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Day: July 3, 2026

High Fiber Breakfast Cereals for IBS: A Dietitian’s Guide to the Best Picks (and Ones to Avoid)

High Fiber Breakfast Cereals

Breakfast cereals high in fiber sound like an easy, quick win for people trying to increase their fiber intake. This is especially true after being told that “more fiber” is the answer to constipation, bloating, or irregular bowel movements. However, many people reach for a high fiber cereal expecting relief. Instead, they end up with […]

🚨 Spoiler alert (it's not betaine HCl) Supporting 🚨 Spoiler alert (it's not betaine HCl)

Supporting your stomach acid is crucial to healing your gut.

Symptoms like reflux, bloating, burping, early fullness, and indigestion can have many different causes. Low stomach acid can be one piece of the puzzle, but it's worth understanding what's actually going on before assuming that's the problem and adding more acid.

More acid isn't always better. In fact betaine HCl is inappropriate for many people, particularly those with certain GI conditions or taking certain medications.

Instead, start by supporting your body's natural digestive process:

🌬️ Slow down before meals
🍽️ Eat in a relaxed state
👃 Take time to smell and enjoy your food
🥬 Include bitter foods if tolerated
🥄 Chew your food thoroughly
☕️ Be mindful of caffeine and alcohol
🧘‍♀️ Work on your overall stress load

If you're experiencing ongoing digestive symptoms, figuring out what's actually driving them is more valuable than guessing whether you need more or less stomach acid. 🤎

#stomachacid #lowstomachacid #hpylori #reflux #ibs #ibsdietitian
5 habits I swear by for reflux, as a GI dietitian 5 habits I swear by for reflux, as a GI dietitian and former GERD sufferer.

I dealt with GERD for years before I understood why it wasn’t getting better. Once I started treating it as a functional issue instead of “too much acid,” these habits made the difference. Most reflux comes from the lower esophageal sphincter not closing properly, which lets acid move backward into the esophagus.

1️⃣ Stop eating 3 hours before bed. This gives your stomach time to empty before you lie down, so there’s less pressure against that sphincter overnight.
2️⃣ Chew thoroughly and slow down. Eating fast means swallowing more air and bigger bites, which both increase abdominal pressure and trigger reflux.
3️⃣ Practice diaphragmatic breathing daily. Your diaphragm wraps around the lower esophageal sphincter and adds outside pressure to help keep it closed. Studies show slow belly breathing can reduce acid exposure and the need for acid-suppressing medication over time.
4️⃣ Chew sugar-free gum after meals. Chewing for about 30 minutes after eating increases saliva and swallowing, which neutralizes acid and washes it back into the stomach. Skip mint, since peppermint can relax the sphincter.
5️⃣ Look into sodium alginate instead of relying on acid blockers alone. Acid blockers make stomach contents less acidic, but those contents still move up. Sodium alginate forms a gel raft on top of your stomach contents that physically blocks them from reaching the esophagus, without suppressing the acid you need for digestion. If you’re on a PPI, don’t stop cold turkey. Work with your provider on a taper.

These target what’s actually driving reflux instead of just numbing the symptom.

If you’ve been managing GERD with medication alone and still don’t feel right, comment ROADMAP and I’ll walk you through what’s actually going on.

#acidreflux #gerd #ibsdietitian #sibodietitian
Believe me I get it. You are so desperate to feel Believe me I get it. You are so desperate to feel better that you are willing to try ANYTHING. 

You've tried the elimination diets, read every gut health post and listened to every podcast, and worked through supplement after supplement. 

Along the way, some of the habits meant to help start working against you:

🔍 Researching constantly
🍚 Cutting carbs entirely
💊 Treating over and over 
🧠 Ignoring the stress of the protocol itself

None of these come from a bad place. They come from wanting to feel better without a clear picture of what's best for your specific situation.

That's exactly what the Bloating Breakthrough Method is built to solve: instead of guessing your way through another protocol, you get a clear plan built around what's actually going on in your gut.

Comment ROADMAP to get your Root Cause Roadmap call scheduled so we can figure out what's actually going on and build a plan from there. 🤎

#guthealth #ibs #sibo #ibsdietitian #guthealing
After 15 years of working with SIBO, these are the After 15 years of working with SIBO, these are the five things I’ll defend in every consult, every DM, and every conversation in the bleachers. 

Most women who come to me have done at least one round of antimicrobials, often two or three, plus months of restrictive eating, and they’re still bloated by mid-afternoon. 

