IBS -- any suggestions or helpful tips?

Naw. Not the only one. I'll friend request you.

Sorry that you have it too. (Sadly it never helped me lose weight either.) Food is one possible trigger but I've always found it an emotional thing too. (Very exciting or worrying or upsetting experiences can set mine off no matter what I do or don't eat.) A combination of food and emotion is hard to keep track of but does explain why a food seems to have an dire effect on one occasion - and yet does nothing on another.

My triggers are spicy food for 3 days, stress, excess alcohol. Two of these are easily avoidable.

I can get temporary relief by eating lots of pears or flapjack, not good for weight control.

For medication I use Colofac which is an anti-spasm medicine. If I use it for more than 3 days it makes my digestive tract earily calm.

Porridge for breakfast and probiotic drinks both seem to have a protective effect.

I hope you can get this under control.

I have IBS, and I find I really don't have any specific trigger foods. Stress and anxiety definitely trigger it, but other than that, it seems to come at random times. I'm doing more testing to try to get a better understanding of it.

I do use medication sometimes to control the systems. I've found immodium to be very effective and I don't have any side effects or reactions to it. I only use it when I have a bad attack or preventative if I am traveling somewhere that requires long amounts of time away from a bathroom.

In terms of weight loss, I gained a lot of weight with IBS, so I know the struggle. But I've also lost almost 25 pounds, so I know with proper calorie management it can be overcome from a weight loss perspective.

And now that I have lost some weight and am exercising more and just improving my overall health, I have noticed some symptom improvement.

I'm going to go against the grain on FODMAPs. My wife had terrible/awful IBS for years. Later developed Fibromyalgia. Going gluten free helped her tremendously. Immensely.

I learned so much about her condition and how to help her that I developed a very strong interest in the Microbiome. I'm a technical recruiter and have done some work in AI/Machine learning before and with some Life Sciences start-ups. I've worked with over 25 start-ups at very high levels.

This is my opinion. FODMAPs aggravate IBS because they are prebiotic. If you have SIBO or the wrong bacterial mix in your Microbiome, of course FODMAPs are going to aggravate you. It's common sense. But, here's the kicker. Most people get sick because they don't have enough fiber in their diets! Now, they are recommending avoid fiber!

My wife, since recovered from both IBS and Fibro, eats around 50g of fiber a day and has FODMAPs all the time with no issues. None.

Four things would help you tremendously. First, eliminating gluten first. Second, I do strongly agree on the elimination diet. Find out if something else affects you. Everlywell has a self home test for around $150 now. My wife was terribly allergic to cow dairy, but she can do limited A2/A2 dairy. Look into Colostrum. There seems to be strong evidence that it helps IBS. I know one start-up that has helped kids in 3rd world countries with diseases like Dysentary with Colostrum. Also, there is a little known study that just came out on depression and the Microbiome. There's one bacteria strongly tied to both depression as well as digestive dysfunction. Turns out that one other bacteria (E coli Nissle 1917) feeds this bacteria (that's needed) that produces GABA internally and improves both depression as well as gut dysfunction tremendously. Right now, there's only one company producing it (Mutaflor), but there's literally a race out there for other companies to produce it cheaply.

Just read an article on Linkedin from a CEO of a well known Pharma company. He was explaining why all the advances in AI and Machine learning haven't impacted drug discovery as rapidly as they had once hoped. I'm paraphrasing here, but what he essentially said is that AI and Machine Learning/Computational Biology and such are making us understand that modern medicine didn't know *kitten* before now and it's actually a miracle that any drug (until now) worked on such a complex biological system that interacts with it's own bacterial "invaders".