Ep.74 – Working in a restaurant when you have IBS
2 Jun, 2025

Episode Intro

My life is a nightmare. This is what Sophia said to me when we first spoke. She was struggling with bloating, frequent diarrhoea, and also wanting to lose weight. She felt in a real muddle. Working at a restaurant meant she had a really erratic schedule and couldn't plan her food intake. Or her working pattern, that was affecting her sleep and anxiety was pretty high. Hear how Sophia got on top of her symptoms to say by the end of working with me over the three month period, 'I know what works, I know how to control my IBS'.

Podcast transcript

 

Welcome to episode 74 of the Inside Knowledge podcast for people with IBS. I’m Anna Mapson.

I picked this study today because I think some of you might be able to relate to that opening phrase that I used at the beginning. My life feels like a nightmare. You’re just going round in circles. You don’t know what to eat and yet you have to eat to keep going.

Anxiety with IBS

And when you don’t have a regular pattern of eating and meals and bowel habits, it can get real muddling in terms of understanding your symptoms.

Sophia came to see me very confused, but also very run down. When you have high anxiety, And she’d had anxiety since she was a child. You get this chronic kind of tiredness as well. Well, not everyone, but a lot of people will. You feel very exhausted. Because if you think physically, your body, when you’re anxious, you’re holding on to a lot of tension. And that is just in itself draining. Plus you’ve got all those repetitive thoughts and sort of worry circling around your head and it can also, of course, affect your sleep. So that was kind of running through the background of her symptoms.

IBS-D symptoms

But her main digestive problems were really painful haemorrhoids and alternating between constipation and diarrhoea, but much more predominantly diarrhoea. So loose stools, type 6 or 7, that were kind of watery, always mushy. And also bloating. She felt like everything she ate was just bloating her.

Working shifts with IBS

Other big problems that Sophia had was frequent headaches and she had water retention in her legs. She worked in a restaurant. She had quite long shifts and she was a waiter. So she was running around all day, going to serve food and also working in the kitchens, .

On her feet a lot. And by the end of the day, her legs would feel quite heavy. She was really struggling with that and running alongside all of this, she was aiming to lose a little bit of weight. She wanted to feel a bit better in her body as well because partly down to her symptoms. And her lack of energy, she was not really exercising either. So that is where she started.

What Sophia was looking for

She just wanted to reach out and get someone to guide her through this because just feeling very lost, confused, and just fed up of her symptoms. She just wanted something to change and thought working with someone who dealt with IBS and specialised in that was what she needed.

Skipping breakfast

When I first got into the details of working with Sophia, she completed her diet diary. Which just shows me what’s a normal week, what she has been eating. I noticed that she wasn’t eating breakfast. She would have normally a croissant and coffee on the way to work. Or she might just have something like cornflakes with oat milk at home if she wasn’t going straight into work.

Because of her different shifts at work some days she would work quite late and then want to sleep in a little bit more because she needed to make up the time. Her breakfast time was different every day. But other times she was doing a split shift, where she was doing some work from lunchtime onwards. Then have a little break, and then do the evening shift. So very, very hard working person.

Erratic eating pattern

But, overall, as well as not eating breakfast, she was sometimes skipping dinner. That was because she would finish quite late and not really feel like eating much. There was kind of a culture in her restaurant of not really feeding yourself and not really looking after yourself.

Sometimes the workers used to all hang out and have a takeaway together. But it was always things like pizza or an Indian takeaway which was quite rich. And full of typical IBS triggers like garlic and, wheat and those kind of things. Her diet was also restricted because she had in the back of her mind that she wanted to lose weight.

Partly she was restricting because of time and the lack of forward thinking. Which was made worse by her anxiety. It was very hard for her to plan ahead and think ‘oh what am I going to make. What am I going to eat on Tuesday when I’ve got that split shift at work, I’m going to be out from 12 o’clock to, midnight, a whole 12 hours. What am I going to eat?’ It was really hard for her to plan that ahead.

Lack of self care

To think about her body, and what her needs were. She struggled to see food as part of a self care importance. Nourishing yourself and eating was at the bottom of her priority list. She wanted to get rid of the symptoms, but she didn’t really see eating a good, balanced diet and supporting your body with nutrients was a part of that. It’s part of self care.

