Meds Again

My last post was about water fasting to avoid a flare and you haven't heard from me since. That is because, unfortunately, I didn't avoid the flare up like I had hoped and I have felt so bad, I haven't had the energy to post. Sorry.

I began to feel a little better after the water fast, but then things went back down hill. I transitioned after two days of water, to a juice diet for four days. Then I implemented my healing diet.

Things began to get a little better, but all the symptoms still remained through last week and I found myself only working about 4 hours per day and needing at least 14 hours sleep and a nap each day.

Unfortunately, I decided to go back on meds. It has been almost 2 years in which I management my Crohn's without meds, so I'm so disappointed. Yet, I have to consider it a success as how many people do you know that can manage Crohn's or US without meds for 2 years?

I intend to get into remission and then wean off the meds and try again. Hopefully I can go the rest of my life off meds this next time.

I'm on budesonide and mesalamine, which are the meds prescribed for Crohn's that have the least amount of side effects. Only two days on the meds and I already feel an improvement. I've made it 12 hours without a nap. That has't occurred in two weeks.

Water Fasting for a Couple of Days

So I've been so fatigued the last few days and my gut is acting up. My bowel movements are not normal and I'm concerned that I might be heading toward a flare up. I'm taking a couple days off, or I should rather say that I'm working part time from home for the next two days so I can sleep excessively between some conference calls and work, and I'm going to water fast. 

Two days of a water fast usually makes a huge improvement. Fasting gives the digestive tract time to completely rest and it should strengthen its mucosal lining. A healthy lining means my Crohn's symptoms will go away. It's also necessary for preventing leakage of undigested proteins and toxins into the bloodstream.

Keep in mind that a fast is not a cure for anything, but it's an opportunity for the body to rest so it can do what it does best, which is to heal, cleanse and restore itself. The difference is during a fast, all of the body's resources are working on healing, instead of digesting and waste removal. And specifically for Crohn's and colitis, it eliminates any causes of GI tract inflammation, which also assists in healing.

I usually go from a water fast to a juice fast. You detox and heal more quickly with a water fast than a juice fast, so when I'm fasting because I think I'm about to flare, I'll start with a water fast. But if I'm fasting just as preventive maintenance and for cleansing, I'll stick with water. 

Because with a water fast, your digestive system and organs are able to completely rest, all of your energy is used for cleansing and healing. With a juice fast, your body has to use energy to digest and assimilate the nutrients, leaving less energy for detoxing and healing. 

I've noted before that being on a water fast for more than three days should be done only under a doctor's supervision. Minerals and salt are needed for the body's organs to function and being on water alone means that your body has to provide these things by using what it has in reserves. If you don't have much reserved, then you may be doing damage to your body. 

So this time, I think 2 days will be sufficient and then I'll go to juice until everything is back to normal.

Oh well...I guess this just is part of living a Crohn's life :)

Crohn's and Colitis Charity Ribbon Magnets

They have arrived and are available for sale:  Crohn's and Colitis Charity Ribbon Magnets

Crohn's and Colitis Awareness

I saw a statistic on a Crohn's and Colitis Awareness Facebook site and decided to create a graphic.

Please share it as you wish!

A Crohn's Refrigerator

My boyfriend, Rich, opened my refrigerator and said, "Stacey would be jealous of all your fresh juice. She'd be asking for all of your juice recipes." Stacey is a mutual friend that just started juicing.

As I looked at my refrigerator I began to think of what it looked like two years ago, prior to my Crohn's diagnosis. Wow, I eat so much healthier today.

Two years ago there actually wasn't much food in my refrigerator because I was one of those people who's idea of cooking was "2 minutes on high" in the microwave. My freezer was filled with pre made meals in a box, and my refrigerator had a shelf full of beer, another filled with bottles of white wine, and a lot of condiments.

Today, this refrigerator full of fruits, vegetables, juice and coconut water, is the reason why I can manage my disease without medication. It was a process to get where I am at today, but after working very hard to heal my ulcers, this diet, along with rest, and proper stress management, has kept me in remission.

