My Dear Friends,

If you’re reading this, I’m guessing that you have your own journey of Self Love and are looking for more strategies to achieve this goal. If you aren’t really sure you know a lot about Self Love, no worries!

I’m no expert, but I do know what has worked for me and hopefully it can help you to!

Self Love to me is doing what makes you happy and putting your physical , mental, and emotional needs first. By no means is Self-Love a negative term. We as humans need to take care of ourselves in order to be the best versions so we can then help others to be there best as well. Self-Love has not only made me the best version of myself, but it has also been a KEY factor in improving my GI issues.

Yes, you heard that right. Self-Love has in fact been one of the greatest things I could’ve ever done to improve my health. I’ll be honest and say that by no means am I a pro at this. But this has really made a difference in my health, especially in the last six months.

If this is your first time on my blog, hello & welcome!

My Name is Sophia and about seven years ago I was diagnosed with a severe allergy to gluten and dairy. Since then I have made it my mission to open a cafe that is 100% gluten and dairy free. Because who doesn’t want to go to a brunch cafe and be able to order whatever they want and not have to stick with only two gluten & dairy free options. Toast gets old after a while!

Last year when I was 19 my doctor and I discovered that I have IBS, and a couple months ago we later found out that I also have SIBO. SIBO stands for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Meaning that my small intestine has more bacteria than my large intestine (it should be the other way around). And so, two hours after we eat, we start to digest our food. But for people who have SIBO, or IBS, our small intestine stops the process of digestion and we’re left feeling constipated, bloated, intense stomach pain, increase in farting, diarrhea, and the worst part of it all in my case: feeling ashamed and disgusted of the body I was given.

I try not to look back at how I’ve treated my body because it pains me that I hated it so much. But, in order to continue my self-love journey, I have to accept how I treated it in the past in order to know what not to do. These challenges have brought me to where I am today, and for that I am grateful.

Let me start by saying that when I was diagnosed with gluten and dairy allergy, I was thirteen years old. Playing golf four times a week, in a club where we ran one to two miles every week and being super active with my friends. Yet I was still always. bloated.

I never like to throw the weight card because my weight doesn’t define me. But I am 5’2 and was blessed with a curvy figure. In other words. When I bloat it shows!

Which really sucks. 

It’s hard being a teenager and comparing yourself to other girls in person or on social media. Especially when you have severe bloating constantly. But I found that the negative words I was telling myself only made my problems worse. 

For example, last fall I was in constant pain. Bloating almost every day for hours and nothing was working. Working out, eating right, smaller portions, etc. I felt big in all of my clothes and my confidence was going down. I needed change.

Have you ever heard the sayings.. Eat healthier, cut back on junk food, have smaller portions, workout and move more? Well I have. Every article I’ve ever read on how to properly lose weight has started out with these recommendations. 

But I’m here to tell you that I’ve done all of these things and still felt fat and bloated. 

If all of the things I was doing weren’t working it was time to try something different. My mom has always said “what we put out into the universe will always come back to us..so be careful of what you say.” When she said this to me back in December it hit me that all I had been saying for years was negative thoughts. 

So here’s what I found. Besides food there are three other things that trigger my bloating episodes. First, I want to explain what I mean by “bloating episodes.” Bloating is normal for the human body. Think “giant food baby!” Sometimes if we eat too much our stomach will get really full and we tend to bloat a little. It’s happened to everyone at one point in time. Maybe the last time you had Mexican or Italian?

But when I say “bloating episodes” I mean severe stomach pain due to excess bloating, sharp pains in my lower back, laying down because even one ounce of movement would cause tears. It’s really rough. Even typing all of this out pains me that I went through it, still going through it.

Luckily for me, I have figured out three things that will cause my bloating episodes.

• STRESS
• EMOTIONAL DISTRESS
• NEGATIVE SELF TALK

We all experience stress in our lives, some more than others. Anyone who has IBS, SIBO or food allergies knows how much of an impact our gut can have over our mood. But what people may not know, is what I finally made the connection to, (there is tons of science and medical evidence on this) only a couple months ago, is that stress, strong emotional distress, and an negative self talk can be huge triggers for indigestion and in some cases, severe bloating and constipation. 

The first trigger for me is STRESS:

When we feel stressed, our body goes into “fight or flight” mode and stops doing some things our body is trained to do like healthy digestion of foods. When we’re really stressed, it takes our body a lot longer to fight it off. Don’t get me wrong, Stress is completely normal for us humans and sometimes stress is good, but when we’re constantly stressed it can affect our whole body. Think “Mind-Body Connection”. The body listens and responds to what our minds are thinking and feeling!

