms.
Case Study: Stress + Antibiotic Induced Constipation
Do you know anyone with chronic constipation? Are they empowered to fix it themselves or do they continuously rely on medications without ever actually overcoming the physiological malfunction?
I had a client named Ronan who had experienced severe constipation for 10 years because several rounds of antibiotics plus a massive stress event had disrupted his digestive system. Ronan had used over the counter stool softeners to relieve his symptoms but was totally reliant on that medication. His body had not regained its own motility even after years of struggle.
During our initial health history investigation we discovered the series of events that led to the health condition of chronic constipation. We investigated further the current state of the digestive system AND Ronan's current stress levels.
Ronan was experiencing stress from regular life stressors like work and finances, but also from the constant physical discomfort of loss of motility and constipation.
An ecosystem imbalance in the digestive system is very common after antibiotics, stress and years of constipation so we lab testing to look deeper. We discovered that Ronan did have microbiome dysbiosis where the balance of good and bad bugs was significantly disrupted.
Once we had a clear picture of the overlapping factors at play, we were able to create a specific healing protocol prioritized to meet Ronan's exact needs.
Within 2 weeks of working together, Ronan was already experiencing much more normal and consistent bowel movements. After 4 months of working together, Ronan's stress levels were noticeably decreased, his digestive system was in much better shape and he was able to maintain normal motility daily.
Ronan is feeling much more powerful in life as his body is serving him so much better now. Because we looked at what exactly was needed to bring the Ronan's body back online rather than doing a quick fix of stool softeners, he has put this decade-long episode of discomfort and poor health behind him!
Why it Worked
Rather than covering up symptoms and saying that was all that could be done, I helped Ronan investigate the real issues happening in his body. I empowered Ronan to understand and honor the needs of his body. Rather than saying there was no reason or cause, I helped Ronan see exactly what could be done and guided him through the process of supporting his body to do what it knows how to do which is to heal itself.