When I trace back what was missing, it’s almost always one of these:

🔄 Antimicrobials without motility support = relapse. Antimicrobials lower the bacterial load. The migrating motor complex is what sweeps the small intestine clean between meals, so if it stays sluggish, bacteria repopulate within weeks to months.

🍽️ Diet alone will not kill SIBO. Low-FODMAP and similar approaches reduce the fermentable carbohydrates bacteria feed on. That calms symptoms, but it doesn’t clear the overgrowth or correct why it formed.

🔍 The root cause matters more than the bacteria count. A breath test shows gas levels on one day. It doesn’t show whether low stomach acid, poor bile flow, low enzyme output, or slowed motility let bacteria settle in the small intestine in the first place.

⚙️ Every root cause stems back to gut motility and digestion. Stomach acid, bile, and pancreatic enzymes are the small intestine’s defenses against overgrowth, and motility clears whatever gets past them. When any of those falter, bacteria gain ground.

🧠 No protocol is going to work if you don’t manage your nervous system. Vagal signaling drives stomach acid secretion, enzyme release, and the MMC. A body stuck in a stress response digests poorly and clears poorly, no matter which supplements are on the counter.

I see this pattern all the time. The protocol targets the bacteria, and nobody addresses the environment that allowed them to overgrow. Lasting results come from treating both.

If your SIBO keeps coming back and you’re ready for someone to look at the motility, digestion, and nervous system pieces nobody has addressed yet, comment ROADMAP and I’ll send you the next steps.

#SIBO #SIBOdietitian #IBSdietitian #bloated
Think your cortisol is “too high” and you need to Think your cortisol is “too high” and you need to lower it? 👀

There’s more to cortisol than simply getting the number down.

Cortisol is supposed to follow a daily rhythm, higher in the morning to help you wake up and get going, then gradually declining throughout the day so your body can transition into rest and sleep. ☀️➡️🌙

If the Cortisol Curve is off, you could be experiencing symptoms like :

😴 waking up exhausted
☕️ needing caffeine to function
🍪 afternoon energy crashes or cravings
⚡️ feeling wired but tired
🌙 getting a second wind at night
💤 waking during the night

And if you're dealing with gut symptoms, this could also be connected. Your stress response, sleep, blood sugar regulation, and digestive function are all interconnected.

I just published a new blog post breaking down what your cortisol pattern should actually look like throughout the day + what can disrupt it.

Comment CORTISOL to read the full blog post!

#cortisol #highcortisol #loweringcortisol #stress
Erika’s goal was to conceive her first child, but Erika’s goal was to conceive her first child, but she wanted to take care of her SIBO first. 🤰

She was struggling with constipation and bloating, and before joining the Bloating Breakthrough, she’d reached out to a couple of other nutritionists. The advice was full of red flags: cut all carbs, keep killing bacteria round after round, and eat an absurd amount of protein.

Here’s what we focused on instead:

🍽️ Diet tweaks based on her symptoms — keeping carbs and fiber in her diet, since restricting them too much tends to make constipation worse, not better.
💊 Targeted supplements — chosen for her specific symptoms rather than a one-size-fits-all protocol.
🦋 Her thyroid, and not just her TSH — a full thyroid panel (TSH, free T4, free T3, reverse T3, and thyroid antibodies) showed several suboptimal markers and that she had been dealing with hypothyroidism.

That thyroid piece changed everything. Thyroid hormone helps drive the migrating motor complex, the cleansing wave that sweeps your small intestine between meals. When your thyroid is off, your gut slows down, constipation sets in, and bacteria have more of a chance to grow. As her numbers improved, her gut started moving again, and she began having normal bowel movements every day.

She was able to bring back every food she’d been told to cut out, and anytime a new symptom came up, she had an explanation and a plan. In her words, she was getting more answers than she ever had from her doctor.

“One of my goals while under Katrina’s care was to conceive our first child, but I wanted to make sure I took care of my SIBO first. Five months into the program, I was able to conceive successfully with minimal issues.”

She’s now just a few weeks away from welcoming her baby into the world. ❤️

If you’re dealing with SIBO and your plan is just removing more and more foods and adding more and more treatments, instead of looking into why it happened in the first place, comment MASTERCLASS and I’ll send you my free training that walks through the missing links in most SIBO protocols that keep you stuck. 👇

#sibo #ibsdietitian #guthealing #thyroid

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