First, I want to say that digestive issues can be very serious and they should not be ignored. They can require medical attention. In this post, I explain what I went through with digestive issues because it might help other people going through similar issues. The whole purpose of this is to help people, so don’t hesitate to ask me questions.
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Summary
I had chronic constipation for years when I was a teenager until I was 21 years old. In the summer of 2019, I then had crazy symptoms that made me go to the hospital, where I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis (UC). The normal treatment for UC is steroid medicines for quick recovery and a maintenance drug for long-term prevention. The medicines did not seem to do anything for me, so I researched natural remedies. After about 3 months of suffering, I ended up healing myself of UC and constipation by changing my diet to an ancestral diet explained in another post.
Ulcerative Colitis
What is Ulcerative Colitis?
According to the scientific community, ulcerative colitis (UC) is an autoimmune disease that affects the colon. Breaking down the roots of the words, col- means colon and -itis means inflammation. Ulcerative means there are ulcers. So a patient with ulcerative colitis has inflammation in the colon with ulcers present. Because the definition of UC is so general and many things can cause a colon to be inflamed with ulcers, there is no one cause to ulcerative colitis.
The scientific community only knows of factors that increases one’s chance of getting ulcerative colitis. These factors include stress and genetics. I am part Ashkenazi Jew, and for or some reason, Ashkenazi Jews have a much higher rate of getting inflammatory bowel disease than other demographics.
My Case of Ulcerative Colitis
The symptoms were a 3 month nightmare that I’ll remember and have PTSD about for a long time. I’m writing my symptoms here because there are other people experiencing this that might not know if they can relate to people about what they are going through. It does feel weird writing this because I feel 100% healthy now and makes me sad remembering how bad I was.
I don’t think I recommend reading the symptoms section below without already knowing what the common symptoms are for ulcerative colitis, because some are very nasty and shocking. Here is a resource that lists symptoms of UC.
The good news is that, because I’ll never forget how bad the symptoms were, I have so much motivation to do whatever it takes to avoid feeling this bad again.
The science community does not know the cause of ulcerative colitis. They only know correlated risk factors, such as genetics and stress. Diet is not a known cause.
How Medicine Affected me
I used some medicine that doctors prescribed me. Because doctors do not know what causes ulcerative colitis, all medicines are meant to treat the symptoms, rather than to fix the root cause. I never want to rely on masking symptoms, so even though I took medicine to try to mask the symptoms, I was constantly reading about how other people have healed from UC without using medicine.
Upon diagnosis, I was prescribed 40 mg prednisone and 3.6 g lialda, both oral pills. The prednisone is a fast-acting steroid to encourage quick healing of all of the cuts and destruction in the colon. The lialda is a slow-acting anti-inflammatory that is used as a maintenance drug to prevent any future ulcerative colitis flares.
The gastroenterologist that prescribed prednisone told me that I would be healthy enough to work within a week of diagnosis. He also told me that prednisone has side effects including swollen face, increased mood swings, and hugely-increased appetite. What I was not told is that prednisone does not always work.
After 1 week, my symptoms were exactly the same. After 2 weeks, my symptoms were exactly the same. I was also feeling absolutely no side-effects from the prednisone. I still had no appetite, even though prednisone was supposed to make me voraciously hungry. When I told the gastroenterologist that I had not improved at all, this is when I was told that prednisone does not always work for patients with the most severe cases, and that I would need a heavier drug to fix my symptoms. After 3 months of prednisone, while I was tapering down from 40 mg doses, when I was down to around 10 mg per day, I did start feeling one side-effect, which was a protruding belly. Prednisone makes your body distribute fat differently, so I was getting the big belly that bodybuilders get when they take steroids. This went away quickly after I fully tapered down my prednisone doses.
Because the prednisone failed, I was told that I needed a biologic drug to treat UC, inflectra, which would mean I needed to do an intravenous infusion every 8 weeks for the rest of my life. All biologic medicines require intravenous infusion or injection. I always knew that I would never do a lifelong medicine and I am straight edge and do not want to rely on any drug to feel good.
I continuously resisted taking biologic drugs, until I was so physically weak that I let the doctors do whatever they wanted to me. One morning, before I started infusions, I woke up with a fever. Because prednisone lowers your immune system, any fever requires a trip to urgent care to see if there is a dangerous infection. I went to the urgent care, then the hospital, and was diagnosed with a Clostridium Difficile infection, which actually causes similar symptoms to UC. I ran a 14 day course of oral antibiotic called Vancomycin.
While I was at the hospital, I ate whatever I wanted for 3 days, because gastroenterologists think diet does not affect ulcerative colitis. I expected to have “reactions” to foods because of food sensitivities, but no direct reactions happened. However, after eating these foods, when I was released from the hospital, I had absolutely no energy and my worst symptoms all came back. This is bad logic, but I thought this probably meant that no one food causes my symptoms, and it was the conglomerate of all of these foods that made me sick.
This is when I decided I would follow my current diet. I was honestly 100% confident that this would heal me. See the post about what I eat to learn about my diet. I immediately started making all of my own food, with my parents help, as I was usually too weak to do anything. In a couple days, my energy came back, and within a week, my symptoms were almost all gone. I got off all medicine in the next couple weeks, have not done any medicine since, and have not experienced any of the symptoms again.
Symptoms I Experienced
This is a list of the most noticeable symptoms I experienced in the 3 months of UC. There were other symptoms. Most of these symptoms worked together and influenced other symptoms.
- Bloody diarrhea 15+ times per day
- For probably the first month, I used the restroom at least once per hour during the day, and about every 2 hours at night. I would wake up needing to use the restroom, so I never slept well.
- I needed to be close to an available restroom at all times. The restroom visits were often extremely urgent. I pooped my pants a few times because I could not get to a toilet quick enough.
- Anemia
- I lost a lot of blood. My lowest hemoglobin level was 8.8 g/dL. The normal level for men is 13.5 to 17.5 g/dL. I got two iron infusions to raise red blood cell count.
- I had an allergic reaction from my second iron infusion and went into anaphylactic shock. I couldn’t breathe and my whole body was going crazy for about 30 seconds, until a nurse put me on a nasal cannula for oxygen.
- Weight loss
- I lost 40 pounds total, from 175 lbs. to 135 lbs. I’m male and my height is 6’0”.
- I lost 30 pounds in the first month, then 10 more pounds over the next two months. I gained 30 pounds during 1 month of recovering, and got back to my normal shape very quickly.
- I think my weight loss was mostly muscle. I was extremely weak and could not run without falling.
- I lost 40 pounds total, from 175 lbs. to 135 lbs. I’m male and my height is 6’0”.
- Low appetite
- Sometimes I would be hungry for a meal, eat one bite, and be completely full, unable to eat another bite.
- Constant fatigue
- I had no physical energy to do anything. For 2 months, I did not go on a walk longer than a quarter of a mile.
- Dehydration
- One morning, I fainted because I was so dehydrated. My dad saw me and said I had glazed eyes.
- Another morning, I had the worst headache of my life and could not stop myself from whimpering.
- I drank electrolyte drinks every day to try to stay hydrated, but I couldn’t combat the constant diarrhea, so I was constantly dehydrated.
- Abdominal pain
- This was a constant pain. It was unbearable sometimes if I had eaten hard-to-digest food earlier in the day.