Certainly if you have active ulcers, a colostomy bag, or are diabetic, this diet isn't for you. But how many people with Crohn's or ulcerative colitis can say they haven't been on medication for twenty-two months and have been able to stay out of the hospital.

Ironically, Crohn's is the reason why I'm healthier today. that I was two years ago, and is likely going to be the reason for me living a healthier life for the rest of my life. I know it sounds crazy that Crohn's has made me healthier, but it forced me to take a good look at my diet, rest, and stress levels. For that, I'm grateful.

I hope and pray everyday that others suffering with IBDs find their way to achieve remission and a healthy lifestyle, and have as much as I to be thankful for.

Car Magnets Too!

Just a quick note to share that I also have ribbon car magnets on the way. Check out the new car magnet page for details.

Crohn's and Colitis Wristbands

I'm very excited because I've ordered 2000 Crohn's and Colitis wristbands. The Crohn's and Colitis wristbands will be purple and similar to the "gel" wristband available with many chronic diseases and cancers, but for some reason, are not readily available for Crohn's and UC.  

I expect to have them available for sale no later than March 19, 2014. The top image below is the outside of the wristband, and the lower image is the inside. The lettering and ribbons are recessed on the outside of the wristband, and embossed on the inside of the wristband. 

I'll I'll probably create a page on eBay to sell them. Most likely they'll go for $2.49 each, but there will be quantity discounts. I may develop some key chains too :)

I intend to donate $0.50 per wristband sold, to Crohn's and/or Ulcerative Colitis foundations. Very cool indeed!

Quality Drinking Water

I was up in Michigan and my mother had a Zero water filter. I had a Brita. She was educating me on total dissolved solids in water. I begun to do some research and she inspired me to create a blog, which will likely become a website, versus blog, at some point in the future. Please check it out: http://qualitydrinkingwater.com.

We all know that water is healthy for us. I know it for sure. It clearly is part of my holistic approach to keeping my Crohn's disease from flaring. Flushing the toxic matter out of your GI tract is essential to a healthy colon. Well, what if the water you were drinking was toxic, then certainly it wouldn't do a great job at cleansing your digestive tract would it?

So check out my new blog and let me know if you're interested in testing water with me :)

Fiji has the highest TDS of any bottle water I've tested so far, by the way.

My Crohn's Writing Career.... Or lack there of ;)

On January 23rd, I told you that I was going to become a writer for the Crohn's Journey Foundation. Well... I guess that has been put on hold. The founder as well as others in the Foundation were looking for writers at the same time, and a couple writers were brought on prior to my commitment being finalized. So for now, I get to write to you folks and the Support Crohn's disease and Ulcerative Colitis support group on FB:  https://www.facebook.com/ItTakesGuts

Maybe after a couple of the Foundation's writers finish their current contract I'll be considered.

I have an idea for another blog I want to share with you. But I must get to work, so I'll likely do so within the next day. Think, "quality water."

8 Things that Worsen Inflammation!

Below is my first article for The Crohn's Journey Foundation. I'll post the link once it's published on their site.

Did you know that the body creates inflammation as a way to help you heal? In the case of Crohn’s, generally, toxic matter poisons the gut and the immune system creates inflammation as a way to purify the area.  Once the area is purified, you heal, and then the inflammation goes away.

Inflammation is caused when the body sends elements of the immune system, white blood cells or T cells, to the affected area. These T cells produce antibodies, which bind toxins and leads to healing.  The last thing we need to do is interrupt this healing process by aggravating the situation.  

There are things we eat and do every day that can either help our gut heal, or throw us into a full-fledged flare up.

Raw Vegetables

Vegetables are great for us, and essential in assisting with healthy iron levels, which is often a challenge for people who suffer from Crohn’s. However, eating raw vegetables and salads can irritate the bowel since they are difficult to digest. Avoid eating them when your gut is inflamed. Drink them instead by including them in your favorite juice or smoothie.

