TW: mention of eating disorders & disordered eating
I really didn’t want to write this article. I am pretty open about how I have a lot of dietary restrictions. When I go out to eat with friends, I usually tell them that I follow a strict diet for my Crohn’s Disease. Then they’ll ask if I can have anything on the menu, and I will say No. The inevitable next question is always: So, what can you eat? I’ll list off a few foods like oats, bananas, blueberries, broccoli, chicken, and buckwheat, and that's usually the end of that conversation. I’ve had it so many times; honestly pretty much any time I meet somebody new.
I tend to think that when I give people that list that they just assume I stop listing things because it would get excessive if I named every food I could eat. I imagine that they might think I am going through a typical day, and maybe other days look different than the short food record I have given. I don’t think that anybody really considers what it feels like to eat the same 5-10 foods over and over and over and over again. But I do. I do because that has been my life since January of 2019 when I entered “remission”.
Remission for me has always been rocky. I noticed really quickly that while I felt better overall (you know, my body wasn’t trying to set records for lowest hemoglobin and highest CRP simultaneously), I still had some symptoms. I decided to take the advice I give a lot of my IBD patients these days and start a food journal to try to find my trigger foods. Slowly I started feeling better as I cut back on the foods that I noticed were giving me hives, acne, bowel cramps, diarrhea, and a whole host of other symptoms.
So I got to a baseline diet with some foods I knew I felt good on and did that for a bit. It was wonderful, as long as I ate these foods, I felt pretty much “normal” and could do all the activities I wanted. But I wanted to find more things I could eat, so I started to do food reintroduction. I would try a new food for one meal and see how I felt afterwards. If I felt worse, I knew that food wasn’t a good fit and I’d mark it as a trigger food.
Fast forward to 2+ years of trying a new food every weekend and you’d expect my diet to be all normal and varied with only a few restrictions. Haha I wish. I’m pretty sure after all this time it has gotten worse. I guess the problem really is that my body thinks pretty much everything other humans call edible is unfit for consumption, and it lets me know that loud and clear.
That all is the much needed background to my current diet. I guess I should share what it looks like at some point as that is the main reason I wrote this article, so here goes:
Breakfast
3 cups of cooked rolled oats with ½ sliced banana and ½ cup blueberries.
1 Orgain Nutritional Shake
Snack
1 Orgain Nutritional Shake
Lunch
2 cups of cooked buckwheat, ½ sliced banana, and ½ cup blueberries
1 Orgain Nutritional Shake
Dinner
2 cups of cooked buckwheat, 1 ½ cups cooked broccoli, ½ a cooked chicken breast.
So…..yeah. I’ve pretty much been eating that or some slight variation (I used to eat a lot of plantains too) day in and day out for a few years now. Pretty messed up right? I am pretty sure from the outside this looks like at least disordered eating if not a full blown eating disorder. But, like, what am I supposed to do? It's not like I am not trying to expand my diet, I just can’t without Crohn's kicking my butt. Also I promise I’ve told every GI doc I’ve had about this and unfortunately there hasn’t been anything they have been able to do to help.
I decided to write this article because during the few years I’ve had these issues with all these trigger foods I’ve never really found anything online that mirrors what has happened to me. My hope is that if there are more people with IBD out there who struggle with these food issues as much as I do, that you at least feel validated that you aren’t the only one going through this. It sucks, and maybe one day we will have an answer as to why it happens.
Until then, if you are having issues with foods triggering your disease, bring it up to your doctor or dietitian. Spread the word. Even if, like in my case, the doctors or dietitian isn’t able to fix the problem, at least we are fostering awareness and discussions that will bring about solutions in the future.