Managing Ulcerative Colitis through food and lifestyle

So this is a first for me. Sitting down with a glass of wine, kids in front of the T.V trying to get some words onto paper (or keyboard). I am not the ‘creative type’ as I determined with a dear friend of mine this morning (she is totally a creative!). We were discussing me and what I was going to do with life, I am 31 (or is it 32?) years old, no significant qualification to speak of, stuck in a bit of a rut. I have two young beautiful children that drive me bonkers. I have a wonderful husband who provides for our family, and does nothing. at.all. in way of domestic chores – old school as. I love them all dearly and appreciate them everyday, but some days I feel like crawling back into bed and just having one day with NOTHING, silence, sleep. Anyway back to the conversation this morning… I said that maybe I would study, this is something I have thought about for a long time, I remember my last year at college deciding I was going to head into work after secondary school until I decided what to do with my life, no point wasting the money on university until I knew what I wanted to do right? well here I am 31 (?) and still not sure… well fat load of good that plan did! So I said to my friend (the creative) possibly nutrition as I have a real interest in food and the impact it has on our bodies. “Yes” she said “totally!”…  we talked about how I could set up something online, even have a small business running out of our local town (15 minutes away, we live rural). So I left the coffee date thinking.. thinking what do I want, do I want to study? do I have time to study? Would I actually pass? I kept thinking about this as I sat back down at my desk to carry on with the coding of the last round of 20ths (did I mention that my husband and I own a farm? so yes I run all the office side of that).  Then the Creative messages me, she says ” Bugger the nutrition degree. Why don’t you just become an expert in your own right about your condition? You could blog about the challenges you face in every day life with the dietary restrictions. You could post recipes and organisational tips based around feeding a busy family and dealing with the restricted diet etc. You could offer consults online or in person… and even create an e book with ideas and recipes and details of how to best deal with it all! And another e book for children dealing with the same restrictions! It could lead on to so much more too…  we could brainstorm together! I can help! haha” You see I have a condition called Ulcerative Colitis (UC), if you are reading this blog then you probably no what it is but if you don’t it is a type of Inflammatory Bowel Disease where you have sores and inflammation in your colon (large intestine) and often rectum, very simply put these sores can effect you absorbing the nutrients you need in everyday life for your body to perform properly. Suffers often feel physically and mentally tired, they can have trouble maintaining everyday life, the body can feel sore and achy. For most suffers it also comes with bouts for terrible  Diarrhoea and suffers can find them selves on the toilet 10, 20, 30 plus times a day, or like in my case, the complete opposite with severe constipation, and the worst part, well it is life long.   Well my initial reaction to The Creative’s message-  “Hell No, and all the reasons why I could not do this started to poured out… I am not qualified to do this, people don’t want to hear things from me, I am no doctor, what if I say the wrong thing, what if people don’t like what I have to say, my condition is not as bad as others they will think I am a fraud. Well here I am. I googled ‘write a blog NZ’ found this site, set up a page and have written something. I don’t know what I am doing, I don’t understand what I need to do from here but I do understand I am not the only one struggling with Inflammatory Bowel Disease, and I surely can’t be the only person that believes that what we put into our bodies and how we treat our bodies has an impact on our health.. I am not going to be an expert on this topic and I wont claim to be, I am not sure if I will end up putting out e-books and the like BUT  I am on a journey, I am working with my GP and a nutritionist to see if I can improve my health. Tomorrow I will have completed three weeks of excluding all grains  and dairy from my diet and so far have been feeling pretty amazing for the most part and to be honest has not been as hard as I thought. The aim is that by eliminating these foods from the diet you are eliminating the most common ‘trigger foods’, hopefully excluding these for a period of time and using gut healing protocol (more on this next time) will allow the gut to heal, therefore allowing you to (hopefully) reintroduce these foods later down the track with not issues.   I am checking in with my nutritionist on Monday for a progress update.  I will write again soon to talk more about the lifestyle changes that I am trying to include to lower the anxiety in my life, my plan to start incorporating movement into my day (apparently just having a gym membership doesn’t work – I actually need to use it), gut healing protocol and maybe something food related. Well as I am a mum this naturally has taken me all evening to write and it is now 9pm. I am going to head to bed, but first I will send a copy of this to The Creative as I have not actually answered her message from earlier!