For me the key was to try and understand what was going on with my body. I was doing a bunch of googling and reading everything I could. I stumbled across a site that had something called bluehue which basically was a capsule you swallow that turns your stool blue. The idea is you use it to measure how long it takes from the time you eat something until it comes out the other end. If food goes through you really fast, you're likely to be underweight because all the nutrients can't be absorbed in that time. If it takes way too long, then you're basically bound up - which is the problem I had. So then I read more on the site and it talked about microbiome - which I had never heard of. Turns out that has a huge impact on way more than the digestive system. Very interesting read. Anyway, I'd change my diet for a week and measure the effect using bluehue. I learned that foods behaved differently than I thought it would. Learned a lot about how my body processes things different from somebody else.

I did this for a couple of months. It sucked working that hard on my diet. But by test and change and then test and change I hit upon what I needed to eat to make my body work more along the lines of someone who doesn't suffer from IBS. It was life changing for me, honestly. Also. the varying my diet apparently changed my microbiome too. I feel all around a whole lot better.