What is Inflammatory Bowel Disease or IBD?

Inflammatory Bowel Disease or IBD is a chronic inflammatory health condition affecting the digestive tract that includes conditions like Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis

Common Symptoms Associated with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Symptoms are a sign that something is off internally within one of these systems: Inflammation, Gut Dysbiosis or Gut Imbalance, Impaired Detoxification, Hormonal Imbalance, Mitochondrial Dysfunction, Circadian Rhythm Disturbances, Oxidative Stress, Neuro-disruption, or Immune dysregulation. Symptoms are essentially your body crying out for help in the only way that they know how to communicate. Symptoms associated with IBD include:

• Abdominal pain
• Abdominal tenderness
• Intermittent bouts of diarrhea
• Low-grade fever
• Loss of appetite
• Weight loss
• Gas
• Fatigue
• Rectal bleeding

Root Causes of Inflammatory Bowel Disease

• Leaky Gut (Increased intestinal permeability)
• Gut Dysbiosis/Gut Imbalance

Labs

My storefront is linked here to order functional labs, which is signed off by a nationally-licensed physician, to assess for gut health issues, hormonal imbalances, or vitamin/mineral deficiencies. If you need help creating a personalized functional nutrition care plan based on the interpretation of any of the above functional labs, you can work with us here.

Functional lab testing would be a good idea if you really wanted to hone in on the specifics of gut microbiome imbalances, hormonal imbalances, vitamin/mineral deficiencies.

Therapeutic Diets To Heal IBD

The therapeutic diet chosen for IBD aims to first manage GI symptoms, reduce inflammation, reduce microbial fuel based on their food reactions, and reduce immune system burden. These are short-term therapeutic diets that are not meant for you to stay on the rest of your life. We are aiming to first heal and repair the gut, slowly re-introduce new foods, identify any trigger foods, and then work to rebalance the gut using the 5R Treatment Protocol linked here.

Looking at it from the STAIN framework — Stress, Toxins, Adverse Food Reactions, Infections, and Nutritional Imbalances — we aim to identify the root causes and design a personalized nutrition care plan based on your unique biochemical individuality. Biochemical individuality is the concept that each of us has a different nutrition blueprint to achieve optimal wellness. We each have our own, unique genetic expression and that is shown in a personalized nutrition care plan made just for you.

Pro tip: Keep a food journal so that pre and post meals you can become more in tune with your body and see how certain meals make you feel. Continuously check in with yourself to see how you are feeling, this is the type of subjective information that only you can know for yourself and make sure to share this information with the dietitian that you are working with!

Ask yourself: How do I feel after eating this specific meal? *insert symptom here* It’s helpful to have a dietitian that is able to look at your food journals so that they can decipher what specific ingredient or a combination of ingredients that may be causing these symptoms. Having a food journal is also helpful to look for any potential food reactions that may be related to IBD.

Caution: Restrictive eating due to GI symptoms associated with IBD may lead to an eating disorder. It is important to not be constantly under eating, resulting in less food and nutrients in the body, just because it results in less GI symptoms! It is still possible to eat high quality and nutrient dense meals with your favorite ingredients.

Recommended Supplements, Probiotic Strains, & Medicinal Herbs

Targeted supplements, alongside a therapeutic diet using a food as medicine approach, are often used for gut microbiome support and healing. Different targeted supplements are helpful in treatment depending on the type of IBD that you have. Remember supplements are there to “supplement” or to help the main treatment which is using a food as medicine approach to healing. Some general helpful supplements for IBD are:

• GI Integrity by Pure Encapsulations
• L-Glutamine to help repair the gut lining

Make sure to order from a high quality and third party tested brand instead of purchasing from Amazon where practically anyone can sell anything without any rigorous testing. To make it easier for you, you may order from my supplement dispensary below through Fullscript’s catalog where each brand and product meets strict top quality standards. You can learn more about third party testing here.

My supplement dispensary is linked here and you do not need to be a client to place an order.

Nutrition & Lifestyle Tips

Look at sleep, diet, exercise, and stress management.

Here are some helpful tips for you to begin the process of healing IBD:

• Chew your food mindfully and thoroughly
• Limit intake of ultra-processed foods and foods with refined sugars
• Have a stress management routine! (traditional yoga, yoga nidra, breathwork)
• For bloating, you can use herbal teas such as teas with fennel, licorice, chamomile, and peppermint.
• Avoid alcohol: studies show that it is associated with increased GI symptoms in individuals with IBS.
• Having a routine that includes any form of daily movement: walking for 30 minutes daily has been shown to improve GI symptoms and lower inflammation.
• Yoga helps to reduce anxiety and stress resulting in improved GI symptoms.
• Using a bidet

Gentle reminder: Don’t stress yourself with an all or nothing mentality where you feel like you have to implement everything on this list all at once. Sometimes in order to reach the end goal, you need to take baby steps at first and build these habits bit by bit.

Referrals