Something else we were working on is actually, what things do you do in your life that actually make you feel good? Do you ever, you know, have a nice bath to relax? Do you ever buy yourself a nice hand cream that smells lovely? Things that are good for your body. That actually help you feel like you’re looking after yourself.

Negative messages about your body

When people get into this state where everything’s bad. Your digestive symptoms are causing you pain and embarrassment. Just feeling very uncomfortable all the time, obviously that can increase anxiety in itself. But I sometimes find with people that you get to this point where it’s almost like you don’t want to listen to your body anymore because you’ve had so many bad messages coming from your body.

There’s not been anything really good coming back to the brain about your experience of the world in your body. And so kind of dampening all that down and thinking, well, I just try to minimize it and try to live more kind of in my head. And I think that was the case for Sophia.

She was just trying to avoid food because she wanted to lose weight, but she was also not really wanting to trigger the symptoms. And didn’t really see the benefits of eating. And so on that basis, she had cut out a lot of carbs.

Low carb diet for IBS

Now carbs are something that can trigger people, especially when you eat a lot of bread products. So someone who eats a lot of cereal, pasta, sandwiches, that kind of thing. She had already cut a lot of those foods out. So one of the first things we worked on was trying to eat three regular meals a day. With the caveat that they were not going to be at the same time every day.

She was not someone who had the same working pattern, so of course her timings were going to be different. But I also wanted to stress that if you’re not eating enough food, it’s very hard to feel good mentally and physically.

We had a lot of conversations about how you can actually sometimes eat more food and still lose weight if you’re choosing the right kinds of foods.

Eating low FODMAP fibre

We worked a lot on how to increase the foods that would help her feel nourished, feel supported. I started with encouraging low FODMAP fibres. These were some vegetables that she could increase. Things like spinach, she was getting on well with spinach and eggs, also some grains like quinoa, rice.

These are not rapidly fermentable, generally quite well tolerated, and just to give her the right levels of support to try and help her feel nourished. Some of the other first level Dietary interventions that we did, was upping her low FODMAP fibres, including those grains. Increasing protein as well, so eating breakfast, it was to add something that had protein.

A good breakfast when you’re working on your feet all day

So cornflakes are typically low in protein. Especially if you’re having them with a plant based milk, such as oat milk, which she was because she was avoiding dairy. That’s a really low protein breakfast. The same if you’re just grabbing a croissant and a coffee on your way to work. There’s no protein in that.

And then you’re starting the day and you’re running around all day on your feet, really busy. That in itself can increase anxiety. Operating from a basis of no support for your brain can increase anxiety. Your body is reacting to a lack of available glucose and it’s going to put your body into a bit of a high state of alert In order for you to seek out food, it’s trying to wake you up and say, go and search for food.

And obviously this person was working in an environment surrounded by food all day, but was choosing not to eat and choosing not to think ahead about food.

Skipping meals can cause headaches

She was also getting quite frequent headaches and that came up probably a couple of weeks in that the headaches, were really seeming to get worse for a time.

As I broke down actually how much water she was drinking, she was not really having enough liquid. Part of that was in order to avoid having to go to the toilet all the time at work. But when you’re working for almost 12 hours and not having many breaks, not feeding yourself, That is a recipe for getting a headache.

You can also get headaches from very low blood sugar because, again, your body is running out of glucose. Being dehydrated and being under fuelled can also lead to headaches.

Painkiller usage 

Now, the other thing that she was doing was taking painkillers for the headaches. But also for really bad period pains that were coming up every month. The non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen can affect your gut if you take them repeatedly.

Once she tried to avoid the painkillers, unless it was really bad, and also thought about alternatives to the non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs, then she started to get less of the diarrhoea. 

Mindful eating

She also did a little bit of work on mindful eating. Things like chewing your food really well. And I introduced to her this idea of taking a bitters tincture before the meal to help stimulate your digestive juices.

Not everyone likes this, but you can either get like a mouth spray or just some little drops that you put into water and it’s very bitter and that helps to just stimulate your digestive juices if you take it just before a meal. Like 10, 15 minutes before you eat. The reason for that to kickstart her digestive juices was that because she was in this sort of ongoing state of stress.

