I just came back from Tulum, Mexico and while I was there, I got horrible food poisoning. I felt cold chills, then a pounding headache, then had days of diarrhea. In this post, I’m going to take all my learnings from my food poisoning and show you how to: do travelers’ diarrhea prevention and prophylaxis and how to treat travelers’ diarrhea.

NOTE: please keep in mind this post will be a bit explicit. But I’d rather be a bit explicit and risk grossing you out if it means that it’ll give you the most amount of information / ammunition in case the diarrhea gods should pick you to be a sacrifice.

Travelers’ Diarrhea Prevention AKA What To Do *BEFORE* Your Trip

First, you’ll need to pack the right things if you want to do travelers’ diarrhea prevention and mitigation successfully. You could buy the following things while you’re traveling, but I’d say that’s unnecessary because the following things I’m about to recommend won’t take up a lot of space.

Here’s some things you should pack:

• Probiotics. I use these ones and they work like a charm for me. You should be taking probiotics on the regular anyway to boost your overall health, but it’s especially important if you want to prevent travelers’ diarrhea.
• Hydration pills. These give you electrolytes without the diabetes-inducing sugar of, say, Gatorade (and much more portable too)! This’ll help you should you get travelers’ diarrhea, but it’s also nice to have hydration tablets on trips in general because you might be going out on an 8-hour day trip and don’t want to pee much. You can drink less volume of water and retain the same amount of hydration with these tablets. Great for going to hot places in general. You should pack 2 vials. I find that 1 thing of tablets (10 tablets) was cutting it very close as I ran out.
• Vaseline and/or Neosporin + Q-tips. While the first 2 items can double as other useful travel accessories, Vaseline/Neosporin + Q-tips is pretty much only for prevention of travelers’ diarrhea. These are used to lube your anus should you have food poisoning to minimize your pain.
• Lubed Kleenex or Puffs.Here are the Puffs that I use. And here’s the Kleenex that I snatched from the hotel. These are useful because hotels generally have barbaric, 1-ply toilet paper. These are bad for your bum. Night and day difference using these to wipe when you need to use the toilet 6-10 times a day.

Note that for the tissues, you can just buy cube tissue boxes for a more compact fit in your luggage. No real need to go for the rectangular ones.

Once you’ve backed your stuff to mitigate travelers’ diarrhea, what can you do in the way of actual diarrhea prevention?

First, don’t eat raw stuff. And eat only cooked foods. I suspect in this trip to Mexico the culprits that could have been responsible for my food poisoning was either:

• Eating a triple ceviche.
• Eating the raw condiments/salad from street vendors.
• Eating some stuff that was dropped onto the table.

Not eating raw stuff is kind of a tradeoff because I love eating raw foods. So I’d say this piece of advice is just more “know that when you eat raw foods in a 3^rd world country, you have a risk of explosive diarrhea coming your way.”

Next, regardless of what your beliefs are in the tradeoff of eating raw foods vs. risk of diarrhea: never eat anything that’s dropped onto the table. Who knows how dirty the towels are that they use to wipe down the tables with are? And who knows if they even wipe down the tables?

Finally, take your damn probiotics!

I had underestimated the power of probiotics so let me give you an illustration here. I got food poisoning and had cold chills for a day. Then, the next day I was hit with immense fatigue and a headache (like after getting a Moderna COVID booster). Finally, my diarrhea began when an intended fart was actually a shart.

I went to the loo around 6-10 times that day and it was extremely painful. This went on for another day. On the 3^rd day, my partner who’s traveling with my got infected by my stomach virus. But it only affected them minimally. They went to the bathroom 3 times that day and then the next day was completely fine.

Turns out, my partner was taking probiotics this whole time!

I saw this and Googled around and apparently probiotics are one of the most potent ways to combat diarrhea. WTF? Why didn’t I find out about this earlier? I immediately took a probiotic. The next day, my symptoms subsided significantly, and 2 days later, my diarrhea was completely gone.

In conclusion: probiotics can treat travelers’ diarrhea but also acts as a potent prevention tool. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And probiotics is both when it comes to diarrhea.

How To Treat Travelers’ Diarrhea: Pain Minimization And Poopy Pants Prevention

In this section, I’ll show you how to treat travelers’ diarrhea. Mostly with the stuff that we talked about buying/packing in the section prior.

First though, if you have to treat travelers’ diarrhea, it means you’re traveling. So the first question I should answer is: “how do you prevent yourself from pooping your pants?”

If you’re a female, then you should consider packing menstrual diapers, which will also catch some diarrhea as well. But it won’t catch an entire sessions’ worth, obviously.