Fatty Foods

Your body is impaired when you’re inflamed and fatty foods cannot be digested properly. Avoid all fatty foods including meats, dairy, oils, avocados, olives, and especially nuts and seeds. Nuts and seeds are difficult to digest even when you’re healthy, and depending upon your type of Crohn’s, they may be indigestible when you’re inflamed, and hard undigested particles can create complications like fistulas. Ultimately, stay away from fatty foods. Even the good fatty foods are not good for you when inflammation is present.

Citrus Fruits

High acid citrus fruits and tomatoes also must be avoided. They’re too harsh for a healing gut. Lemons and limes are the worse as they are extremely acidic and for those with Crohn’s, even during healthy times, should always be used in moderation, diluted with other juices or water, or used with other ingredients. Avoid them entirely and stick with sweet fruits instead when you’re inflamed.

Acid Forming Foods

This is a tough one, because it encompassed sooo many foods we love to eat, but it is well worth the effort in results. Our GI tract’s ideal state for healing and health is slightly alkaline, except the colon, which is slightly acidic. However, the only way to accomplish this is to eat predominately alkaline forming foods. Creating a highly acidic GI tract is problematic and will perpetuate your inflammation. Acid forming foods include all meats, dairy, beans, most grains, nuts and seeds, sugar, soft drinks, coffee, and alcohol.

Spicy Foods

Any food or drink that is spicy hot to the palate or makes your eyes water is an aggravant to the gut. Garlic, cayenne pepper, onions, leeks, etc. can create additional unneeded irritation. Avoid them during times when your gut is inflamed.

Overeating

An overloaded bowel is an overworked and stressed bowel, which will worsen an inflamed bowel. Don’t stuff yourself.

In addition to changing your eating habits there are a couple of other things you should consider when it comes to healing your inflammation.

Your nerve energy plays a significant role in healing. If you have ample, you are more likely to heal sooner than later. But if your gut is deprived of nerve energy, your inflammation is apt to worsen.

At the beginning of each day you are filled with nerve energy and you use it up throughout the day. The more you physically, mentally and emotionally do and handle, the more nerve energy you use. 

Nerve energy to your gut comes from your celiac plexus. Your celiac plexus is the largest plexus, or network of nerves and arteries in the body. It connects and regulates many of your organs, including the stomach, pancreas, liver, small and large intestines.

When your celiac plexus expands, it is radiating nerve energy throughout this network.  For this reason, the celiac plexus is often also referred to as your solar plexus. When it is contracts, it is depriving its network of the nerve energy it needs, and this will certainly make healing difficult, if not impossible.

So what makes your solar plexus contract instead of expand? What things do you do that wastes nerve energy?

Stress and Other Negative Feelings

Your ability to manage negative emotions is essential to healing for several reasons. First, negative emotions and disempowering thoughts wastes nerve energy. You need your nerve energy focused on healing, not on stressful situations.  You only get so much nerve energy a day. Do you want to use your nerve energy for healing or for managing useless emotions?

Second, when you are stressed, unhappy, depressed, or have any negative feelings, your celiac plexus contracts. Often your blood pressure and pulse rise. You may begin to breathe faster. Ultimately, the physical changes that negative emotions bring to your body over time simply are not healthy.

“Stress doesn’t only make us feel awful emotionally,” says Jay Winner MD, author of Take the Stress Out of Your Life. “It can also exacerbate just about any health condition you can think of.”

Managing stress and other negative emotions is challenging at times, especially if you’re not feeling well due to your Crohn’s symptoms, but get the stinking thinking out of your head if you want to accelerate your healing.

Lack of Sleep

Your nerve energy is only rejuvenated when you sleep. If you use up all of your nerve energy before you get to the end of your day, there is nothing left for healing. No organ can function properly without a supply of nerve energy. Therefore, lack of sleep is problematic.

You must get plenty of rest. The lack of appropriate nerve energy to heal will only make matters worse. Listen to your body. It tells you how much sleep you need.  If you’re fatigued or tired during times of inflammation or any other illness, you should sleep. You can never get too much sleep when it comes to healing.

Conclusion

I take a holistic approach to managing illnesses in my life, and this has required me to make massive changes in my lifestyle as a result of my Crohn’s diagnosis. I am learning every day better ways to manage my disease, and know that learning how to live a healthy life with Crohn’s is a process. I also know that change is not easy.  Yet one thing is abundantly clear to me. Eliminating these eight things during times of inflammation has been essential to managing my disease without medication and living a healthy life.

