 This picture of me was when I was 21. Now, if you can see how skinny I was here, I wasn't trying to be skinny. This was from years of digestive problems. Now, that was after years and years and years of trying to see medical practitioners to figure out what was going on with my gut. And while at that time, it really was just digestive problems I was having. But as I got older and closer to 30, I began having other widespread systemic issues, like insomnia and brain fog and palpitations and really significant bowel changes and a lot of anxiety. So it seemed like my original root issue with the gut was now manifesting in much more serious ways elsewhere throughout my body. Have you ever wondered why some people are able to eat burgers and shakes and fries and they have no issues with bloating or bowel movements or their digestion? And then you might be the person who's eating very, very strict, very, very dialed in and yet you're always complaining about something going on with your gut. This is something that I wanna talk about here in today's video as part of my healing journey. Hey guys, it's Dr. Alex Hine, board licensed acupuncturist and doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, author of the health book, Master the Day. Let's jump in. Now what were a lot of my digestive symptoms way back when? For me, I remember the first time I went into a dietation nutritionist. I was telling her, you know, I basically an incredibly healthy Mediterranean diet and I had tried every diet from the elimination diets to specific elemental sort of diets, specific carbohydrate diet, low carb diet, carnivore diet, vegetarian diet, vegan diet. And I told her, you know, no matter what I do, pretty much I'm always feeling extremely bloated to the point of almost shortness of breath and on top of that, I'm also extremely irregular with bowel movements. I mean, I was averaging one bowel movement every three days, which is crazy for someone who ate healthy. And while she was very sweet and she tried her best to help me, really what she had me do was she added bran, of course, following in the traditional food pyramid, you just don't have enough fiber, even though I was eating healthy. So she asked me, I had powdered bran to my oatmeal in the morning, powdered bran to my second meal, powdered bran to my third meal. So we add bran to my meals and that night, I had so much abdominal pain the very first night that not only did it not help with my bowels, it just gave me severe gas pains that kept me up all night. So I went back to her and she said, well, let's try something else. And she said, by the way, you know, you're very, very thin, are you just not eating? And I was eating normally, I was eating plenty, but I just was genetically very thin and so I was losing weight, just sort of my normal temperament, right? My normal physical constitution. So she sends me to a GI specialist. Now this guy basically touches my abdomen for 12 seconds in a four minute visit says, it's interesting, you have both asthma and digestive problems. And he said, you know, it sounds kind of like you have IBS, you know, you want to have bowel movement for three days and then you have this sort of paradoxical mixed bowel movements, sometimes cramping in pain for bowel movements. He's like, are you really stressed out? And I said, no. And he's like, yeah, you're really stressed. I know, it's tough. So this physician was extremely condescending, didn't listen and said, you know what, I'm going on a vacation to Jamaica, so let's just get you to do a colonoscopy next week. And then we can chat when I'm back. Needless to say, I did not take his advice and did not schedule a colonoscopy because I felt like what he said was inaccurate and just claiming that I had IBS with a four minute conversation was just not even professional, right? It was just very inaccurate. So off I go on this odyssey. And you know, for me, a lot of what it was, was when I was younger, it was purely localized to the digestive system, right? My only real concerns were maybe lower appetite, significant bloating that would flare up from time to time to almost unbearable levels and then really inching back down to let's just say a regular level of bloating and then very irregular bowel movements. There was no amount of healthy eating that would fix that. It wasn't about stress because when I went on vacation, it wouldn't fix it. So it really was something going on with my body. As we move forward in this video, I wanna share less about my journey and more about what work because chances are if you're watching this, you have a lot of the same symptoms that I had. And while I will share a combination of traditional Chinese medicine things and non-traditional Chinese medicine things, note that there are a lot of different ways you can treat gut issues. And I've put together four really interesting daily healing rituals. It's a free guide. It's the first link below this video. There are four healing practices you can do from traditional Chinese medicine that personally helped me quite a lot. You know, a meta high level living a healthy life point of view. And I think they are very distinct to East Asian healing arts. So you guys can check that out. They'll link right below this video. And you'll also get my weekly video newsletter. But let's jump in more and talk about the first dietary practice I did that really had a big effect. The first thing I did for about 10 years was the specific carbohydrate diet. Now I found this book. It's called Breaking the Vicious Cycle by Elaine Gochal. And I think Elaine talks about maybe her daughter when she was very young, a couple of years old and she had some kind of Crohn's disease. Crohn's are colitis. I don't know, there's all sort of colitis whether her daughter was bleeding or her son but had severe GI issues. And she had seen many, many GI specialists and many physicians and as many people as she could see to help her child. And she said, there was an old GI doctor, very, very old guy who was a little bit more traditional like back in the day where they would do dietary therapy with patients. This doctor recommended her child to avoid gluten, wheat, dairy and a few other things. And she said that as her child got better and better and better and began to heal, the doctors were saying that wasn't necessarily possible. And frankly, only one doc, a really old school guy that believed in dietary therapy recommended her to do this. She found that very discouraging and very intriguing. So I believe that's when she went back to become a biochemist to study this phenomenon. Now in her book, Breaking the Vicious Cycle, she talks a lot about why people with these kinds of issues very often have a microbiome issue. And a lot of what is going on with the microbiome is that it's feeding on the bad bugs. So the bad bugs are feeding on the disaccharides, so a lot of what we traditionally call like carbs. I was on the specific carbohydrate diet for often a couple of weeks and then cycling off long enough for over a decade. All I knew was that my appetite was the best, my digestion, the bloating was certainly the best and bowel movements were a little bit better, a little more regular. This was fascinating to me because I found it number one that I had a solution that actually worked. Now I didn't fix my problems and if you can see how thin I am now, I lost about 10 or 15 pounds because it's a no carbohydrate diet besides vegetables. So one, I found that I was