Note: Read on about how to fix other things apart of constipation too. Please remember though, I’m not a doctor, that’s just what I did to get out of the situations I’ve been.

You might have read my story about battling IBS-D for 10 years, and how the Paleo/SCD diets helped me got rid the IBS menace & all sorts of other problems. However, about 2 weeks into the diet, my diarrhea had morphed into constipation of sorts. Apparently, a lot of people (with IBS or not) get constipated on Paleo/SCD at first, because they enter these diets with a badly altered gut flora. Eating “more fiber”, doesn’t really help.

But early-on, a comment on PaleoHacks.com made me see the light. The guy said something to the effect of “diarrhea is usually the outcome of some food that shouldn’t have been consumed, and constipation is food that should have been consumed, but it wasn’t“. This made sense to me somehow. Since my diarrhea went away after I stopped eating grains and bean lectins, it only made sense that constipation was here just because I was not doing enough to fix my terribly damaged gut flora. I was not eating everything I was supposed to eat. I was simply eating “the Standard Western Diet, but without grains/beans/sugar”. The part I was missing from the whole story was that there were other, ancient types of foods, fermented foods, that our modern society has completely shunned off. In the olden days, people were eating fermenting foods all the time. Even their bread was always hyper-fermented.

It’s been 2.5 months since I started the diet that saved my life, and based on this new information I was able to fix my constipation within a week of following the regimen below. As my leaky gut heals (chances are you have one too, you just don’t know about it), bowel movements & overall health are getting better. For a month now I have one, firm bowel movement within 30 to 45 minutes of waking up (no matter if I eat/drink or not). It’s like a freaking clockwork. A few days I might have two BMs a day, but they’re always well-formed and looking healthy. This is a kind of healthiness I wasn’t accustomed to after 10 years of feeling like the shit I was over-producing.

If your condition is too extreme (I’ve heard nightmare cases about constipation — and I thought diarrhea was bad), give it at least 4 weeks on the regimen below. For me the problem went away in a week, but then again I had already started Paleo weeks before, and my case was very mild anyway (I never had pain for example).

This regimen might also be helpful for those with diarrhea who are following the mainline Paleo/SCD/GAPS diets, but somehow these diets haven’t help them alleviate their symptoms (because they might be battling mutated bacteria/parasites/protozoal/H.Pylori, which eat anything that falls into the stomach, not just carbs). In that case, add more carbs in to your diet (e.g. parsnips, turnips, sweet potatoes, beets) to empower your “good” gut bacteria, while introducing more “good” bacteria and competition using with the regimen below.

1. Follow the Paleo diet. This is for now, and forever. It’s your new diet, for life. Get into the right brain mode, and accept the realities of why you’re sick and what you have to give up to get healthy again. The Paleo diet can fix, or make asymptomatic, a whole slew of inflammatory, auto-immune, gastro-issues, and even mental issues (e.g. light depression, ADD/ADHD etc)! If the mental issue is severe (e.g. bipolar, autistic etc), you might need to go Paleo-Ketogenic to see more change. If your auto-immune disorder is severe, you might also need to follow the auto-immune Paleo protocol (which also removes “nightshade” vegetables, shellfish, eggs, nuts, and all dairy — eliminating each for a period of time until you find the “offending” food). But just for constipation issues, the plain Paleo diet, is enough.

2. Make your own, home-made, probiotic, lactose-free goat yoghurt (recipe) or Kefir. Goat’s casein is more tolerable than cow’s, and being lactose-free is key because candida, a prime suspect for constipation, loves lactose. Cut down its food, while promoting competition to the “bad” bacteria/yeast in your gut with a probiotic yoghurt starter. However, even more than yogurt, I’d suggest you make Kefir, which is many times more potent than yogurt (its bacteria & yeasts actually colonize the human gut). But it has to be home-made and not store-bought to get its unique benefits.

