"For about nine months, I had this horrible cough that ended up being a staph infection in my lungs. My Western doctors gave me four to five different antibiotics before they figured out what it was, then finally found out I needed amoxicillin to fight the staph infection. All those antibiotics really screwed with my gut, which I never had a problem with.

"Over the next few years my 'food processor' stopped processing. I had to keep eliminating foods from my diet because my system just couldn’t take them and everything backed up. I tried everything to have regular bowel movements.

"I had been seeing Phoebe Yin, ND, to help boost my immune system over the years, and we started with probiotics to try to heal my gut but it didn’t work.

"By that time, I had been dealing with a painful side ache for a year, and my stomach hadn’t been properly processing foods for about four years. I’d tried all sorts of Western medications. I had X-rays, CT scans and a colonoscopy that showed everything was fine. All the tests just showed my bowel was beyond backed up. I tried all sorts of treatments for irritable bowel syndrome, but they just stopped the food processing even more.

"After all the tests I went back to Dr. Yin and she started me thinking that my symptoms might be small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), so she referred me to Lela Altman, ND, MS, LAc.

"After meeting with Dr. Altman a few times, she recommended I try the elemental diet, which is a common treatment for SIBO. For 14 days, I couldn’t eat or drink anything but these pre-digested food packets. By the end, nothing had changed and I was so mad because I made it 14 days without food!

"But then I started adding foods back in one by one, and on day 16 I suddenly felt 100 times better. The side ache was gone, and some weird rashes I'd been having disappeared. I kept adding foods back in and the negative symptoms stayed away. Starving the bacteria actually eradicated the overgrowth.

"For the first time in four years, I can eat food again, and I’m actually pooping regularly now!"