The Girl's Guide to Guts: Everything Your Doc Didn't Tell You (But Your Bestie Would) - Hardcover

Melas, Chloe; Batalion, Judy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593979206 ISBN 13: 9780593979204

Publisher: The Dial Press, 2026

Synopsis

Two women who have been through it all with their own gut health issues offer groundbreaking honesty and advice to live a full life while navigating symptoms.

“Chloe Melas and Judy Batalion bring much-needed honesty, humor, and clarity to the conversation, connecting the dots between gut health and whole-body wellness.”—Dr. Mark Hyman, New York Times bestselling author and co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Function Health

Bloating. Pain. Cramps. Gas. Food fear . . . Your doctor gives you medical advice. Your nutritionist suggests dietary changes. But who actually knows what you’re going through? How do you work, date, travel, parent, dress, eat, and maintain relationships when your condition is with you every day?

In The Girl’s Guide to Guts, Chloe Melas and Judy Batalion, who together share decades worth of experience living with ulcerative colitis, show up with remarkable openness and candor about everything from bleeding and bloating to sex and fertility, what to do after a diagnosis, the anxiety of living with a chronic illness, what to bring in your carry-on (and we’re not talking heels!), and the countless lattes purchased in exchange for use of a bathroom. They also interview experts in their field to give you the inside scoop on what your doctor is actually thinking.

Here, you’ll learn about figuring out how to survive a first date when your stomach is gurgling, navigating colonoscopies and chronic pain while raising kids and working high-pressure jobs, and advocating for yourself with your doctors.

The Girl’s Guide to Guts takes bowel disease—our culture’s final taboo—from being a topic many women hold inside or only discuss privately into a conversation we’re ready to put center stage.

About this title

About the Author

Judy Batalion is a New York Times bestselling author of award-winning nonfiction and fiction. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vogue, among others. Judy has a BA in the History of Science from Harvard, a PhD from the University of London, and has worked as a museum curator and university lecturer. She lives in New York City with her husband and three children.

Chloe Melas is an entertainment correspondent at NBC News appearing on the Today show, Nightly News, and NBC News Now. She previously worked at CNN where she broke numerous high-profile stories during the Me Too era and co-hosted CNN’s New Year’s Eve show alongside Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen. In 2023, Chloe worked to publish her late grandfather’s memoir, Luck of the Draw, which became a New York Times bestseller. Chloe is the co-founder of the gut health brand Bio.me. She lives in New York with her two sons, four pets, and husband.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

The Onset of Illness . . . What Is Bowel Disease?

Actually, What Is a Bowel?

Normal bowels are all alike, but every bowel disease begins in its own way—or something like that. Illness can hit suddenly or come on slowly over time. Onsets can be dramatic or quiet, painful or bland, bloody or not bloody at all. At the beginning, bowel sickness can be utterly unignorable, wildly disruptive to your life from the start, or it may be easy to pretend that nothing is awry . . . at least for a while. But they all start somewhere.

Chloe

I’ll never forget the day there was blood in my stool. I remember looking at the toilet paper and immediately having an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

It was the fall of 2011 and I was twenty-five years old, living in New York City and trying to make it as a journalist. I was working at a start-up website for a no-nonsense boss, chained to my desk, and very stressed. The days were long: I’d begin just after 7 a.m. at our Midtown Manhattan office writing online articles for tweens contemplating topics like whether Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez were getting back together. After nine hours of producing such hard-hitting material, while also being loudly scolded by my editor for something like a missing comma or a run-on sentence, I’d slip on the pair of heels under my desk and make my way to a glitzy Hollywood event, like a red carpet for a new movie or restaurant opening. You may be thinking, Oh, that sounds glamorous. Hardly. I’d be the last person at the end of a winding line of reporters with my little tape recorder, relieved if a reality star gave me a quote about their workout routine. We’re talking rain or shine. I barely made enough money to cover rent on my shoebox apartment in the East Village, which I’d return to most nights close to midnight; I’d consider myself lucky if I got six hours of sleep.

It was a grueling pivot from my carefree college days on the sunny plains of Auburn, Alabama. In New York, I was doing my best to balance the long hours and maintain some sort of social life, but I wasn’t getting enough sleep, was drinking more alcohol than I should, and was really burning the candle at both ends. As a result, I was sick—a lot. A visit to urgent care was like getting a pedicure—it was routine to be prescribed antibiotics: “Here, take another Z-Pak, this should help!” Not to mention, I was smoking cigarettes—gross. What was I even thinking? It really is true that youth is wasted on the young.

So when I saw the blood on my toilet paper that day while at work, it certainly gave me pause, but I pushed the gnawing fear deep into the back of the file cabinet in my mind and went about my day. That is, until it kept happening. Day after day there would be red droplets either on the toilet paper or in the toilet. I told myself it was probably just a hemorrhoid, but one phone call with my mom and I was spooked. She told me I needed to see a doctor immediately. My southern mother, introverted and a bit of a nervous Nelly, never met a doctor she didn’t like. If my brother or I even had the hint of a cough growing up, we were at the pediatrician’s. Despite her being what my dad and I would consider a bit of a hypochondriac-by-proxy, I look back and appreciate her urging me to make an appointment with a gastroenterologist. That’s a fancy word for a doctor that specializes in your bowels.