I felt that her stomach acid could be potentially quite low and also because of some of the symptoms in terms of the maldigestion of foods and her fast transit time. I also helped her with, some specific probiotics that I thought would be helpful for her symptoms.

Supporting relaxation with magnesium

And also we looked at some calming magnesium glycinate, which is quite good for the nervous system. And for helping her with sleep and sort of relaxation at the end of the day.

By adding in some low FODMAP vegetables and fruits, And actually upping her fibre intake that she’d been so worried about. She did manage to start regulating her bowel movements and having less episodes of diarrhoea. She would still get these episodes. 

Half way improvements in the Gut Reset

kind of half way through our three month program working together. Around six weeks in, she was getting less episodes of that. Less pain in her stomach and less of those occasions where she had to just dash to the toilet. But she found it was worse when she had more wheat foods. One day for example she went away with her partner and they had like a beef lasagne, which had obviously lots of things in it like Garlic and cheese and wheat and all kinds of maybe fatty meats

That was okay, but then the next day she had some bread and cheese, and she didn’t know whether it was a combination, but having a lot of bread and a lot of cheese in two days didn’t go well. And then she did have pain.

Relapsing symptoms

She had that repeated recurrence of dashing to the loo and frequent diarrhoea. She thought that maybe it was just that she’d been too relaxed when she went away. And she’d seen some improvement, gone away for a few days and then thought, oh actually maybe I am okay and I can eat what I like.

I didn’t say go on the low FODMAP diet and cut out fibres, because she’d already restricted quite a lot and I was really keen not to restrict her from anything else. But where we were trying to increase fibre, was just choosing the things that were naturally low FODMAP so that she could start increasing vegetables without going overboard and potentially triggering her symptoms again.

Prepping some foods to take to work

I also worked through with her a couple of things that she could prepare and take to work. She wasn’t working seven days a week, although there were weeks when we were together that she was probably doing a 10 day streak with no days off, so she was really working so hard.

But, when she did have a day off, obviously she wanted to relax and to enjoy exercising again and try and get out. But also, we worked on how to quickly prepare some meals. That could either be frozen in advance and then kept and brought out to have those times when she was at work she could have something healthy in her bag that she could just get out.

Taking a convenience route

It was things like having ready cooked pouches of rice and quinoa. And you don’t have to cook everything from scratch. Sometimes buying things that are ready chopped, if that helps you to be quick in order to eat more healthily. That’s completely fine.

Buy chopped up carrots. things like butternut squash can be quite challenging to prepare because they’re so hard. So if that’s putting you off eating it, By all means, buy it ready cut up. It’s all the small steps that can help you to eat a better diet. If there are barriers in your way. It’s going to feel more challenging, so if you choose to buy ready cooked meals that are healthy or ready cooked ingredients, then there’s no problem with that at all.

Cooking at work

We also talked through what opportunities there were for her to cook quick meals at work. She was allowed to do that in between some of the main serving shifts So things like making egg and spinach, which was very quick. Going to give you a little bit of vegetables, some protein, and then bringing some of those grains in. Trying to work through the options, what is available to you. What would be healthy, what would be ideal, and then what compromises can you make.

Energy to exercise again

So we worked through a lot of that together. As her digestive symptoms calmed down, she began to get back into exercising. And she said, I know I love exercising, I really enjoy it, but at that time when she started with me, she just couldn’t remember that she loved it. Like it wasn’t appealing, it felt too hard.

The fatigue was intense and she really couldn’t bear to start exercising, but once her symptoms calmed down She got a little bit more energy back. Then she was able to go out and start exercising again. She just bought some small weights and would do a little bit before work at home And she also started walking a little bit further with her dog. Sort of exercising a bit more, like a faster walk a bit longer duration.

Exercise helps with anxiety

That was really really helpful in managing the anxiety, you know, things like getting outside is very good for us when we are feeling stressed and worried and actually just seeing the daylight, seeing the horizon, it’s very calming.

Sophia was still getting this problem with water retention in her legs at the end of a very long shift. And she was asking me whether she should take a diuretic supplement to try and get rid of it. I wanted to focus a little bit more on getting some of those key electrolytes naturally through food.

