SIBO Came Back. Here's What That Usually Means
You finished your second round of antibiotics, felt genuinely good for about six weeks, and then the bloating showed up again on a random Tuesday like it had never left.
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You finished your second round of antibiotics, felt genuinely good for about six weeks, and then the bloating showed up again on a random Tuesday like it had never left.
I ate the same breakfast four days in a row once: nuts, banana, and coconut yogurt. Monday, totally fine. Tuesday, fine. Wednesday, bloated and doubled over by 11am. Thursday, fine again.
I have a Notion page with eleven test results in it, none labeled by date. A notes app full of half-finished food logs. A folder of screenshots from Reddit threads I meant to come back to.
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If you've spent any real time deep in gut health information, you already know the feeling: more tabs open, less idea of what to actually do.
Figuring out what to do for SIBO after antibiotics is its own project. I finished my second round of rifaximin on a Friday, and by Monday I was back at my desk feeling maybe 20% better with no real idea what came next.
If you're bloated after every meal, you've probably already tried the obvious things. Eating slower. Avoiding gassy foods. Going dairy-free for a month. And still, the same distended feeling shows up.
If you've been dealing with chronic gut issues despite normal test results. Years of bloating, cramping, unpredictable digestion. A referral. Tests. More tests. And then: everything came back normal.
I spent months doing everything right. Followed the protocol exactly, gave it the full recommended time, tracked what I ate. Nothing changed. And that was somehow worse than the symptoms themselves,
I stopped taking a probiotic after three weeks. The bloating hadn't obviously improved, I was having a rough couple of days, and it just felt pointless to keep going. That was a couple of years ago no
I'd spent two years trying to figure out what was going on with my gut when I got yet another appointment with a gastroenterologist.
One of the low FODMAP mistakes I made early on was thinking the diet was doing something it wasn't. I was careful, checked the Monash app, and was still flaring.