Night one, I puked until 4am.

The SIBO Journey, Part 3

Night one, I puked until 4 am.

Not because the shakes tasted bad. Not because something went wrong with the protocol. Because I thought I was supposed to drink six shakes a day, and I was going to do it right, and by shake four I was full, genuinely, uncomfortably full, and I drank two more before bed anyway.

My body had something to say about that.

I spent the night paying for following the instructions vs following what I actually felt. And somewhere around 3 am, hunched over the bathroom floor, I made a quiet agreement with myself: for the next thirteen days, I was going to listen to my body over the prescription. Three shakes, four shakes, five shakes — whatever it needed. Not six because six was the number.

That decision changed everything about how the two weeks went.

What the First Few Days Actually Felt Like

I won't pretend the first few days were comfortable. They weren't. My body was adjusting, my energy was low, and there was a mental recalibration happening that I hadn't fully anticipated, the shift from the rhythm of food to the simplicity of shakes.

But somewhere in that first week, something unexpected started happening.

My body seemed almost... relieved.

Not struggling.

Not fighting the protocol.

Almost like it recognized what was happening and exhaled into it. Like it had been waiting for exactly this kind of simplicity, and I was grateful I had finally listened. The bloating that had been my constant companion started to dissipate. The digestive discomfort I'd normalized for years, also lessening. The background noise I hadn't even realized was always running, suddenly quiet.

I was also deeply grateful in those first days for something I don't take lightly: I have built a life where I can control my environment and my daily experience to a significant degree. I could take it easy when I needed to. I didn't have to push through the first week on adrenaline and obligation. Not everyone has that. I knew it then, and I know it now, that kind of support makes a hard thing possible in a way it simply isn't for everyone.

I leaned into it. I rested. I let the process do what it was designed to do.

And I used the fasting journal my church had created for a 21-day spiritual fast as my daily anchor — gratitude, intention, scripture, prayer. It wasn't designed for a SIBO protocol. But it gave each day a container. A reason to slow down and check in rather than just endure. Some mornings, it was the thing that got me out of my own head and into something larger than the protocol.

Day Five

Around day five, something shifted.

The low, dull energy of the first few days lifted. And what replaced it wasn't just the absence of fatigue; it was something cleaner. Clearer. The kind of energy that doesn't have static in it.

I started waking up naturally between 5:30 and 6 am. For context: I'm usually a 7 am person on a good day. But almost every morning of the protocol, I was up by 6:30 without an alarm, without forcing it. My body was just awake. Ready.

I noticed my thinking was sharper. The brain fog I had quietly normalized for years was lifting in a way I could actually feel the contrast of. This is what clear feels like. This is what I'd been missing.

The Gym

By the end of the first week, I was curious enough and feeling well enough to test something.

I watered down one of my shakes, took it with me, and went to the gym.

I didn't know what to expect. A liquid-only protocol doesn't exactly scream strength training. But I wanted to see what my body could do.

Not only did I feel good, I felt more mobile than I had in a while. My strength was solid. And my joints, which had been a quiet source of frustration for months, felt noticeably better. Less inflamed. More fluid.

I stood there between sets thinking about the joint pain I'd written off as aging, as just the deal now. And I wondered how much of it had been the SIBO all along — the systemic inflammation, the gut-driven effects rippling out into places I hadn't connected to digestion.

Day Twelve

I made it to day twelve before I really started wanting food again.

I wasn't craving specific foods. I wasn't fantasizing about a particular meal or lying awake thinking about what I was going to eat first. After twelve days of liquid nutrition, what I missed wasn't actually food.

It was chewing.

Just the act of it. The texture. The resistance. Something to actually bite into.

It sounds almost funny when I say it out loud. But it's true. And toward the end of the protocol, I started making one or two of my shakes into slushies — blending in ice just to have something to chew. It was not the same thing. Not even close. But it was something.

There's something quietly profound in that realization. Strip food back to pure function, pure nutrition delivered without the ritual, without the texture, without the social and sensory experience, and what you discover you actually miss tells you something. It wasn't the taste. It wasn't even the satisfaction of eating.

It was the experience of being in my body in that particular way.

What the Two Weeks Taught Me Before Reintroduction Even Started

By day fourteen, I had been reminded of something it can be easy to forget and even ignore:

My body knows things.

Not in a woo way. In a very practical, very literal way. It knew it was full at shake four on night one, and I overrode it.

It knew it needed rest in the first few days, and I honored it.

It knew it could handle the gym by week two, and I tested it.

It knew the reset was working, and something in me recognized that too, in the energy, in the sleep, in the quiet absence of symptoms I'd stopped noticing because they'd been there so long.

The agreement I made at 3 am on night one, to listen to my body over the prescription, turned out to be the agreement that ran the whole two weeks.

I think about that a lot now.

How many times do we override what we actually feel because we're following someone else's prescription? Not because they're wrong but because we've been taught to trust the external over the internal. The protocol over the signal. The number over the need.

So here's what I want to leave you with:

Where in your life are you drinking the sixth shake?

Not because you need it. Because the instructions say so, the expert said so, or just someone else told you to?

That's worth sitting with.

Your body is in a constant conversation with you.

The question is whether you've learned to hear it over everything else telling you what you're supposed to do.

This is part three of five blog posts documenting my full SIBO and gut-healing journey. Part four picks up where the protocol ends and where the harder work began. Stay tuned.

If this resonated, come find me at MotivAction.academy. And if you're someone learning to trust what your body is telling you over what you think you're supposed to do that's exactly the kind of work we do.