Ultimately, the items above are inflammatory. I regularly tell myself that a temporary pleasure of the palate is not worth the repercussions that could lead to a month or more of unpleasant symptoms. Even during healthy times when my gut is 100%, moderation is the key.

I realize that each of us is uniquely different and our bodies react to our actions individually. I’m hopeful that my experience and suggestions will help you, and I recommend that if you have any of these eight things in your life, you also make some changes. I hope that by eliminating these eight inflammatory things, you too will get as much comfort in your gut as I.

Raw Stuffed Portobello and Chocolate Mouse... Yum!

If you can eat delicious food that's raw, it's easier on your digestive tract than eating cooked foods and it's more nutritious. The enzymes in the food help with digestion which gives your own GI tract a little break from having to do all the work itself. Give these a try. They're delicious and good for you too!

Organic Raw Stuffed Portobello Mushrooms
All ingredients are raw. Start with a couple portobello mushrooms. I marinated the portobello in sesame seed oil, balsamic vinegar and some spices for about 30 minutes. The spices included cilantro, oregano, rosemary, Himalayan salt and pepper. The stuffing ingredients are as flows:

• Juice from one lime
• 1/2 cup of cashews soaked for a couple hours or over night
• 1/2 red bell pepper
• 1 clove garlic
• A few basil leaves
• A couple pinches of Himalayan salt

The stuffing ingredients are blended together.  All three dishes are placed in a dehydrator for about 30 minutes. Then remove the dishes, stuff the mushrooms, and place back in the dehydrator for about an hour.

Raw Chocolate Mouse
I had left over soaked cashews and cashew cream added to raw chocolate pudding makes a great mouse. There was about 1 cup of soaked cashers remaining, so I blended them with water to make a cream. I added two avocados, a heaping table spoon of raw cocoa and some agave syrup to taste. Yum yum.

The Crohn's Journey Foundation

Today I've agreed to become a writing with a 6 month contract for The Crohn's Journey Foundation. You can view the site at www.thecrohnsjourneyfoundation.org. I'm excited!

On another note, my gut has not been 100% and I've been a little fatigued. I've been needing more sleep that when I'm at my best. So I have to do some mitigation again. I'll go to my juicing routine if my healing diet doesn't get things back under control within a few days.

Wish me luck and make sure to check out The Crohn's Journey Foundation page.

My Crohn's Life

I've had the website www.mylifewithcrohns.com and have unsuccessfully been able to renew it. When I started the blog, I secured the domain name from Google as the blog platform I use is Blogger.com, which is a Google app.

Google sent me notice about the domain registration expiring and the links they gave me to pay for the renewal wouldn't work. I had messaged the three times asking for help, and attempted to call them as well. Over a two month period I wasn't able to renew the domain name successfully. Crazy…

So I found out through GoDaddy that Google would charge $80 to restore the name and that they could help me get it restored. Then once restored, they could reassign it to themselves.  GoDaddy is who Blogger/Google used for domain names but since it was purchased through Google, they couldn't restore the name without going through Google.

Well, out of principle, I was not going to pay Google $80 to restore a name that should not have expired if they would have responded to any of my customer service requests. So, please make a note of the new domain name: mycrohnslife.com.

I'm So Blessed!

This is not my typical post, but I will give a quick update. I feel great. Dr. Azar is a blessing! 

So… I was sitting on the hearth of my down stairs fireplace looking at how my home is shaping for the holidays, and as I began to think for how great it's looking, I also began to think of all my blessings, and I began to cry and cry. I think the tears are because I don't feel worthy, or maybe these really are tears of happiness…

I couldn't have imagined life to be this good. I'm not sure how it gets better than this. I wonder what I have done to deserve such a wonderful life. 

First came to mind my family. My son seems to finally be on the right path. He is going to school and following his passion, and he even has a job. He only has a couple more years and he'll finally have the education he needs to pursue his dream.