If you’re a male, then it’s probably not worth packing adult diapers because it’d be ludicrous to pack adult diapers for every trip trying to treat for travelers’ diarrhea that might never happen.

But regardless, the solution is very simple. If you feel an explosive urge to diarrhea, squeeze your buttocks as hard as you can to prevent the eruption from ever coming out. The diarrhea will rush back into your body and probably wait another 15-30 minutes before bothering you again.

Note that this is not medical advice, but this is just what I did so I can keep traveling while dealing with diarrhea. Before resorting to such aggressive tactics, you should consider taking a day rest like I did and actually just spend a lot of time in the restroom doing anal volcanic eruptions before resuming your activities. This is because diarrhea is one of our body’s most efficient ways to getting rid of viruses, so if you can diarrhea, you should diarrhea because your ultimate goal is to get better anyway. And part of getting better means disposing of the virus as effectively as possible.

Now that nasty part’s out of the way, let’s talk about how to treat travelers’ diarrhea so you minimize your pain.

As soon as you encounter your first diarrhea, you should use the lubed Kleenex / Puffs to wipe. Don’t wait until your anal lining hurts to use soft tissues. Regular 1-ply toilet paper chafes a lot more than you think. Using the lubed / soft wipes means you’ll get a lot more diarrhea sessions in before your anus really starts to hurt. As such, your diarrhea might be over with before your anus even starts to hurt.

Next, you should coddle your anus by applying Vaseline or Neosporin with a clean Q-tip after each time you finish wiping. This further acts as lubricant so you’ll minimize the friction between your future eruptions and your anal lining. Neosporin won’t have as good of a lubricant property as Vaseline, but it feel soothing enough and provides additional protection due to its anti-bacterial/anti-inflammation properties.

How To Treat Travelers’ Diarrhea: Things To Do To Stop Your Brown Volcano

Now that we talked about how to minimize diarrhea pain, let’s talk about how to treat and actually stop your travelers’ diarrhea.

First, take probiotics. Initially, I thought probiotics helps us poo. And thus, I thought taking probiotics would exacerbate the situation. Nope. Probiotics just helps encourage normal bowel function. This means if you’re too watery or too frequent, probiotics will make you less so. Conversely, if you’re constipated, it’ll make you more flowy.

Like I said above, probiotics are a huge game-changer for me. Only after taking 1 pill, my symptoms slowed down by 3X within 24 hours. And within 48 hours, I resumed normal bowel function.

Second, eat the BRAT diet and soluble fiber. BRAT stands for Bananas, Rice/starch, and Toast. The “A” stands for applesauce, but it’s pretty impractical to buy or pack applesauce. So just stick with bananas and bread/starch.

I find that after eating a lot of “Crispy Potatoes” at my hotel (they’re thick-cut fries so there’s a lot of starchy potato in the inside), my watery travelers’ diarrhea was treated somewhat and converted into a slush. The slush then eventually became regular, healthy logs of poo.

Eat soluble fibers. Soluble fibers slow down your digestive system. Insoluble fibers speed up your digestive system. When you have diarrhea, your digestive system is moving too fast. Thus, the former helps mitigate and treat your travelers’ diarrhea, while the latter turns your digestive track into a Bellagio fountain water cannon. Examples of soluble fiber are found here, but I’ll give the rundown here as well:

• Bananas (this is great since we need their starch anyway)
• Oranges and grapefruits.
• Avocado and broccoli.

I recommend just eating bananas since you get the soluble fiber from it and the starch from it as well. AND you get potassium for your electrolytes also. Your goal here is to treat diarrhea, not to have a fruit platter. So I think bananas are the most effective way to treat diarrhea.

Finally, stay hydrated. Take the hydration pills as I’ve mentioned above. I put a tablet in roughly 12oz of water after every 1-2 “sessions” at the toilet. Staying hydrated prevents secondary symptoms like headaches, nausea, and a bunch of other nasty things.

If you’re able to stay hydrated, while eating soluble fibers, sticking to a BRAT diet, and take your probiotics, you should have a much more speedy recovery than I did.

Wrapping Up

One thing you should keep in mind here is you shouldn’t overdo your recovery.

For example, just because toast is good doesn’t mean you should eat 20 slices of toast for breakfast. Your body is in a weakened state during a food poisoning episode. As such, coddle your body and take things slowly.

But in summary, the best way to treat travelers’ diarrhea is:

• Lube your butthole.
• Eat carby stuff, but not too much.
• Take your probiotics and hydration tablets.

Kind of a gross topic, but hope this helps someone!

What about you? What are your go-to remedies for food poisoning and/or diarrhea?