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.
Imperfect health
IBD always has a way of keeping you guessing. Just a few months after putting my story on social in 2021 I started showing some unexplained symptoms. In fact, I tend to have unexplained symptoms at least once or twice a year. I make adjustments quickly to get things under control but I never want to give off the perception that I have it all together…
Things I wish I knew…
I started this blog because I wanted to have a platform to say the things I wish I would have known 20 years ago when my journey with Crohn’s disease started. As I think about what I’d tell a younger version of myself there were three key phases of my journey where a little encouragement, guidance, and knowledge would have been helpful…
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...
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”…
Diet change is hard
In the summer of 2012 my mom gave me a book called “Breaking the Vicious Cycle” by Elaine Gottschall. The book had been recommended to her by a friend after she saw success with it. When she first gave it to me I thought to myself “yeah… that will never work” and I dismissed it. But as the summer progressed so did my symptoms…