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World IBD Day, May 19

Stephanie Gish, Crohn's Disease Warrior, World IBD Day

What’s behind this smile? 😁Would you guess fatigue? Dizziness? …How about kidney damage? Anemia? Crohn’s?

While you probably would have guessed Crohn’s (simply based on the name of this blog!), the others may not have crossed your mind. Continue reading “World IBD Day, May 19”

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Do cravings ever go away?

Chocolate dessert with ice cream

I’ve heard so many people say that their cravings for junk food completely went away after adopting a healthy lifestyle, cutting out refined grains and sugars, and including more healthy fats in their diet. I’ve read comments by many people on the ketogenic diet saying that their cravings went away in just a few months, while others who went straight carnivore said their cravings vanished after just a couple of weeks (or even days!). But, what about me? Well, after three months of keto, followed by six months of straight carnivore, and now entering my ninth month of eating keto carnivore, I still want junk food. Especially warm, soft, chocolate chip cookies just out of the oven…or frozen cookie dough, another favorite of mine. And if I close my eyes, I can almost taste them. Continue reading “Do cravings ever go away?”

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Dogmatic Diets…When to Break the Rules

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No matter what way of eating you follow, chances are there will be a few rules you must abide by. Avoid dairy; no processed foods, refined oils, or gluten; refrain from drinking alcohol; use this sweetener but not that one; and the list goes on…

Reflecting back on my own journey, and thinking about all the different diets I’ve tried–whether they were for bodybuilding or Crohn’s management–I think I can say without a doubt, that I fall into the category of “chronic dieter.” Over the past 20 years, I’ve read and followed so many diet books, programs, and articles, that I lost count a long time ago. From the Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution to The Maker’s Diet, I’ve tested the dieting spectrum from plant-centered to all meat (although, I’ve never gone vegetarian…if you can’t tell by now, I love steak too much to do that). But, no matter how different all these diets might appear to be, when you break them down, they all really center around the same basic principles of eating real, unprocessed food and cutting out both sugar and highly refined seed/vegetable oils. And (in my humble opinion) it really doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

But, there are two things that I really don’t quite understand about dieting:

  1. Why people become so dogmatic about the way they are eating, and
  2. the amount of hate that people will shout from behind a computer screen to others who don’t eat what they do.

Continue reading “Dogmatic Diets…When to Break the Rules”