It took a few days, but I found a doctor who accepted my insurance, and made an appointment. At my consultation, I described my symptoms, and he told me to schedule a sigmoidoscopy, a short procedure in which he would insert a scope into my rectum. I would have the option to be sedated; I definitely did not want to be awake for this. (In a colonoscopy, FYI, the doctor inserts the scope farther up into your colon and views the entire large intestine. Think of it like Mrs. Frizzle and her Magic School Bus—yes, this is a nineties reference). This seemed extreme. Couldn’t I just take a short course of meds or change my diet? But no; he said he needed to see the inflammation and the state of my colon—up close and personal. Yay.

Fun fact: Did you know that when you are put under general anesthesia you need someone to take you home? Given that my dating life was about as rough as the Colorado River and none of my family lived in New York, I had no obvious choice as to whom I would encumber with this oh-so-fun opportunity . . . so I made a panicked phone call to my best friend, Emily.

Within two weeks, I was in a backless hospital gown, gearing up for what would be the first of many explorations inside my bowels. I was so nervous, but once I was wheeled into the procedure room, the anesthesiologist had me count back from ten and picture myself on a beach, and by seven I was out like a light. The next thing I knew, I was in a recovery room, not on the beach. I was exhausted from the anesthesia and starving since I hadn’t eaten solid foods in nearly twenty-four hours. But I finally got the strength to change into my clothes and meet with my doctor in his office. He sat in a white doctor’s coat behind a fancy mahogany desk and matter-of-factly told me I had proctitis, an inflammation of my rectum. He didn’t seem concerned at all. Actually, he was rather dismissive—he gave me suppositories, told me that my symptoms should resolve within a few months, and sent me on my way. I was stunned at his lack of bedside manner but relieved it wasn’t more serious. In case you don’t know what a suppository is, lucky you! It’s medication that, for this purpose, comes in a waxy three-inch bullet-shaped pill for your butt. Fun fact: Suppositories come in all shapes and sizes—from the bullet shape to round, oval, or even cone-shaped! You stick it in and hope it stays in place as it dissolves. It’s on my list of least favorite things to do.

Looking back, my health was not anywhere on my list of priorities in my twenties, and embarrassingly, I was not diligent about using the medication. I was too busy chasing my professional dreams. I wanted to climb the corporate news ladder right to the top; think Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon in The Morning Show. My dream was to become an on-air reporter and one day work at the Today show like Katie Couric, whom I’d watched growing up. (I wish I could go back in time and tell that tired, emotional girl, “Just wait twelve more years and you’ll get to the Today show and even become friends with Katie!”) Yet, for my slightly-less-serious job at the time, I was out every night and assigned to do cringey things like go to a store to find out what Jennifer Aniston had purchased earlier in the day. I had no idea how to move up in my industry and was worried I would pigeonhole myself as a gossip reporter. I spent the rest of my free time getting my heart broken by overconfident mansplainers, including a well-known radio host and a professional hockey player. All to say, I was very busy. In hindsight, I’ll always wonder if I’d been more diligent about taking my medicine, would my disease have progressed more slowly or maybe just have gone away? It’s impossible to know for sure whether my behavior when it came to my health impacted my eventual fate, but what a shame that I didn’t try.

In the year following my diagnosis, I continued to see blood on an almost daily basis when I went to the bathroom. As it became routine, I learned to ignore it. Then, as one might expect, my symptoms got bad—like, really bad. I would be working on my computer or talking on the phone with a friend (or, the nightmare of all nightmares, driving a car) when, all of a sudden, I’d get this sensation, the kind you get when you’ve had some food that didn’t agree with you. I’d immediately go into fight-or-flight mode, scanning the room (or highway) for the nearest bathroom, and then bolt, unsure if it was gas or an actual bowel movement. That’s the worst part of having bowel disease: You can’t chance it because you could gamble and end up with soiled pants (like the time I was at the swanky Sundance Film Festival in Utah wearing a pair of white jeans; more on that later). But on the complete opposite end of the inflammatory bowel disease spectrum, for me the most frustrating part would be that half of the time I’d get to the ivory throne and . . . crickets. Nothing would happen, except for maybe some blood. A gastroenterologist would eventually reveal to me that this phantom urge to defecate, sometimes described as dry heaves of the rectum, has a name—it is called tenesmus. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, not even the girls who viciously bullied me in middle school.

I felt as if the disease was seeping through me. Eventually, I got the courage to tell my mom that things weren’t getting any better. “You need to get a second opinion,” she said frantically. “This is not normal.”

Edition details

• Publisher: The Dial Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593979206
• ISBN 13: 9780593979204
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336