3. Use multi-probiotics. I personally take two pills of iFlora right before bed. If you were never breast-fed, then your gut flora has a bigger probability of being messed up, so you might need this one too. If you instead have diarrhea (and especially if you suspect Clostridium Difficile as the culprit), go for Florastor and alternate between them.

4. Start using some virgin coconut oil to cook with in addition to the rest of the allowed oils. Coconut oil’s lauric acid has anti-fungal and anti-microbial properties.

5. Eat RAW and unfiltered local honey (unless you’re doing a ketogenic diet, in which case you can’t have honey at all). This kind of raw/unfiltered/undiluted honey is the only real honey. The more bits of bee shit and bee body parts you have in there, and the more cloudy it is, the better the honey is. Such honey has major anti-microbial & probiotic properties. Prefer your honey to be local, because when you eat local pollen, you reduce your chances for spring allergies too (you will have anti-bodies). New Zealand’s Manuka honey is the strongest anti-microbial honey in existence, but it’s expensive, and well, it’s not exactly local.

6. Get the rest of your health up to speed, supplementing with some vitamins. Vitamins D3, magnesium, K2 and Calcium are important for everyone who’s coming from the Standard Western Diet. Years of leakiness in the gut means that you’re likely malnutritioned from malabsorption. Here’s a Paleo dieter’s amazing tooth restoration within a single week, using these vitamins. I’d suggest you also try a multi-vitamin (I personally use “Alive“), alternating with the D3+K2+Mg+Ca every other day. Maybe 2-3 times a week, when you’re not eating fish, you can also take some krill oil (which is a much strongest omega-3 oil than plain fish or cod liver oil). Unfortunately, supplementing is needed because the kind of vegetables/animals we can buy today were aggressively selected in the last 10,000 years for more sugar content, more eggs, or more milk — usually at the expense of their vitamins/minerals. Even the water we drink today is terribly poor in minerals compared to what the paleolithic people were drinking. In any case, don’t take as many pills daily as these supplements suggest, you don’t want to be overdosing.

7. Make your own probiotic sauerkraut. Unfortunately, sauerkraut sold in cans is “dead”, they contain no alive cultures. Same goes for natto (more difficult to make though).

8. Drink Kombucha tea, 3-4 times a week (or daily if you don’t drink other coffee/tea). Kombucha is fermented green tea. Some people don’t tolerate it well, but others thrive on it. I use the decaf Yogi version. Sweet-enough all by itself to not require any sweetener. Stop kombucha and any non-herbal tea/coffee when your gut starts working properly. There’s no reason to poison yourself with fluoride, when there’s herbal tea.

9. Eat a jicama 1-2 times a month. Jicama’s FOS-type sugars have prebiotic benefits (“prebiotic” is not a typo). The problem with this is that jicamas are mostly found in the Americas, I’ve never seen them sold in Europe. If you can’t find jicama, there are some other prebiotic foods to try too.

10. If you have to have wheat bread (note, grains are forbidden in all the gut-related diets), go only for the einkorn ancient variety, which contains a different, more tolerable kind of gluten (it has 14 chromosomes instead of the 42 found in the modern Frankenstein, selected varieties of wheat). Then, you must ferment your bread to make sourdough bread. The fermentation will help reduce the amount of gluten in the bread, since the bacteria will eat part of it. But honestly, avoid all grains. The more you cheat with non-Paleo foods, the longer the leaky gut takes to heal, and the longer your health problems will carry on.

Bonus: Drink enough water, and don’t forget to eat offal, and make bone broths. No, I don’t care if you think that offal is disgusting. It’s the most nutritious part of the animal. Muscle meat is like junk-food compared to offal.

Oh, and start researching for yourselves! All of what you read above is knowledge accumulated in the last 2-3 months, after spending hours and hours reading everything related to my problems that made some sense. From testimonials, to research papers, to science blogs. Don’t expect doctors to fix your chronic issues, this is almost never possible. For chronic issues, you need chronic, radical changes. There is no magic pill.

Good luck!