My brother has grown so much. I'm so proud of him. All my prayers for him seem to have come true. I love him so much. My mom and dad, in spite of their ups and downs with jobs and such, are financially stable and healthy. My sister, has such a beautiful family and they always seem to be stable and having great lives.

I found a wonderful man, that I think I've been needing in my life my entire life. Gosh, if I can't make things work with someone as wonderful as he, then I guess I'm destined to be single. But something tells me, that's not the case and that he'll be in my life for a very long time, if not forever.

Then, I reflected on an email I received today from one of my staff. How fortunate am I to have found something I love to do, that pays well, and where I get a chance to mentor young aspiring people. Jamie doesn't realize how nice her email was today.

I never seem to have to worry about finances these days. My bills are less than I earn, and I'm just preparing for the future. 

Then, of course, I have my health. I still have yet to hear of anyone that lives a life with Crohn's without hospitalization, medication, and a lot of pain. With one call to Dr. Azar, I'm back on the right track and am feeling great. How blessed am I to have her in my life. 

I love to ride motorcycles and snowboard, and a new passion of mine is tennis. I basically can do all of these things I want without any real challenges getting in my way.

I'm not really sure how life gets any better than this. Family, career, health, relationship…

Thank you Lord! You've touched me today like I haven't been touched in a while. I'm so grateful for all that you are and all that you've given me! I'm not sure how I'm worthy, but I will do my best for you. 

Appointment with Dr. Azar. Very interesting… I always learn so much from her!

Very interesting…

I explained to Dr. Azar why I was so confused as to why I'm having a flare up. I cleansed for twelve days, just about a week ago and I was certain that my colon was in a very healthy condition. Within a week after finishing my cleanse, I'm having all of these Crohn's symptoms. Fatigue, joint pain, irregular bowel movements, mild fever, etc.

I continued to explain to her what I ate the day after returning to solid foods, and she simply explained very easily why I'm having these symptoms. Something I never considered…

Twelve days of cleansing put my body into a very deep cleanse. The cells in my body were working at dumping toxins into my blood stream so they could be carried to my kidneys, liver, and GI tract for elimination. All of the symptoms I'm describing are also symptoms of cleansing. Haha.

So I was in a deep cleansing state, and adding food to that state could easily create a reaction if  the body is not prepared. That really isn't too difficult to understand. A Crohn's flare up is just another way your body cleanses. Even for those without Crohn's or colitis, all of the symptoms I just described an occur in a deep cleanse.

When I explained to her the juice I was having, she confirmed that I put my body in a very deep detox state. Any one if not all of my symptoms could be considered the body's intelligent response ridding the body of toxins.

So when I came off the cleanse, my GI tract was not ready for food I gave it. It had been cleansed of the good bacteria needed to operate properly, so it responded as anyone's body would if not prepared for digesting food, not to mention the acidic food that I gave it.

Toxins that should have been eliminated by my GI tract settled in my joints and elsewhere in my body, and this creates joint pain, fatigue, fever, etc.

She coached me today as to what to do to gently introduce solid foods back into my system. My colon needs to begin to get used to doing its job again, and it needs to develop bacteria in order to do so.

Today for breakfast I had a banana, apple smoothie, with cinnamon and vanilla (tastes a little like apple pie filling), yum! For lunch I've had some mushroom soup and I have vegetable soup planned for this evening. I'll fill in the day with some of my miracle juice (see my juice recipes), and be hopeful that my body accepts this gentle food better than it did the acidic tomato sauce I had when I finished my cleanse the other week.

Another interesting fact we discussed, is that pectin, which is really very good for the colon and found in apples, carrots and bananas among other fruits, doesn't digest in the colon unless there is bacteria created by feces present. It needs the good bacteria to metabolize properly. So during a cleanse, all of the pectin I was drinking with juice, never got metabolized in the colon.

Ultimately, when I came of the cleanse and ate some inflammatory foods, my body continued to cleanse it out. I got scared and returned to juice, which ultimately continued the cleanse. Now I need to gently get off of this cleanse, which is what she has instructed me to do. Wish me luck. So far, so good :)