(Sur)Thriving with Crohn's

Site Key:

Have you had a life bingo card filled with fun things like; bloating, gas, abdominal pain, nausea, tyrannical cramps, depression from all that, and some type of food o phobia because everything you eat might be something that screws up your week or month, or entire life?

That sucks, and if you're like me than your doctor(s) have told you things like; we don't know that much about the stomach yet, it's stress, it's in your head, take medicine, take narcotics, don't take narcotics, change your lifestyle. If you are stubborn and keep going to the Dr. you might get a diagnosis; it's IBS, it's IBD, it's peptic ulcer disease, it's Crohn's. It's peculiar, it's idiosyncratic, It's gluten, it's not, we don't know, come back later, come back when you're forty. Well, I'm forty now.

For me, the only thing you can do is take complete control over your own diet, no one cares about your health as much as you.

I'm not a doctor, I don't claim to be, what I am is casualty of a system that seeks to sell you things at the lowest cost to produce possible while at the highest price negotiable . And a medical system that is fantastic and lightyears beyond leeches, but I feel still it is very hard to diagnose what you can't see. If my arm isn't clearly broken, I'm gonna get 4 different diagnosis from four different doctors. Humans are extremely intricate little snowflakes; unique, delicate, one in a trillion.

In my case, that means the food I'm generally eating is the lowest quality food, purchased from the lowest bidder. Furthermore, the industrial practice of preservation seems to change some foods in a way that I can not tolerate. Fresh tomato's versus canned tomato's means the difference between health, and irritation and pain. Is it the process, the ingredients, the facilities? I have not had the chance to conduct an exhaustive trial, so I avoid processing out of experience and gut instinct.

My whole life has been a journey up and down sensitive stomach mountain, I feel that everyone sees me as a hypochondriac, it causes depression, and insecurity about what you can and can't eat. It's made me a hermit as it's become so common to experience nausea, cramping, burning gut feeling, etc, that my work and recreation all end up at home most the time. Where else are you going to be when you have to make every single meal from scratch or close to it.

I've tailored my life around cooking and sourcing food for fear that I will have a "flare up", and reset my whole system into a phase of inflammation.

This meant and means years of trial and error, using the braille method of problem solving. I'd bump my head into a trigger food and start the process over. Now looking back, I can see I never really mastered my own diet. I just tried to eat things based on how I felt, like a culinary hedonist. I don't think this is working anymore based on the physical experience (flare up's) and tests results I've received.

This is where I accepted a piece of advice from my Doctor that I had ignored in the past as rational as it was. He said remove everything from my diet except a handful of things, and I did, this is called the "Elimination Diet". I eliminated everything from my diet but the most basic foods that you can survive on. If I built a website, and had problems with the website, the first thing you would do is deactivate everything before turning each thing on again and seeing if the website worked. The doctor told me to do it, I totally subscribed and ate only 21 types of foods for 15 days before I started adding new foods every 3 days.

(Symptoms)

Would you believe it? Eating 15 variations of rice and chicken seasoned with only carrots, salt and olive oil for 15 days proved enough to me to continue this diet. Same stress, same life, different diet, and most my symptoms had regressed* Now I'm still on the elimination diet but I have added considerable more foods. Each one going through my off the cuff test. It would help to be more diligent with notes, but I haven't started that yet. If it hurts, it doesn't work, take the food out.

(Tests came back)

Most symptoms had regressed except loose stools every day throughout this process and before. I began to research everything about the looseness of my little friends. In learning about a healthy diet for managing Crohn's and IBS, I went on a tangent towards something called, "FODMAP's" and their likeliness as a culprit in my situation.

FODMAP's are a "family of poorly absorbed short-chain carbohydrates that can induce gut symptoms". So avoid those to for 2 months and see if anything changes. So, nothing has changed in the density department. I'll keep you updated. There's an app that I paid for that lists all the foods and which FODs each food has, and how much of the food can be safe to eat. In my process here I'm sticking to foods with negligible FODs.

GI ASSAY came back and it is indicative of "Dysbiosis".

Dysbiosis - accounts for all sorts of things I thought were my default state. Depression, Anxiety, anhedonia

Role of diet and nutrition in inflammatory bowel disease (2022). Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7852575/ (Accessed: 8 August 2022).

Colonoscopy Completed:

Diverticulosis

If we wrangle all the pathologies together, it sounds like this:

GI- Dysbiosis

Stomach-

Gastritis

Colon-

IBD/Crohn's

Diverticulosis

Musculoskeletal-
Dx of Gout or plantar fasciitis

hypothesis of arthritis

Mental:

Irritability
Depression
Anxiety

Search This Blog

#gingerdaddy foods

(Sur)Thriving with Crohn's