does diet affect your symptoms??

Hey there i have trialed cuttig things out of my diet to see if it would help but its soooo hard and i thought it was acuali workin but do i go through rest 8f my life watchin what i eat and bein limited from nearly everything or just have a op done and eat what i like x

This may not be what you want to hear but UC is a chronic lifelong disease with periods or flares and periods of remissions. With your personality I think the best option for you is to do the surgery and be done with it. No more fighting.

I just feel no matter what i try ill end up on medication anyway and coz ive had it since i was 17 my cancer rate will go up and illnprob have to have it all done anyway so i feel that im just putting it off when i know its supose to happen ...
I am alot more mentally ready for an op than i was its just my appereance i worry about and worried that the surgery wont help me as much as i think x

Diet makes no difference in my symptoms, although some foods will be more painful coming out when I'm flaring. It can't hurt to try some of the various diets, however I think I'd do them in conjunction with a 5-ASA medication.

DB, did you mean to say protein digestion or starch? I don't think bacteria break down proteins in digestion, it's hydrochloric acid and enzymes.

Just asking

Hey Jasmine-
It would have been a good idea to mention that you were already on meds. Your post provided very little information.
I responded based on what info you gave.

Perhaps you could ask the doctors to give you less dangerous meds than steroids and try diet restrictions. But it will require patience.

At 20 years old, you will have a long time to regret a hasty decision.
I wish you good luck.

Diet it important for me. Two major factors - first I have some definite intolerances, and I had a test done for them. Some of the things on the list they gave me don't seem to be a big deal. But others do - in my case oregano, basil and coconut. No question, if I eat those my stomach empties itself in a hurry. There seems to be a couple of other things too, but I haven't isolated them. So I need to treat them like food allergies.

Second, sugar. It's really clear that sugar does a number on me - no question. If I eat something very sugary about 24 hours later I start bleeding heavily for a few hours and then it passes. I can't explain the mechanism, I just know for sure it happens.

So I basically avoid sugar to the greatest extent possible. That's not so hard, although in the US there's too much sugar in most things. But it can be done, and plenty of people do keep sugar out of their diet for health reasons more generally, so they are catered for.

Giving up sugar's exactly like giving up smoking. The first two weeks are the hardest, and you have cravings - then it gets easier. You get your sense of taste back, and feel generally better. And of course, you lose excess weight pretty fast.

My main diet modification was cutting out sugar about a year and a half ago. Since then I very rarely have any bleeding, or if I have any it's minor. Food tastes better, my skin's better, I have a BMI of 23, and a middle-aged man's nearest equivalent of a 6-pack (sort of a slight 4-pack if you squint and the light's right). I still have some urgency and frequency - it's not like it put me into remission. But it's made a big difference.

We're all different so it might just be me. But I'd recommend cutting out sugar to people without UC, so it seems like a good idea to me.

Jasmine-x-x said...
Hey palacedan
I totaly agree i did cut out asmuch sugar i could but its in bloody everythin lol
And when im on steriods trying not to eat is very hard!
Did you have to check all your foods to see how much sugar was in them and then try get the lowest .....
I just need to get off the steriods and take it from there realy .... x

I find it basically works out the same as eating healthy in general - fresh foods, lots of meat, fish, vegetables, rice - that sort of thing. I keep fruits to a minimum with the exception of berries which are low in sugar.

It comes out similar to the paleo diet in effect. It's actually not that restricted in that there's a lot to eat. The problem is eating out - eating in's fine. Eating out is hard, but, again, there's so many people right now who are trying to cut out sugar that you can usually find low or zero-sugar options most places.

Yes - you look at the ingredients for everything and see how much sugar's in it and aim for zero.

I also restrict gluten and dairy, but both are not such a big deal for me. Cheese makes me gassy. I use almond milk. Nothing major. I eat bread now and again.

Re steroids, for me at least I can eat as much as I want and I don't gain weight. That's the good news - eat as much as you want, just cut out the sugar. When I cut out sugar I dropped about 14 pounds (I wasn't fat, but I had a little extra). Once that was gone my weight stabilised and the amount I eat makes pretty much no difference as long as I keep the sugar out.

When I had my short course of pred I guesstimated I was eating about 3000 calories a day, but as close to zero sugar as I could manage - scrambled eggs with rice cakes for breakfast, two sushi dishes for lunch, a whole chicken with potato and spinach at dinner time - that sort of thing. Over the six weeks I put on two pounds - I was eating more but it wasn't sugar. My symptoms improved but I assume that was the prednisone.

There was a great documentary on the BBC about sugar. In the early 70s a man called John Yudkin wrote a book called "Pure, White and Deadly" about sugar, but the food industry funded huge amounts of research to discredit it. Yudkin was arguing that the big spikes in heart disease around then were linked to massive increases in sugar intake in the regular diet. The food industry supported research that suggested that it was linked to fat, hence the low-fat food fad. But there's strong evidence that it's the sugar, not the fat that was bad for people. The thing is, there's so much money in selling people sweetened processed food, particularly food processed with high-fructose corn syrup, that there are plenty of companies with a stake in avoiding that conclusion.

I realise I sound like I'm ranting, but I'm convinced that in a decade or so people will think of companies that sell/ sold high-sugar food and beverages exactly the same way as we currently think about tobacco companies.

And sugar is believed to be linked to inflammatory responses (just google sugar and inflammation).

Sorry - got carried away. I don't get so upset about adults being hooked on sugar, but I hate seeing it in kids. So awful how they have things marketed to them that are so bad for them. Honestly, when our kids grow up they will think of how we fed them candy and sweetened foods as if we used to give them a pack of 20 Marlboro lights every day to take to school.

The sugar hate is ridiculous.

If you can tolerate sugar, no reason not to eat it.

Hey Jasmine,

IMO and my experience, diet does affect your symptoms.

Depending on what you eat, it can make things much worse, or much better.

How about trying a food journal to stay what correlations come to light?

As far as your doc telling you diet has no effect, well mine told me the same thing BUT he's wrong.

I've  found that a combination of diet modification, certain supplements like probiotics, slippery elm, l-glutamine, and LDN have helped put me in remission.

BTW, have you had your vitamin d3 levels checked? there's a correlation between low d3 levels and IBD.

Are you on any probiotics?  Your doc probably poo-poohed that too?

Anyway, if you are interested, there are things IMO that you can control, which will have a direct impact on your disease, the symptoms you experience and their severity.

I was able to control my UC into remission through various supplements, probiotics, diet modification, and LDN , low dose naltrexone.

 

For more info on the protocol which has put me into remission, please go to this link: https://www.healingwell.com/community/default.aspx?f=38&m=1666318 , and look at the 11th post.

I hope you feel better and let us know how we can help you.

 

When I was flaring, I avoided spicy foods and "scratchy" foods (such as raw veggies). I honestly didn't have the energy to try food journaling at that point, and the medications started making a very positive difference in my symptoms pretty quickly, so I decided to see what they could do alone, w/o diet modification.

Since I have been in remission, I eat just like I did prior to my UC diagnosis. It's pretty healthy, especially compared to the SAD (standard American diet), but I have dairy, grains, and sugar. The only things I can't have are MSG and artificial sweetners, but I couldn't eat that crap prior to UC anyway. I mostly avoid processed foods and cook from scratch, but that's for a general health benefit. I did that prior to being diagnosed.