For years, my gut was a mess, and I attacked it the way I attacked everything. With money, effort, and an endless supply of new things to try.
I had IBS. Gas. Irregular stools. Days of real pain and discomfort, and some days when nothing moved at all. I will spare you the full catalog, but if you have lived it, you know the particular low-grade misery of a gut that has turned on you, and the way it follows you into every meeting and every meal and quietly colors your whole day.
So I did what driven men do. I went to war on it. I spent a small fortune on specialists. I tried what felt like a hundred remedies, probiotics, prebiotics, FODMAP, enzymes, every protocol the internet swore by, each one bought with a fresh surge of hope that this would be the one.
I even sent my stool off to one of those expensive microbiome tests, certain that if I could just get the data, I could finally engineer my way out. The report came back long and impressive and scientific looking, and it changed absolutely nothing. And when I dragged myself to my doctor, exhausted, he looked at me and delivered the most useless sentence in medicine. “That’s normal. Eat more fiber. You’ll be fine.”
I did all of it. For years. And my gut, along with the anxiety that rode shotgun with it the entire time, only got worse.
Here is what took me years and that small fortune to finally understand. The chasing was the disease.
You cannot add your way out of an inflamed gut
Every single thing I tried had the same shape. It was something added. Another bug, another enzyme, another powder, another test, another protocol stacked on top of the last one. I was treating my gut like a machine with a missing part, convinced that if I could just identify the right component and bolt it on, the whole thing would finally run.
But a struggling gut is not a machine missing a part. It is a living system under stress, and you do not calm a stressed system by shoving more inputs into it. Every supplement I added was one more thing for an already irritated gut to deal with. Every new protocol was one more variable in a system I could no longer even read, because I was changing five things at once and never knew which one did what. I was not healing anything. I was pouring noise into a signal I desperately needed to get quieter.
The whole industry I was funneling money into runs on this instinct, because the instinct sells. Probiotics, enzymes, the fancy stool test, none of it is evil, and most of it is not even dangerous. It is just sideways. It treats a symptom, or it sells you a dashboard of data you cannot actually act on, and it very carefully never touches the thing driving the problem.
That stool test was the perfect example. It told me an enormous amount about which bacteria were supposedly living in me, and not one word about why my gut was inflamed in the first place, which was the only question that mattered. I did not have a gut that was missing a supplement. I had a gut that was being kept sick by something upstream, and no amount of bolting on parts was ever going to reach it.
And every new thing seemed to work, for a week or two. That was the trap hidden inside the trap. A new protocol brings novelty and hope, and hope alone can quiet a stressed gut for a little while, so every remedy looked like a breakthrough right up until it stopped working. I read each brief improvement as proof I was finally on the right track, when all I was really feeling was the short-lived calm of believing, for a moment, that I had taken control again. Then it would fade, and I would go hunting for the next one, more convinced than ever that the answer was out there waiting on a shelf.
My gut and my head were the same problem
The thing upstream, in my case, was the one I least wanted to look at. My nervous system.
For years I treated my anxiety and my gut as two separate problems on two separate lists. They were never two problems. They were one. Digestion is not something your body bothers to do while it believes it is under threat. It is the opposite of being under threat.
Your gut works properly only when your nervous system is calm enough to hand it the blood and the resources, which is exactly why that state has always been called rest and digest. I was not in that state. I had not been in that state for years. I lived wired, switched on, permanently braced, and then I would sit down and eat a meal in that condition and wonder why my gut could not do its job.
And here is the cruel loop I had built without seeing it. The chasing itself kept me wired. Every morning I woke up thinking about my gut. Every meal became a test I was afraid of failing. Every new twinge sent me hunting for the next protocol. The constant monitoring, the dread, the research, all of it kept my nervous system parked exactly where digestion shuts down, which produced more symptoms, which fueled more chasing. The intervention was feeding the cause. I was using the cure to keep the disease alive, and paying for the privilege.
The detour that nearly killed me
There was one stop on this road I have written about on its own, so I will keep it short here. At my most desperate, I reached for the most extreme fix available and went full carnivore. No plants, no carbs, nothing but meat and eggs (and sometimes fish), for 7 months.
And at first, it worked. My gut went quiet, and I took that quiet as proof I had finally cracked the code. What I did not understand was that the quiet came from elimination, not from healing. Strip your diet down to almost nothing and of course the things irritating your gut vanish, because nearly everything has vanished.
But while my gut went calm, the rest of me came apart, and by the end I was cold, gaunt, sleepless, and sitting across from a doctor staring at cholesterol that had nearly tripled. The gut relief was real. The price was almost everything else.
That detour taught me the single most useful thing I know about elimination diets. They are a test, not a destination. They can show you what your gut cannot handle. They are never meant to be the place you move in and live.
What actually worked
When I finally healed, it was not dramatic. There was no protocol, no stack, no breakthrough supplement, nothing I could sell you. It was four ordinary things, and every one of them was a form of subtraction.
I calmed the system down. I fixed my sleep, I lowered the chronic stress I had spent years mistaking for a personality trait, and I started eating in a settled state instead of hunched and braced over a laptop. The gut followed the nervous system, because it always had been following the nervous system. I had just been giving it the wrong thing to follow.
I went back to real whole food, carbs included. I stopped starving my gut in the name of healing it and simply fed it normal, unprocessed meals. The thing I had been taught to fear turned out to be the thing it had been asking for.
I stopped chasing. No more tests. No more stacks. No more new protocol every month. I stopped digging up the wound to check whether it was healing, and the stillness itself turned out to be the treatment. A gut left alone in decent conditions already knows how to recover.
I used a short, sane elimination as a test, not a religion. A couple of weeks of stripping things back to find my actual triggers, then a careful reintroduction, one thing at a time, watching what happened. Weeks, not months. Information, not identity. The exact opposite of what carnivore had turned into.
That is the whole protocol. It cost nothing, and it worked when the fortune never did. My gut settled. The bathroom stopped running my calendar. And the fog and the anxiety that had ridden along with it for all those years began to lift on their own, because they had never been separate from the gut in the first place.
The calibration
Your gut does not need another protocol. Mine never did. It needed the right conditions to heal, and then it needed me to get out of its way.
This is the hardest thing for a high achiever to accept, because it asks you to do less, and doing less feels like surrender. It is not surrender. It is the difference between a gardener who keeps yanking the seed out of the soil to check whether it has sprouted yet, and one who waters it, gives it light, and walks away. I spent years pulling up the seed. The healing started the day I finally left it in the ground.
So if your gut is a mess, by all means find your real triggers and remove them, fix your sleep, and learn to eat like a man who is not under attack. But stop adding. Stop testing. Stop reaching for the next thing on the shelf. The body that has been digesting food for two hundred thousand years does not need your supplement stack and it does not want your dashboard. It needs you to stop interfering long enough for it to do the thing it has always known how to do.
The chasing was the disease. The cure was learning how to stop.
This newsletter is where I take the optimization world apart, one sacred cow at a time, from the inside, as a man who chased every one of them and kept the receipts. If that is useful to you, subscribe. If it is not, don’t.
P.S. None of this is medical advice, and the gut is one place where that line has teeth. Real conditions exist, and symptoms like blood, unexplained weight loss, or pain that wakes you at night are not things to calm your way out of. See a doctor for those. This is one man’s story of a gut that was being kept sick by the very effort that was supposed to heal it.
Great Read, The nervous system is UNDERRATED!
Amazing post. But I don’t know how to stop the stress. Loss of a child, only caregiver of mom with dementia, etc. I also don’t know how to make myself sleep outside of drugs, which I’m unwilling to take. Suggestions?