Diet for Remission Update

I have reached the 6th week of my Crohn’s disease exclusion diet. Half of my daily calories are from enteral nutrition (Kate Farms chocolate flavor nutrition shake). Half of my calories are from fruits and vegetables, mostly smoothies, soups, and the occasional salad.

I actually guess I haven’t been following the diet, per se, because I am not eating the required foods, which include chicken and egg. I have eaten 2+ green bananas every day, and cooked and cooled potatoes most days. I have been eating a lot of blackberries, hemp seed and spinach in smoothies. I have also been eating carrots, celery, garlic, onions, and beets regularly in soup form. Salads usually have a lot of herbs, avocado, and some red leaf lettuce.

I have been tracking symptoms, mostly BMs. In the first week, I was having diarrhea every day. By the 5th week, I had diarrhea once, and this week has been pretty regular. However, I am still experiencing some abdominal pain, bloating and gas pain, and intense fatigue. (Fatigue coupled with difficulty sleeping! The best.)

Next week I will reduce the amount of enteral nutrition to 25% of my calories (from 4 shakes a day down to 2). I am also going to start juicing vegetables, so I can get some extra nutrients and enzymes not available in their cooked form.

I tried adding in some excluded foods, and this is what happened!

  • Phò caused me abdominal pain and bloating (possibly due to overeating)
  • Roasted broccoli didn’t digest at all
  • Brown rice didn’t digest at all
  • Oats didn’t digest
  • Lentils I think were fine? But hard to tell because I cooked them into a paste/soup consistency.
  • Nut butters and hemp seeds have been fine (and delicious)
  • Tofu, which gave me some problems before this flare, was terrible on my body!!! GI issues, plus nausea the next day. Killer tofu!!!

Based on this experience, I am definitely going to hold off on adding in more grains and legumes for now. I am going to focus instead on diversifying the vegetables I am eating. I am going to keep on with smoothies and soups, as those seem to go well, and add in raw juice.

We just finished the school year, so I have two solid months of health sabbatical until going back to work in August. It’ll be about 4 months in total, which seems like a long time, but 6 months is typically the time frame for mucosal healing.

We’ll see what the future holds.

Vegan Cream of Mushroom Soup

  • 1/2 cup raw cashews, soaked for 30 min in 2 cups boiling water
  • 4 oz shiitake mushrooms, stems off, caps cut into slices
  • 1/2 medium onion, cut into moons
  • 3 cloves garlic, diced
  • 1T olive oil
  • 1/4 cup fresh lemon thyme
  • A couple sprigs of fresh parsley

Sautee onions, garlic and mushrooms in a soup pot with 1T olive oil and water until onions are translucent. Puree cashews and 2 cups water in blender for 3 mins until creamy. Add cashew cream to mushrooms. Separate thyme leaves from stems and add to soup. Simmer 20 mins. Add Braggs liquid aminos to taste. Garnish with a few sprigs of fresh parsley.

That’s creamy!

All I Eat Is Smoothies Recipe

  • 3 bananas
  • 1 cup blackberries (frozen or not)
  • Water to get the blender going

Do you desire something else in your smoothie?

  • 2T hemp seed
  • 1T chia seed
  • 1 cup spinach (you probably won’t taste it)
  • 1 cup fresh strawberries (you know the frozen ones will break your blender)
  • 1/2 cup wild blueberries
  • OJ instead of water
  • Nut milk instead of water

You can add any of those things. No one is watching. No one is judging you. If you add all of them, I hope you have a big blender, or a mop.

Brought to you by, I spent my life savings at Jamba Juice my freshman year of college, 2003. So I know a good smoothie damnit.

Here is how capitalism caused my Crohn’s disease.

1) It is socially acceptable and commercially encouraged to eat a diet high in meat, fat, and processed foods. This diet is driven by advertising. This diet contributes to higher rates of Crohn’s disease.

2) Big pharma can’t monetize vegetables, so they have no incentive to get people to eat the foods that lower the risk/protect us from Crohn’s disease. (although Monsanto is trying to patent broccoli apparently.)

