I grew up with the kind of health you don't notice, because you never have to. I didn't think about my gut, my energy, or what I was eating — I could eat and drink whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and never feel a thing afterwards. "Bloating" simply wasn't part of my vocabulary.

All of that changed after a single episode of food poisoning, an ordinary stomach bug, that should have come and gone. Instead, long after the infection itself had cleared, the symptoms stayed behind, and almost overnight I went from tolerating everything to tolerating very little: extreme bloating, constant indigestion, a growing list of foods I could no longer eat, fatigue, brain fog.

Like most of the women who now sit across from me, I ran every test under the sun, and everything kept coming back fine. But I felt anything but fine, and more than that, I didn't feel like myself at all. For months I went from one doctor to the next without a single answer as to why perfectly good health had unravelled the moment I caught a stomach bug — mostly, I think, because no one seemed to consider that the stomach bug had anything to do with it.

Eventually, by ruling everything else out, I was told I had IBS, and that my symptoms were the result of stress and anxiety.

That never sat right with me, because the timing was too clear to ignore: I had been well, then I had food poisoning, and then I wasn't well. That isn't the kind of coincidence you can talk yourself out of.

What I was offered in return was antacids, antidepressants, a list of foods to eat and avoid, and the general suggestion that I get on with my life. But I've never been that kind of person, and since no one seemed able to help me, I decided to take the matter into my own hands.

I read everything I could find — books, scientific papers, webinars, whatever existed at the time, which, more than fifteen years ago, was almost nothing, since the conversation around gut health had barely begun. Eventually I came across a condition called post-infectious IBS, and for the first time, seven years of digestive symptoms began to make sense.

Once I understood post-infectious IBS and its connection to SIBO, I could finally do something useful and write myself a proper plan of action. It asked for a series of steps, a great deal of patience, and more commitment than I'd like to admit, but little by little I started to feel like myself again.

It was through that journey that I decided to train as a nutritional therapist, because I had gained so much knowledge the hard way and couldn't imagine keeping it to myself when so many people were going through exactly what I had just come out of. For the years that followed, gut health, IBS and SIBO were the air I breathed, and I studied them constantly, keeping my clinical knowledge current and refining the way I worked.