Autistic burnout — Candida & SIBO

The unholy trinity

My digestive issues began when I was in my late teens. I’d always had a sensitive stomach, suffering bouts of nausea and Diarrhoea since I was a young child but it was always put down to being nervous about something.

I know for a fact that my gut biome was nuked when I was a toddler because I had recurring chest infections and was taking good old banana flavoured Amoxicillin ever other month for about 3 years.

In 1997 I started a ‘proper’ job to try and supplement my meagre self employed artist’s income. It was a boring driving and delivery job but it was bearable. Ironically, it was much less stressful than dealing with my design business customers, so it came as quite a shock when I woke up one morning and all hell broke lose — my body spent the next 3 weeks evacuating everything, all day, every day. I think perhaps the drop in adrenaline caused a candida die off reaction — but more about that later.

That was 29 years ago and I’ve spent most of that time dealing with what my doctor ‘diagnosed’ as IBS — in other words, all the tests to determine if you’re dying are clear so we have no idea what’s causing your digestive system to rebel. Trust me when I say I had ever test the NHS could throw at me — cameras up, cameras down, scans, blood work — nothing showed up as abnormal (I laugh at that ever time I tell someone).

I’ve had no choice for the last 3 decades but to try work around those days when I need to be near a toilet which is why I’ve been self employed for most of that time. The driving job was totally unworkable so when I was unceremoniously made redundant, I never got a ‘proper’ job again.

Given the ‘all clear’ by the NHS, but with no improvement in my condition, I began a long and expensive journey of discovery to try and figure out how to fix myself. I tried, acupuncture, reflexology, homeopathy, Chinese herbal medicine, crystal therapy, spiritual healers, even hypnotherapy — I was desperate to have a normal life so I got into masses of debt paying for stuff which just didn’t work at all.

I stumbled across an article about candida overgrowth and noticed the description of the symptoms matched my experiences perfectly so I dug deeper. I never do things by halves, so the next day I went out and bought a long list of candida safe foods and stopped drinking alcohol, eating sugar, fruit, grains, gluten, carbs and additives overnight.

I was ecstatic when I lost over 45lbs in a couple of months and could fit into my favourite size 30 jeans again — but my symptoms didn’t improve. I kept going with the diet because I liked being thin again and I thought that maybe it would take a while for my candida levels to balance out to what they should be.

I got used to the diet, I didn’t miss the booze and the sugar so I’ve stayed on it for the last 15 years — but my symptoms have never improved. I’ve had periods of less bad, but I’ve never woken up and just gone to the loo once and forgotten about it.

Last year I discovered SIBO — Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth and because a lot of the symptoms crossed over with Candida overgrowth, I cut a lot of FODMAP foods out my diet as well.

I’m now eating a tiny variety of ‘safe’ foods but my symptoms haven’t improved — in fact they’ve got much worse over the last couple of years to the point where my life is a survival battle with stomach cramps and Diarrhoea every day.

More research brought more information which has explained why my diet hasn’t fixed me. I must just say that I have tried adding foods back in over the years and there was never a severe reaction, but there was definitely a cumulative one and I always had to remove that food again after a week or two.

In the last 2 years my digestive symptoms have got much worse, but to add to the misery, I’ve developed severe joint pain in my shoulders, back and hips and chronic anxiety too.

I found out about autistic burnout a couple of years ago and that led me deep dive further into the side effects of drowning in cortisol for the best part of 52 years.

The puzzle pieces all started to fall into place when I discovered that when we’re stressed our liver pumps out large doses of stored glucose to prep us with the energy boost to run away from whatever is making us scared or anxious. That glucose is a banquet for both Candida and SIBO bacteria and they chow down on it like their lives depend on it — because funnily enough, it does.

After the Candida fungus and the SIBO bacteria have had their fill, they begin to excrete some very nasty chemicals into the bloodstream — 72 different toxins, each of which sets off alarms in the immune system and sets the body into red alert mode.

The main chemical is Acetaldehyde which crosses via the blood into the brain and causes brain fog and extreme anxiety/paranoia/OCD. These chemicals also slow digestion and block the transit of serotonin and dopamine to the brain which explains why I’m still overweight even though I eat hardly anything and by I’m such a miserable bugger.

Each time I build up the energy to try and fix myself, boost my self esteem and fake positivity to boost serotonin, I raise my adrenaline and spike my cortisol — my body doesn’t seem to know the difference between happy and stressed, so the result is the same. The excess Candida/SIBO boils over and I’m left feeling like my whole world is about to end, every germ in the universe is out to kill me and everyone hates me for being so ill all the time (among other things — my brain has a talent for dreaming up ways to sabotage my life).

Nervous system regulation is a term I recently discovered. It’s something I’m struggling to tackle because I’m a gibbering, anxious wreck with brain fog, gastric distress, constant joint pain and a massive headache.

Meditation doesn’t work. It makes me more anxious because when I try and quieten the cacophony in my head, all the nice thoughts disappear and leave me with the worst of the worst — the ones I keep buried for a reason.

Deep breathing sort of works in the moment, but it just makes me feel dizzy and spaced out and within a minute I’m back to rocking in a corner questioning my life choices.

I’m a total mess. I’m backed into a dietary corner because all the nice things to eat make my symptoms worse. I can’t even ‘fake it till I make it’ anymore because that raises my cortisol and indirectly feeds the unwelcome beasties residing in my ample gut.

Quitting society to live in a cave seems like the only viable option right now — somewhere I can sit in peace, reading my books and making my art without any outside interference. Sadly, that costs money, like everything in this miserable capitalist hellscape and I have none of that!

Maybe one day I’ll be able to calm down and I’ll write a follow up to this misery fest. Maybe I’ll just survive till I shuffle off this mortal coil and my last words will be, ‘Well that was shit.’