I used to stress about anything and everything. I can’t remember a time in the last two years where I didn’t stress about something. 

To name a few 

• Starting college
• Long Distance Relationship
• School work
• Making new friends
• Not gaining the freshman 15
• Needing to workout everyday
• What to wear
• My skin disease
• My food allergies
• Not knowing what was wrong with my body

That list is exhausting! All completely normal things to “stress” about, but I was stressing about these things 24/7, which only made my bloating and gut health worse. It was haunting me to the point that both my boyfriend and mom had to tell me that I needed to stop worrying about these things and trust in God. I still stress about things don’t get me wrong. But when I start to feel stressed I do two things.

1. I take a step back and do this breathing technique my mom teaches in her mindfulness meditation classes. Closing my eyes and taking a deep breath for 8 seconds and after exhaling for 8-10, 3-4 rounds. I do this three times and it really does help.
2. I ask myself why am I stressed? What am I getting out from this being so stressed? Certainly not feeling my best. Do I even have a reason for being stressed? When I started to answer these questions I noticed there was no point in feeling that way. I could just feel all that negative energy come out of my body!

My second trigger is EMOTIONAL DISTRESS: 

Emotional distress is sort of like being stressed but with feeling 100 different things all at once. I think this was the first thing I noticed that really caused my bloating. I will be honest and admit that I’m a very sensitive person and in touch with my emotions. I love a good cry every now and then. But I noticed that every time something serious was going on in my life and I cried or felt sad I would end up feeling so sick in the stomach and bloated. Which only made me feel worse. 

I just couldn’t catch a break! It’s still something I’m working through because I can’t control when I cry. But I can stop from beating myself up because of it. If I kept getting so angry for crying and being bloated I wasn’t helping my healing process. 

Which brings me into my third trigger.

Negative Self-Talk: 

Basically negative self-talk means how you treat your inner self. Any negative thought that diminishes your ability to grow, heal, and make positive changes in your life. Not only can negative self-talk effect your gut health, but it can impact your mental health. 

I felt like all I had been doing for years was this. Constantly attacking myself with name calling, yelling at myself that I deserved what was happening to me. To name a few:

• fat
• ugly
• worthless
• weak 
• disgusting 

It’s hard to admit but these were the words I was calling myself for the last two years when we couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me (Before finding out about my IBS + SIBO).  I want you to take a moment right now and pick one word from this list where you remember calling yourself this. If you have another word then use that. I want you to call yourself this word in your head 10 times. “I am ____”. 

How did that make you feel? 

It sure didn’t make me feel good. 

I want to point out that when I do call myself these names it wasn’t just at random times. It was at really low points in my life. (Getting tested for IBS, SIBO, food allergies) when I was exhausted with feeling bloated every single day. 

Back in December I remember crying in bed to my mom begging her to get re-tested for different gut conditions. I just wanted to feel normal and beautiful. There was a point in the conversation where I said something like “I feel so fat and ugly I don’t even deserve to live at this point.” Yeah you’d be right to guess that my mom quickly stopped me from ever saying that again. But it was the truth. I was tired of living each day in fear that no matter what I ate I would bloat. 

My mother, who is my everything, made me tell myself 5 things I loved about my body. Now, I’m not sure if you’ve ever had to do that but when you’ve been crying for the past hour it was not something I wanted to do. 

Here are somethings I said 

• I am beautiful 
• I am loved
• I was made perfectly by my savior 
• I am worthy
• I am not fat 
• I am deserving even on my worst days 

Just saying those things out loud gave me so much peace. I promised myself I would stop the negative elf talk  and when I felt not good enough I would replace negative thoughts with positive ones. Work like a charm, but not always easy!

I know this is going to sound crazy but when I really made an effort to do that back in December I could see a change in how my body felt. Even when I did have bloating I wouldn’t tear myself down. And the bloating didn’t end up lasting that long either! I saw that how I was treating my body with negative self-talk was making my bloating episodes worse. Everything in our body is connected. So what we say to ourselves affects everything else. 

So that’s my Self-Love journey. 

Maybe there will be something that doesn’t work for you and that’s okay. My hope is that you find things that do help you and make you feel like the best version of yourself! 

xoxo

Sophia