How To Stop Stressing About Food With IBD

When you live with an inflammatory bowel disease, you may find eating stressful. It often feels like very few foods are “safe” because they can trigger a flare up. Many people will narrow down their food groups until they are only eating a handful of foods because that’s all they feel they can tolerate. This post will guide you through identifying food sensitivities, explore foods that support your digestive system, and give you some tips on how to keep a positive mindset around your food and body.

Stop Your Stress By Identifying Food Sensitivities

Food sensitivities are a common symptom of leaky gut. Leaky gut (or increased intestinal permeability) means that the lining of your intestines is letting more than just nutrients in. The gut lining is supposed to detect nutrients and let them through and into the bloodstream. It’s also supposed to detect invaders like pathogens, viruses, and undigested food and keep them out of the bloodstream. People with leaky guts let some of these unwanted substances into the bloodstream.

When this happens, the immune system forms cytokines that go after the invaders and neutralize the threat to your health. This is a good thing! Your immune system is doing it’s job. However, let’s say you eat a carrot. The carrot goes through your intestines and some of this carrot that has not yet been digested slips through your gut lining. The cytokines attack the carrot and keep it from causing any issues. Those antibodies are still alive and active after the carrot is gone. So, the next time you eat a carrot, you will have a bigger reaction because you’re immune system is already on guard and ready to attack it to keep you safe. The more you eat a food that your immune system has attacked, the more sensitive to that food you will be.

The first step in any dietary protocol is to remove the inflammatory foods. Any food that you have a sensitivity to will cause inflammation. Other foods that I generally recommend taking out are gluten, harmful oils, and processed sugar.

Harmful oils are vegetable oils like sunflower oil, safflower oil, canola oil, cottonseed oil, etc. It also includes any rancid fats. Rancid fats are fats that have been heated past their smoke point, exposed to a lot of light (you want to choose oils that are in dark tinted packaging to prevent oxidation instead of clear, see-through packaging), or exposed to oxygen for a prolonged period of time (fats that have been sitting out in open containers). Your cells need fats to create their outer membrane. You need this membrane to be permeable so it can take in nutrients and dispose of waste. Bad or rancid fats can make your cells rigid and unresponsive.

Processed sugar is inflammatory. We eat a ton of sugar compared to what people ate even a few decades ago. Sugar is added to almost everything and it hides under many names such as corn syrup, fructose, dextrose, sucralose, maltose, etc.

In our guts, a chemical called zonulin tells the tight junctures in our gut lining to open to let nutrients pass. Gluten contains zonulin. This is fine for people who don’t have increased intestinal permeability, but for those of us who do, it’s best to stay away from gluten. In addition to adding more zonulin into the mix, refined grains cause inflammation. Even whole grains can cause inflammation when not consumed in moderation. For people with autoimmune diseases like inflammatory bowel disease, it’s best to take all grains out for at least a few weeks to see if you feel better. Grains trigger an immune response in many people.

If you are still having issues with flare ups 2 weeks after removing those foods, it’s time to do some more investigating. This is where you will start to keep a food and mood journal. A food and mood journal is designed to track reactions you may have to certain foods that your eating. Every time you eat a food, log it in your journal along with your mood after the meal, any bowel movements you have, and any physical activity. After 3-5 days you may notice some patterns start to emerge. Maybe you have diarrhea every time you eat fried eggs. You could feel nauseous when you eat brussels sprouts or feel tired and have trouble concentrating when you eat yogurt. These patterns indicate possible food sensitivities.

If you suspect a food sensitivity, take out that food for 2-3 weeks and then add it back in. Start with a tiny amount your first day, eat a little more the second day, and then try a full serving on day 3. Watch closely for any reactions such as diarrhea, constipation, brain fog, stomach pain, nausea, inflammation in the joints, headaches, mood swings, etc. Specifically the reaction you thought it was causing in the first place. If the food causes a reaction, you should eliminate it from your diet for a longer period (you will likely not reintroduce this food until after you’ve supported your gut for a while). If it causes no reaction, you’re good to add that food back into your diet!

Some people try a food an mood journal and eliminate food after food to no avail. This is usually because food reactions can take up to 3 days to appear after you’ve eaten a food you have a sensitivity to. Some reactions are immediate, while others take longer. This leaves people feeling discouraged and hopeless. That’s why I’m currently training at Restorative Wellness Solutions to learn how to order and interpret MRT food sensitivity tests. This test takes the guess work out of finding food sensitivities. That means you can start feeling better much faster than if you went through this process on your own. You could also avoid taking out foods that you suspected you had a sensitivity to, but actually didn’t. Even if you choose to work with me and not run this test, you might find that having a pair of fresh eyes that are trained to evaluate your nutritional needs makes this process go a lot smoother and quicker.

Support Your Digestion And Immune System By Adding Foods

As you take out all the foods that are causing you inflammation, the important work begins. This is where we start to incorporate certain foods and drinks that help support your body. Digestion and the immune system will be the targets of our support for those of us with inflammatory bowel disease.

