I Already Knew. I Did It Anyway.

The SIBO Journey, Part 4

If you read part three, you know how night one went.

I had just spent two weeks learning to listen to my body.

I'd made an agreement with myself at 3am on night one — listen over the prescription, trust what you feel over what you're told. And I had kept it. I thought I had this.

And then reintroduction started. And within seven days I had broken the agreement completely — not dramatically, not all at once, but in the quiet, familiar way patterns tend to reassert themselves when you think you've dealt with them.

I defaulted to the expert over myself.

Again.

What Reintroduction Actually Is

Coming off two weeks of pre-digested liquid nutrition, reintroduction sounds like the reward. The finish line. The part where you get to eat food again.

It's not.

It's the hardest part of the whole process. And I say that as someone who spent fourteen nights drinking shakes and one of those nights sick until 4am.

Here's why: during the protocol, everything is simple. You know exactly what's coming. Your only job is to drink the shakes and rest. The decision fatigue is gone. The monitoring is minimal. It's the equivalent of wearing the same outfit every day — zero cognitive load, zero negotiation.

Reintroduction hands all of that back to you at once.

Every bite becomes a data point. Every meal is followed by a monitoring window — how do I feel? Is that bloating? Is that just fullness? Is that distension or did I eat too much? Am I still hungry or am I satisfied? Is this a symptom or is this just digestion doing its job?

The questions stack so fast that by the time someone asks how you're doing, you genuinely don't know how to answer. You're paying attention to so many signals simultaneously that the signal gets lost in the noise.

And underneath all of that monitoring, I discovered something:

I don't actually know what normal feels like in my body anymore.

I've been navigating so many issues for so long — normalizing them, adapting to them, building routines around them — that the baseline got blurry. I couldn't tell you with confidence what full feels like versus satisfied. What bloated feels like versus distended. What hunger actually is versus what habit feels like at mealtimes.

Those distinctions matter. And I had lost them somewhere along the way without noticing.

The Visual Element Nobody Talks About

I also want to be honest about something that's part of this story even though it's uncomfortable to name.

I have struggled with dysmorphia for most of my life.

For anyone unfamiliar, dysmorphia is when what you see in the mirror doesn't match reality. Not vanity. Not insecurity in the normal sense. It's a distorted perception where your brain genuinely shows you something that isn't there or magnifies something that is and no amount of logic talks you out of it.

After two weeks of pre-digested nutrients and nothing solid, my stomach was flat. Really flat. The kind of flat that doesn't exist in regular daily life when you're actually eating food. It's just what happens when there's nothing in there to process.

And then I started eating again.

And my stomach was no longer flat.

Because there was food in it. Which is normal. Which is what stomachs do. And knowing that logically did not stop the spiral from starting, the immediate questioning, the “is this bloating, did it not work, is something still wrong” — when the answer was simply: you have food in your body. That's what this looks like.

For someone with a long history of dysmorphia, reintroduction has a layer that has nothing to do with SIBO. That layer showed up right on schedule. And I'm naming it because I suspect I'm not the only one.

The Expert I Deferred To

Here's what I know in retrospect that I couldn't quite see in the middle of it:

I had sensed, somewhere in the back of my awareness, that two weeks might not be enough for me. I had felt that. Not loudly. Not as a clear signal I could point to. But it was there.

And I overrode it.

I defaulted to the prescribed timeline, two weeks, as recommended by the creators of the protocol and I filed my own knowing under: probably just fear talking. Probably just wanting an excuse to stop. And I moved into reintroduction on schedule.

And I bet this is sounding familiar.

If you read part three, you may recognize a version of this pattern. And you’re right — the same pattern I thought I was already aware of, already moving through, showed up again. In a slightly different form, in a different decision, but the same root.

And isn’t that just what patterns do?

We get clear on them. We name them. We think we’ve moved past them or at least we’ll recognize them when they show up. And then they find these sneaky little ways to show up anyway — in different nuances, different contexts, different decisions.

Although this one wasn’t all that nuanced, if I’m being honest.

This is a pattern I know well. It has a long history. The tendency to position the expert — whoever or whatever is filling that role — above my own read on a situation. To shrink my intuition to fit someone else's framework. To trust the credential over the felt sense.

Truth is this doesn’t happen everywhere. There are areas of my life where I trust myself completely in love, in sport, with the people I'm closest to. But trusting my own perspective, my own intuition, my own quiet knowing when it conflicts with an outside authority, that's been a place to work within.

