Crohn's, Fitness, Food, and My Rocky Road to Health
My Story: by Stephanie Gish
Crohn’s Fitness Food…it’s how you know me on my blog, Instagram, Facebook, and podcast…but sometimes, I feel like it should be Crohn’s Fitness Fasting. It’s been almost two months since I switched back to an alternate day fasting (ADF) schedule and I wanted to share some of the positives that have happened since then and why I continue to love and promote the benefits of fasting for better health.
Continue reading “Crohn’s Fitness…Fasting!”
Continuing my tale of vacation dining and holiday indulgences with food, I want to pick up where I left off in my previous post when I returned home from vacation and entered right into the holiday eating season.
Continue reading “Part 2: Vacation dining, holiday binge eating, and fasting (my secret weapon and saving grace!)”
For the few weeks leading up to our Hawaiian vacation this past November, I was cautiously working on adding more foods back into my diet. Common sense was telling me that with my kidneys functioning at lower than what they should be (most likely due to IgA Nephropathy) and hovering in stage 3 of chronic kidney disease, I should eat more than just meat. So, goodbye carnivore/zero carb diet. Slow and steady, I was trying a wider variety of foods to see if I could tolerate them without causing a flare up of my Crohn’s Disease. (Now, remember, it was just a few months prior, during the summer, that I failed in my attempts to add food back into my diet–bringing on a mini flare in early August). So, I’m not exactly sure why, but when we got to Hawaii, I decided to throw caution to the wind and ate ALL the food.
Continue reading “Part 1: Vacation dining, holiday binge eating, and fasting (my secret weapon and saving grace!)”
I recently had the pleasure and honor of being interviewed on the Intermittent Fasting Stories Podcast with Gin Stephens, author of Delay, Don’t Deny: Living an Intermittent Fasting Lifestyle. Fasting has been one of the things that has truly been life changing in my never-ending quest to manage Crohn’s Disease. Practicing it gives my gut time to rest; allows my body to heal and repair itself; has given me a better relationship with food; and–in an unexpected twist–it has also taught me patience, appreciation for quality, and a desire to remove more clutter (emotional and physical) from my life. It’s a mindset and a lifestyle.
Continue reading “Episode 46: Stephanie Gish on the Intermittent Fasting Stories podcast with Gin Stephens”
Part 2 is here! Well, technically, it’s parts 3, 4, and 5 of what I did to help pull me out of my latest Crohn’s Disease mini flare up. If you didn’t read last week’s post, I encourage you to go back and read it, as it paints the picture for what got me into this flare and the key changes I made in my diet to pull me out of it. So, without further delay, let’s pick up where we left off! Continue reading “Part 2: Fasting and diet, my one-two punch out of my most recent Crohn’s flare up”
Things started going downhill two months ago in July. Over the summer, I started playing around with adding different vegetables into my keto-carnivore diet. One by one–and spread out over the course of a few weeks–I tried an asparagus spear, butter lettuce, white rice, sweet potatoes, and even dark chocolate. Then in mid-July, it was time for my 7th colonoscopy (I think, I lost count), followed up by an MRI two weeks later, to see how my Crohn’s Disease was doing. Continue reading “Fasting and diet, my one-two punch out of my most recent Crohn’s flare up”
I tried fasting once, years ago, and quickly held up my white flag in surrender. Fasting was not for me. So what happened? Fast forward to today and most days you’ll find me fasting for 16 hours at a time; with the occasional 36-hour fast thrown in for good measure.
The main difference is that this time, my primary fuel source is fat. I also broke my Pavlovian response to eating in accordance with the clock and my mindset is different. Although I knew there were benefits to fasting when I first gave it a try, I didn’t know then just how important fasting actually is to keeping our bodies healthy.
So, why exactly would you want to fast? Continue reading “Why I enjoy fasting”