Digestion is our first priority. If we can support the lining of the gut and decrease our intestinal permeability, we can limit the number of pathogens that our immune system attacks. As we explored above, our gut lining is one cell thick. So immediately, cellular health becomes an important component of GI health. The gut lining also has a thick mucus layer. The mucus layer houses beneficial bacteria and also helps protect us from pathogens. This layer is nutrient rich and made up of fat and collogen.

Foods that support gut lining include nutrient rich foods and foods that contain healthy fats. Some of these include:

• Bone broth
• Cold pressed, organic olive oil
• Nut butters
• Eggs
• Salmon
• Sardines
• A wide variety of organic fruits
• A wide variety of organic vegetables
• Ginger tea
• Peppermint tea
• Slippery elm
• Marshmallow root

Our second priority is the immune system. We are not looking to “boost” the immune system in people with IBD because the presence of food sensitivities indicates that the immune system is already working pretty effectively. Instead, what we want to do is try to avoid our current sensitivities and avoid developing more. The work your doing to support the gut lining will already help prevent new food sensitivities (and can even reverse the ones you have over time), but there are other preventative measures you can take.

Especially in the beginning, many people benefit from implementing a rotation diet. This prevents you from eating the same foods day after day. Many of the foods you develop sensitivities to are the foods you eat over and over. This is because those are the foods your immune system is most exposed to. If you rotate your diet, your immune system won’t have time to develop a serious sensitivity to the foods your eating. The amount of time in between rotations varies from person to person. I would recommend waiting no longer than a month in the beginning. As time goes by and you haven’t developed any more sensitivities, you can try 2 months and then 3 months. Eventually, your diet will rotate with the seasons.

Keep A Positive Outlook

I know I said supporting your gut health was the important work (and it is), but all your work is reliant upon your ability to trust your body and believe you will get better. I know that sounds kind of out there, but there are actual studies that are beginning to find links between a positive outlook and a decreased risk of infection and disease.

Some studies and articles on positive outlooks:

A Positive Outlook May Be Good For Your Health – The New York Times

The Power Of Positive Thinking – Jon Hopkins Medicine

Positive Phycology and Physical Health – PubMed

How The Power Of Positive Thinking Works – Harvard

As someone who loves to study the connection between the brain and the gut, it comes as no surprise to me that your gut would heal faster when you are positive. Your general mood, stress levels, and ability to be present while eating have a profound impact on the gut. In fact, digestion actually starts in the brain.

I have heard multiple stories about people experiencing symptoms because they thought that they consumed a food they were sensitive to…but they actually didn’t. I have personally experienced this multiple times where I’m sure something had processed sugar in it (Processed sugar is not good for my ulcerative colitis) and I start to experience symptoms like bloating and/or gas, only to later find out there was no processed sugar in it at all. Now, hear me when I say I am NOT telling you that your symptoms are all in your head. I am only demonstrating that stress/fear can have a negative affect on your gut, even when your living a perfect lifestyle and eating a perfect diet.

A positive outlook is also essential for mental health. The work we do to support our bodies is hard. Our culture does not often support such decisions. You are constantly getting bombarded with messages like “treat yourself.” Everyone at the office celebrates you and your achievements with processed food and alcohol and you have to say no. Food marketing often portrays certain foods as self care (ice cream after a breakup, candy bars on your period, a massive stack of french toast drenched in syrup because you deserve it, fried chicken as comfort food etc.). We have to make a large shift in our thinking as to what foods are actually comforting or what we deserve. When we are sad, we deserve more than a massive inflammatory sugar spike. We deserve healthy, properly functioning bodies. We deserve to take care of ourselves.

Practical ways to keep a positive outlook on health, your body, and your life include:

• Practicing daily gratitude
• Remembering that your body is only trying its best to protect you in the way it knows how
• Finding healthy activities that are enjoyable for you (rock climbing, walking, reading, music, gardening, volunteering, crafting, learning a new skill, yoga, etc.)
• Finding recipes and experimenting with cooking to keep your diet varied and fun
• Humor
• Get plenty of sunshine
• Stay off or limit time on social media
• Stay hydrated
• Create healthy boundaries
• Surround yourself with people who care about you and support you on your health journey

Food can bring you joy (yes, even when you’re on an elimination diet) and it’s best when you are in community with others to enjoy it. It’s also important to realize that there are other joys besides food. You don’t want food to be an all consuming thought. It will only make this journey harder. Food prep or batch cooking can also make your life easier and take some of the worry out of the equation.

Summary

Many people with Inflammatory bowel disease believe they can only tolerate a few foods and are afraid of trying anything new. I have personally been there and completely understand. Luckily, you have the power to introduce new foods into your diet that are soothing and supportive to your body. The goal of any person with IBD is to support the gut. Fostering an environment that is ideal for beneficial bacteria and supporting the gut lining are both critical steps toward living symptom free.

Taking foods your sensitive to out of your diet and adding beneficial foods into your diet should be done at roughly the same time. This is so you don’t feel deprived of food as you take certain ones out. The only exception is if you are trying to test a specific food to see if you have a sensitivity to it. No new foods should be added for three days before you add that food back in.

If you have any questions about this post or just want to chat, let me know in the comments! This is a huge lifestyle shift, so it’s completely valid to have a dozen different questions about how this could possibly fit int your schedule.

I hope you all have a beautiful week!!