starving all the time. I looked literally emaciated. I mean, I'm already underweight sort of frame, so to lose another 10, 15 pounds was not something I wanted to do. And what I found was that like so many of my patients today, I was just cycling on and off and on and off these digestive diets and there really was never a resolution. So while some people go on the specific carbohydrate diet for years, it is an uncurculean level of will that is required to do that. And I didn't find that I was able to do that or really found it worth it. So I moved on to the next option which was looking for more people who could help. The second thing is really this concept of constitution. So your genetic tendency, right? Your constitution as we call it in traditional Chinese medicine encompasses things like your genetic body type, right? Obviously hair patterns, weight accumulation patterns, physical body type, how you look is inherited genetic material from your parents and from your genetic line. While there are some illnesses or some genes that you know, there's this predisposition towards something skip a generation. Some people asthma allergies and eczema, for example, this kind of immune triad, they skip generations. It's very bizarre. The grandpa had it, the grandson has it, but mom or dad don't, right? Or the in-between generation doesn't. What I learned was that for a lot of us, there is a genetic tendency towards some of these issues. So for myself, I learned that lots of people in my family on my mom's side all complain about their digestion. Surprise, surprise. It wasn't that I was eating a bad diet. It wasn't that I had an abnormal level of stress. It wasn't that I was doing the wrong things. It was that a switch had been flipped. That was a genetic thing running in my family. You know, like the balance had been tilted a bit out of line. That was somewhat useful, but also not that useful because what was I supposed to do about my genetics, right? Now, what I learned though in traditional Chinese medicine is that this constitution, not only can it be altered or adjusted, theoretically it can be quote, repaired in many cases. So from long-term herbal therapy, my practice views traditionally custom compounded herbal formulas, we can actually help flip those switches on or off of disease. So people who have had SIBO-like symptoms and bloating their whole life can take a traditional herbal formula for three to six months and now they're 95% resolved. And generally they're good for quite a long period of time. Of course, they can go eat burgers and fries and donuts and the symptoms can all come back. Any of us can do that. But in general, we can play with this sort of genetic temperament quite a lot. Now, if you guys don't know, I have a private clinical practice in Los Angeles where I see a limited number of new patients every month and also via telemedicine. So if that's something that's interesting to you, you can always call or reach out to my clinic and my practice right below this video. There's some information there on the kind of conditions that I treat and how to reach out, et cetera. But in general, if I'm being candid, what really moved me to a state of resolution where I saw finally uninterrupted years symptom-free was the addition of traditional Chinese medicine formulas. And while I had done this specific carbohydrate diet and danced back and forth on these elimination diets between no symptoms and a lot of symptoms, I hated that I lost a tremendous amount of weight. I hated that it was no carbs so it was completely unsustainable for life and I hated that it wasn't sustainable. And it was around this time that I was talking to TCM doctors and they were saying, you know, you really shouldn't be needing to go back on and off these elimination diets because if we fix the organs that are causing the problems in the first place, the microbiome will be well. So there were a number of traditional formulas that doctors I'd seen used and those formulas were different for each practitioner. But what it was was that, you know, I would take this compounded powder twice a day, dissolved into hot water and I did that for about three months to a year with one of my mentors. Actually, I saw him for several years. And what I noticed was that, you know, I had this one experience after a month where I ate something that would normally massively flare up my SIBO, which was I had a donut. Saturday morning, I had a donut and a cup of coffee. It was delicious. After a yoga class, very hypocritical, I know. But I found that what would ordinarily be guaranteed constipation and guaranteed severe bloating for a day or two was nothing. I didn't have any issues with transit. I didn't have any issues with bloating. I didn't get any other systemic symptoms and it really opened my eyes to the fact that it's not the food a lot of time. Unless you are celiac, it's not the food, it's the gut. TCM focuses a lot on the terrain theory, meaning that once you treat the organs and the terrain and the physiological processes, the pathways that have become dysregulated, you can go back to doing the same things, drinking coffee and you won't get anxiety or palpitation. Eating those high carb foods, you won't get excessive bloating. And what I find is that this is generally very true in my practice. Food allergies definitely are reversible. These kinds of things definitely are functionally reversible and that opened my eyes because that meant that there was the potential for healing in sight. I didn't see that in anything I talked to in conventional medicine any practitioners because they said you're just gonna have to do this forever. You're just gonna be this way because you are this way and there isn't really a way to reverse food allergies, which is utter nonsense because there is. And we have lots of case studies on my website of me having done that with formulas. So I found that the combination of elimination diet, if things acutely flare up and traditional Chinese medicine formulas really to be the game changer for me. And that is literally why I specialize in this in my practice because it is the thing that made the difference. Far and beyond anything I'd seen in conventional medicine and of course I never went back to that GI doctor. And it is the thing that really led to a more permanent resolution of symptoms. So I share this because there is hope for people that have SIBO and gut issues and I wanted to share what worked the best and why it made me not become a traditional medical doctor or a GI doctor but become a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. So there are lots of healing practices and modalities you could do. This one had a profound effect for me and many of my patients. Now, something really exciting. I just launched an introduction to healing with traditional Chinese medicine online program. It's the link right below this video, the pin link. It's a part of this bigger thing I'm building called the Healing Library or the Healing Path which is a series of online programs on how to heal traditional Chinese medicine because it's really not a lot on that, on the internet itself. And so I figured for some of you that can't see me or won't see me this is a great way to actually apply some of these practices in your daily life that can really potentially make a giant difference. So you guys can check it out, the link below the video. And then I also have another video here on healing the gut in particular right up there.