Chloe Melas Wants You to Talk About Your Gut

At 23, living in Manhattan and working her first job in television news, Chloe Melas saw bright red blood in the toilet. She did what a great many people do with that sight, which is nothing. “I can’t explain to you why I ignored it,” she told TODAY.com years later. “I was completely in denial,” she told People. “I didn’t have one friend that ever had a colonoscopy.”

On November 10 she publishes a book about exactly that silence. The Girl’s Guide to Guts, written with the author Judy Batalion, is a plain-spoken guide to living with bowel disease as a woman: the bleeding and bloating, the dating and fertility questions, the colonoscopies, and how to make a doctor listen. “Our bowel movement movement is officially happening,” she wrote this week, holding the first copies.

The diagnosis: Two years of symptoms, then a name for them

About two months after that first sign, a doctor diagnosed proctitis, inflammation at the end of the bowel. The symptoms kept coming for roughly two years before a colonoscopy, in 2012, gave the condition its full name: ulcerative colitis, a form of inflammatory bowel disease. What followed, as she described it to TODAY.com, were flares that arrived out of nowhere, urgency, then stretches of severe constipation and weight loss, and a rotation of treatments that included steroids. She changed how she ate and stopped drinking, which helped her digestion but not the colitis. “I spent a decade thinking about my bowel movements,” she told People.

Through all of it she was on television. She had started at CNN as a news assistant in 2008, straight out of college, and returned in 2016 as an entertainment reporter, TheWrap reported when she moved to NBC News in August 2023. NBC describes her as an entertainment correspondent, and viewers of TODAY and Nightly News know her face. Almost none of them knew about the colitis. She went public in January 2024.

The turn: A second opinion

Around the age of 30, her doctors began talking about removing part of her colon, and about the possibility of a temporary colostomy bag. She went for a second opinion. The new doctor changed her dosage rather than her anatomy. “He was able to put me in remission,” she said. No surgery followed. In May 2023 she had what she called her first normal colonoscopy in years. She still gets the occasional flare, she said in 2024, and manages it with medication, extra fibre, sleep, water and attention to stress. The line she gave People is the one her readers will remember: “I don’t think about going to the bathroom anymore.”

The book: Written with someone who has lived it since childhood

Her co-author, Judy Batalion, is the New York Times bestselling author of The Light of Days, the history of the Jewish women who fought in the Polish resistance, and she has lived with ulcerative colitis since childhood, her site says. Between them, the publisher’s description notes, the two women have decades of experience with the disease. The book, from The Dial Press, sets out to move bowel disease, which it calls our culture’s final taboo, from something women hold inside into something they can talk about, with interviews that explain what doctors are thinking. The audiobook, out the same day, is read by Melas.

The early verdicts are warm. Hoda Kotb calls it “honest, hopeful, and deeply comforting,” and Dr Mark Hyman, Kris Jenner and Christie Brinkley are among the names on the jacket. A reviewer for Gastroenterology & Endoscopy News wrote that the authors “convey the sense they are in the room, ready to hold your hand.” Melas announced the book on TODAY in May. “I hope that this book helps millions of girls love their guts and know that they are not alone,” she said.

The purpose: From a private diagnosis to a public one

The colitis also led to a company. In 2023 she co-founded Bio.me, a fibre and gut-health brand, with its chief executive, Shannon Race; by 2025 it was in more than 500 Whole Foods stores. Asked this autumn why she keeps talking about something so private, she told The Purist: “It’s incredible to have turned this darkness into purpose.” To People she put it more simply. “I want to speak about the things that are tough to talk about because I know there are people suffering in silence.”

Her advice has not changed since the day she first said it out loud: blood in the toilet is not something to wait on, and if something is wrong in the bathroom, a gastroenterologist is the person to see. For anyone who, like her at 23, has never known a friend to have a colonoscopy, the book is a place to start.

Where this comes from: Sources

Chloe Melas’s account of her diagnosis and treatment is from her interviews with TODAY.com (January 4, 2024) and People (January 5, 2024), her remarks to The Purist (September 2026), and the two Instagram posts embedded above. The book’s details and blurbs are from Penguin Random House; her role is as NBC News and TheWrap describe it; Judy Batalion’s from her site; Bio.me’s from the company’s August 2025 release. The illustration is ours. This article is educational, describes what the cited sources say, and is not medical advice.