And my gut — pun fully intended — decided this was the moment to make that very clear.

Day Seven

Seven days into reintroduction, everything kind of came crashing down at once.

Not dramatically. Quietly. The way the most important things tend to arrive.

I was sitting with the accumulation of it — the hyper-vigilance, the visual struggle, the energy dips that happen when your digestive system wakes back up after a two-week rest and suddenly has to produce enzymes and get everything moving again. And underneath all of it, a feeling I recognized immediately even though I didn't want to:

“I did it wrong. I messed it up.”

The shame spiral doesn't ask for permission. It just arrives, fully formed, ready to make its case. And the case it was making had teeth because this time, unlike night one of the protocol, I couldn't entirely argue with it. I had ignored a signal. I had defaulted to the prescription over myself. And here I was, seven days later, feeling like the wheels were coming off.

The tears came. The frustration came. And then, eventually, something else came.

Clarity.

The Decision

I still had twelve shakes.

I had never managed to drink six in a day — my body had made that clear from night one — so twelve shakes were still sitting on my counter.

And I made a decision.

I stopped reintroducing food. And I went back to shakes.

Not because I had failed. Because I finally listened to what I had been sensing all along. My body needed more time. More rest. More of the simplified environment the protocol had provided. And instead of overriding that signal the way I had when I moved into reintroduction too soon, instead of finding another expert to defer to, I just listened.

Three and a half more days. Shakes only.

What the First Shake Back Felt Like

I didn't know what to expect going back. Whether it would feel like defeat. Whether the hyper-vigilance would follow me in.

It didn't.

That first shake, especially waking up the next morning knowing that today was a shake only day, that I didn't have to monitor every bite and wait and wonder — felt like coming home. Like exhaling after holding my breath for a week.

Within 36 hours the mental fog lifted. The clarity came back. And something settled in me that had been unsettled since reintroduction began.

I hadn't failed. I had gathered data. And now I could use it.

The Pattern Underneath the Pattern

I'm tired of not trusting myself. I’m tired of not listening to the signals my body gives me.

That's the most honest thing I can tell you from the other side of this.

Not in a dramatic, I'm-done-with-this way.

In a quiet, I-am-ready-to-be-finished-with-this-particular-chapter way. I am tired of the second-guessing. The shrinking of my own knowing to fit someone else's framework. The defaulting to the credential, the protocol, the prescribed path, even when something in me is clearly, persistently saying something different.

And here's what I believe, sitting in this now:

This journey wasn't just about healing my gut. It was about getting on the other side of this pattern. The body was the invitation. The real work was always about learning to trust what I already know.

I didn't get it perfectly right. I overrode myself at least twice. But the going-back-to-shakes decision was different. That one I made from myself. Not from a protocol, not from a recommendation, not from what I thought I was supposed to do.

From myself.

And I'm carrying that forward.

Here's what I know about patterns: naming them doesn't end them. It just means you can't pretend you don't see them anymore.

And that's actually the harder part.

Because now the work isn't about getting through the protocol. It's about what comes next — returning to food, rebuilding from the inside out, and learning to stay in relationship with my own body without defaulting back to someone else's prescription the moment things get uncertain again.

That's the chapter I'm walking into now.

And I'm going in differently than I went into the last one.

The Support That Made It Possible

I want to name something before I close this chapter.

None of this happened in isolation.

My sister — who has been on her own version of this journey far longer than I have — was there every time I needed to talk through what I was experiencing. My best friend and business partner Irina held space without trying to fix anything. And my partner Nathan offered the kind of steady, unconditional support that makes it safe to fall apart a little and put yourself back together. And my functional med doc, Dr. Reyna, was always on call ready to pull me back into the reality of the situation and pushed me to trust my guy vs challenging me or gaslighting me.

I couldn't have done this without a safe environment. Without people who honored whatever choices I made, even the ones that took longer or looked messier than the plan.

If you're considering this journey or any hard health journey — please make finding that support system part of the preparation. Not an afterthought. The foundation.

This is part four of five blogs documenting my full SIBO journey. Part five picks up with the second reintroduction — returning to food more slowly, more honestly, and with a lot more data than I had the first time. Stay tuned.

If this landed somewhere real, come find me at MotivAction.academy. The work we do is built for exactly this — learning to lead from the inside out, starting with learning to trust yourself.