Something happened to me recently which hasn’t happened in a long time – I got a pain in my gut.

Out of nowhere, this stabbing pain came on and it just so happened that I was on my way to a meeting so I couldn’t cancel it and just had to go into the meeting and act like nothing was wrong. Meanwhile,this stabbing pain was getting worse and I was just acting like everything was fine.

Now, after thinking about it, I am fairly certain I know what caused it because the truth it that I have been eating a couple of foods that I happen to know I am intolerant to! Of course, there are also emotional factors that I’m aware have contributed to it as well.

The first point I want to make about this is that it really reminded me of how my life used to be, because that was pretty normal for me. I would sit there at work in pain pretending like it was all fine because I would have to go home so often that I didn’t want to keep doing that. I certainly wasn’t as productive or effective in my work as I could be though, and it’s always unpleasant when you’re sitting there in pain trying to act like nothing is wrong.

I know that for so many of us, common gut pain really is an unfortunate reality. It’s awful because we care about our work and the quality that we provide, and we know that we are being held back because of these gut pains.

The worst part is not knowing what caused it. These pains coming on all the time, no matter what we eat, and we have no idea what we are doing wrong.
So, the first step is getting support to work out where the pain is coming from. As someone who has been there, I promise you that it won’t go away on its own. It takes some digging and expert help to work out what’s going on.

Secondly, once we do know what the issue is, we need to avoid the foods that we know don’t agree with us.

Here’s the interesting piece about that.

We all know what we need to do to be healthy, fundamentally. Eat well, exercise, self-care, stress less. So why don’t we do the things we know we should do?
Take me, eating things I know I shouldn’t. Me with all my training! I’ve since analysed this and worked out what was going on, but the trouble is even when we know what’s going on, we can’t always stop ourselves doing it.

The next piece of this is to work out why you aren’t doing the thing you know you should, or why you can’t stop doing the thing you know you should stop.
It’s about recognizing the thought patterns that drive us to do this thing, catching ourselves and creating new thought patterns instead. This is a whole new topic that I’ll have to delve into separately in a later blog post!

Life is life, and there are going to be things that come up that throw off your gut health. The difference is that once you have built that resilience and once you have a strong gut, these things don’t throw you like they once did. You can feel healthy, happy and balanced and these incidences become minor setbacks, rather than catastrophes that wipe you out.