For those who have been following my blogging journey or just watching me over the last few years, you know my diet has progressively evolved and is, what some would call, quite radical now (although extremely delicious and satisfying…you should hear the whimpering of my dogs every night as I fry up bacon and sear my daily ribeye…). What can I say though, I do rather enjoy experimenting and researching food and fitness. That said, as you may remember, one of my earlier posts to this blog outlined what I called “My Crohn’s 1.0” diet, it was what I started eating immediately after I made the decision to stop taking my immunosuppressant and immune-modulating drugs.
Knowing that there is often more than one right way to do something, I wanted to share some of the modifications I made to my original diet, prior to jumping on the very small bandwagon of Zero Carb. Recently, I heard Crohn’s Disease likened to that of the flu, as if there were many different strains of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), which includes Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis, that give each Crohn’s or Colitis patient very different symptoms and responses to medications and treatments. I like the analogy because it paints a picture as to why some people with IBD do very well on an all-plant diet, low FODMAP diet, Specific Carbohydrate Diet, or any number of different diets and others do not. It’s also why most doctors can’t/won’t provide dietary guidelines for IBD patients, because the same thing doesn’t work for everyone.
So, throughout the course of the next year following my original diet, I began experimenting with adding other healing foods that I came across during my unending research: eggs, sourdough, and bone broth. I won’t spend much time on the first one, eggs, because most people already know that eggs are considered one of nature’s perfect foods. They are, after all, complete with all the life-giving nutrition necessary to turn a cell into a baby chicken. I’m only mentioning them here, because I didn’t include them in the original diet. I waited a few months and then started eating eggs for breakfast (scrambled in either coconut oil or grass-fed butter) when I didn’t want a shake.
But, that’s enough about eggs. For those who missed it, a quick recap of what my daily diet looked like in the beginning (I’m partly recapping this for my own benefit so that I can look back later and identify what worked at times and what didn’t, and whether I want to go back to a point where I may have strayed away from):
Morning
Coffee and cream
Protein shake with greens (kale and spinach), fruit (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries), and raw milk or kefir
Afternoon
Salad with chicken or beef, drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar
Yogurt and fresh fruit (blueberries or strawberries)
Kombucha
Sauerkraut
Evening
Tunafish with avocado oil mayonnaise or steak on the weekends with sautéed mushrooms
Sauerkraut
Raw milk
1 oz soaked and peeled almonds
Snacks/treats
My coconut oil “protreat”
Occasional glass of wine in the evenings
Occasional vegetables (I was careful to not overdo these in the beginning…too much definitely gets me in trouble)
Supplements
Glutamine
The above diet treated me very well for nearly two years. It was almost perfect for me–and would have been–if it had only been able to keep the mild Crohn’s symptoms away during these winter months (but, I’m striving for perfection and have thus now ventured into the plant-free world). So, before I get too far into my new experiment, I wanted to pause and share some recipes and more information about the other two main foods I added to my original diet; those being sourdough and bone broth. Both of which, I believe, have incredible health benefits.
In the next couple of weeks, along with updates on my carnivorous life, I’m planning to share my sourdough recipe made with sprouted spelt flour and discuss more about why home-made, traditionally-fermented sourdough bread is full of nutrition, is delicious, and is easy to digest. When done properly, there have been reports of those with Celiac Disease even being able to eat sourdough without problems. I’ll also talk about bone broth and why it’s considered a gut-healing food. The reason chicken noodle soup has been a long-time popular remedy for being sick is because it used to be made in the traditional, long-simmered manner with real chicken bones, creating an incredibly nourishing food for the body and boosting the immune system.
So, on that note, I just wanted to briefly introduce two of my other favorite foods and relieve any fears that my blog was going to turn into nothing but meat and recipes for steaks; though I might include a few down the road 🙂 Think of this as simply just one of many tools in the toolkit.