Water retention

So for example, we do need electrolytes like potassium, sodium, and magnesium. Now, she was taking a magnesium supplement and potassium is really widely available in vegetables and fruits. So, the more variety she got in, I felt like that was supportive for that. But we also talked about, vitamin C and zinc foods such as seafood, meats, pumpkin seeds.

As well as things that support your circulation like ginger, garlic, although garlic was still a bit of an issue for her when it was in high amounts. But that was a goal for her to start reintroducing garlic. Those kind of things supporting your circulation, but also thinking about structural integrity of tissues. Like collagen production type nutrients like zinc and vitamin c. And also drinking sufficient water.

Staying hydrated

So getting enough liquid in counterintuitively actually can help with water retention. When your body is a little bit dehydrated there are cases where you can actually cling on to more water and become more puffy as your body is trying to retain that water. She had had blood tests by the way at the doctor.

They had ruled out things like any problems with her kidneys, with her liver, and if you have any unknown causes of your oedema, that’s like the swelling in your legs. Like for her, it was definitely down to long shifts being on her feet all day and standing up for long periods. But if you have swelling, then please do make sure you get that checked out with a doctor because there are other concerns that could be causing it.

Moving to control IBS

So, really important to just clarify that. At the end of working together, it was really nice to hear her say, I can control my IBS. I know what I have to do. She didn’t completely clear her IBS. I just want to be upfront with that. She had loads of things she still had to work on by the end of three months together. But she knew what they were and she knew how to control it. Also how to keep reintroducing foods or testing things out.

Understanding what works

And she knew the basics of a healthy diet that suited her digestion and suited her issues. She initially told me that she wanted to lose weight whilst we were working together. And although her weight didn’t change throughout that time, she did feel that her legs and her hips were thinner.

Body recomposition

The weight on the scale was the same. Actually, that’s what most people mean when they say they want to lose weight, is they want to have a body shape that they feel comfortable with.

So it’s just about things like your clothes fitting more comfortably. She was happy with that. She was eating more and she was not putting on weight. And that was because she was eating different foods. Eating enough food to keep her going rather than that sort of erratic famine and feast cycle with not eating much and then eating a big takeaway.

That was more regular for her and she just felt like she understood her body a lot more. 

Listening to your body = feeding it

I was really happy by the end, to hear her say, I think about food now, I think about what I can eat and it doesn’t stress me out. She was happy to think about what food was needed for her body. Also to see it as part of something that was important for keeping her going.

It’s not just something to keep the hunger at bay so you can get on to the next meal. Now I find this happens with people who work in kitchens sometimes, and if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant maybe you have been sick of food at that point as well. You don’t feel like cooking yourself a nice fancy meal when you get home, when you’ve been serving for others all day long.

Working in a restaurant with IBS

She said by the end that she thought maybe she did have a problem with food. She had reflected on that over weeks and months of small conversations about what does food mean to you. How can we change some of those attitudes to food and to fuelling yourself.

It felt like a really nice ending, but obviously she still had lots to carry on with and lots to work on, but everything was calmer and more peaceful. And she had a plan.

Work with me in the 3 month Gut Reset

I think that is the benefit that you get when you’re working with somebody on a one to one basis. Somebody who has a lot of time to listen to you and understand your particular needs. If that feels like something you would benefit from, you can join my three month gut reset where I work with people over three months. You get eight different calls with me over the three months, plus an hour and a half to begin where I take all your health history. And really understand your issues up front. That creates the plan that we work towards. And because it’s three months work, we can change the plan as we go depending on the results and is it getting you to where you want to be.

If you want to investigate working with me further, please do check out my website and also you can book a call with me via the link in the show notes. I always love hearing from people as well. So if you’ve got a topic you would like me to speak about on the Inside Knowledge podcast for people with IBS, then please feel free to send me an email.

Please rate my podcast

I love hearing from my podcast listeners. And on that note, I would love it if you would rate the podcast, please. It really, really does help me and I can see. A few people have left some comments recently that have been great. So if you’re on Apple Podcasts, you can leave a review on Spotify.

You can rate it by clicking on the three dots. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Inside Knowledge podcast. Better digestion for everyone.

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