My Story with IBD
Fighting IBD Naturally
Life with Crohn’s Disease
Life is hard. Life rarely ever turns out the way we expect it to or hope it will but maybe that’s ok. Maybe it’s life’s way of challenging us to become better versions of ourselves - allowing us to grow from our struggles and then help others. After 20 years of battling Crohn’s disease along with all of the other pressures and disappointments of life I’m still trying learn this lesson myself. I hope that the failures, disappointments, and lessons learned I share here help in whatever journey you are on in life. Be blessed.
Seasonal factors
While there are certain patterns I’m seeing in my own health related to seasonal factors I still have a lot to learn. It is clear to me that there are MANY factors that impact my overall health and learning how each of these things impact me personally (and what I can do to avoid / minimize them) will bring me better health in the long run…
Diet+ other factors
I have focused a majority of my posts specifically on my diet changes for two key reasons: 1) because so far over my 20 years with Crohn’s disease, diet has been the one factor that I have seen the most direct correlation to my symptoms and 2) diet has been one of the easiest factors to control, track, and tie back to symptoms. But…
My Trigger Foods
I’ve talked about some of my worst trigger foods previously - fish, shrimp, egg, and corn. Because of the severity of these reactions I avoid these entirely. But in addition to these after testing over 100 ingredients during a four year elimination diet and through trial and error I’ve found over 20 ingredients that impact me in other ways…
My Process
After my hospitalization, I knew if I was truly going to get to a place where I could eat the things I enjoyed again I had to figure out exactly how specific ingredients impacted me. But while that premise sounds simple it is actually an incredibly complex goal to achieve. Think for a moment how many ingredients you take in on a daily basis...
Stress Measurement
Having a chronic and incurable disease is not easy. In looking back over my journals from the second half of 2018 into the first part of 2019 it seemed as if I was always frustrated. It almost felt as if nothing could go my way. Thankfully God began to turn things around for me early 2019 but I still lived with a persistent low level of anxiety…
Allergic Reactions
My first foray into true a elimination diet started with a question - could I be allergic to egg? Years earlier I had done an IgE food allergy blood test which showed that I had a very slight allergy to egg. I dismissed the test results however since I had been eating eggs my whole life and I had never seen eggs give me an “allergic reaction”…