3) There has been a correlation/positive association between MAP (a bacteria that causes a Crohn’s like illness in cows and other ruminating livestock) and Crohn’s disease in humans. MAP is in drinking water and dairy products, and survives chlorination and pasteurisation. If MAP infection indeed does cause Crohn’s disease, we will continue to see increased levels of Crohn’s disease as long as we continue industrial factory farming of livestock.

4) Industrialized agriculture and chemical fertilizer and pesticide use has destroyed much of the soil microbiome of our farmland. The soil microbiome influences our gut microbiome when we eat fruit and vegetables. This also means our fruits and vegetables have less nutrient density than they have in the past. As long as industrial monocroping and big agriculture continue, shifting the caloric intake of our society to wheat, soy, and corn, we will continue to see rising rates of Crohn’s disease and gut disbiosis.

And this is why, for the health of our species and our planet, and myself, we have to destroy industrial capitalism.

Riding the Flare & Dietary Interventions for Crohn’s Disease

I’m about 3 weeks into this flare. Had a great talk with my primary care doctor where we discussed my long term health goals and I shared with her my research on treating Crohn’s with diet. She is incredibly supportive and promptly ordered a bunch of tests to assess my micronutrient levels and try to unwind my thyroid situation.

Unsurprisingly, I am deficient in a number of key nutrients for thyroid function, as well as B12 and iron anemic. I have picked up a few over the counter supplements: sublingual vegan B12, Omega-3 from flax, in addition to the Vitamin D and iron I was already taking. I am waiting to speak with a nutritionist and functional medicine doctor in June to get deep into supplementation.

I am attempting to end this flare with partial enteral nutrition (read: complete meal replacement drink) and a plant based whole food diet. For the first 6 weeks I am getting half of my daily calories from complete nutrition drinks (vegan options from Kate Farms and Orgain), and the rest of my diet is following the Crohn’s Disease Exclusion Diet.

  • Green banana (resistant starch)
  • Cooked and cooled potato (resistant starch)
  • Apple (soluble fiber)
  • Various other easy to digest fruits and veg: carrot, cucumber, herbs, spinach, berries, avocados

That is not a complete list of the foods allowed on the diet, but what I am most frequently eating day to day.

So how is it going? How do I feel?

I feel like I’m sick with a crohn’s flare!

Fatigue, loose stool between 4-7 on the Bristol Scale, malaise, weird smelling gas and stool, brain fog, the usual. Interesting to note that I cut out coffee, sugar, and refined grains at the beginning of the flare then had a week of terrible brain fog and fatigue. Those symptoms have abated and I feel that has been a major improvement.

Studies suggest EEN, as well as CDED and CD-TREAT diets, can induce remission in as little as 3-6 weeks. These dietary interventions have no negative side effects, unlike steroids. These treatments also induce mucosal healing, which steroids do not.

Complete nutrition is expensive, costing me about $500 for 6 weeks of drinks (990 calories a day for me). A reminder that one infusion of Remicade costs at least $30,000 or more, depending on hospital charges. And complete nutrition from Kate Farms and Orgain specifically eliminates the most common allergins, so unlike Remicade, it does not trigger an anaphylactoid reaction. No intravenous benadryl or steroids needed to tolerate this medicine.

I have completed 2 weeks of this 6 week treatment. I hope to report positive results in another month.

The following link will take you to my research on dietary interventions for crohn’s disease.

Healing Crohn’s Disease-1.pdfDownload

Flare #3

Acceptance that something is wrong in the state of your colon.

Action plan develops. Grocery shop for flare foods. Make an appointment with your doctor. Keep up with food diary and go over your data, again.

Deflation. Reliving medical trauma. Activate PTSD. Depression. Feeling like you have done this to yourself. Feeling there is no hope. Wondering when you will have surgery. Ostomy fear.

Everything seems inevitable, incurable, and the lack of agency in the direction of my treatment is very troubling.

But of all of it, the timing is the worst. A year of quarantine and we are finally ready to go back to school in a hybrid capacity! So much hope and excitement and feeling of responsibility to really nail it for the remainder of the year. And then you aggressively shit 3 times in an hour and all of the energy and vitality drains out of you.

It sure feels like a dead end, but somewhere under the upsetting and terrified feelings is some kind of hope that we, me and my colon, can get better.

Time to sign up for FML AYYYYYY

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