Things are good. "The number" has jumped up a little, but I'm not worried about that in the slightest. I literally JUST got back from a week long semi-indulgent vacation, plus I have had to REALLY focus on addressing my colon issues, which can sometimes come at the expense of being SUPER strict about food types and amounts.
Let's start with the colon. I'm not sure if I covered this in my last journal entry, but my colonoscopy in mid July showed chronic inflammation peppered throughout my colon. Scary. Especially considering that my last colonoscopy a year and a half ago showed nothing of the sort. The good news is that this goes along with the very painful digestive issues I had been experiencing for the past 8 - 10 months, which means that I can monitor my condition by the symptoms. What is kind of scary is that this is the time period during which I switched to my most serious version of paleo/primal eating. Going paleo is "supposed to" ALLEVIATE digestive problems, but it looks like it GAVE me new problems. My best guess for what exactly happened is that while I was on a SUPER low carb (<50 g carb/day) diet, even though I ate LOTS of leafy green vegetables, my overall fiber intake was MUCH lower than it was before going paleo/primal (from ~ 30-40 g fiber to ~10-20 g fiber/day, based on diet journal data I logged on fatsecret). Perhaps I starved my good gut bacteria. Perhaps I didn't have enough mass to regularly move matter through my colon and it became a physical blockage, which caused inflammation. I think it's worth noting that some of my worst, most painful episodes were when I was traveling or for whatever reason, didn't go to the bathroom for several days. Then, when I did, it was EXTREMELY painful. So it's possible that stress-induced/travel-induced/lack-of-fiber-induced constipation led to a backup that caused a lot of pain and irritation to my colon when I did go.
Ok, so moving forward to my intervention: I found this all very confusing. There isn't a clear path forward for how to heal your colon (although there are many suggestions out there, many of them are contradictory). What I ended up doing was this:
1. take out or limit anything that seems super irritable (coffee, I'm looking at you). I stopped drinking coffee, and severely cut down on nuts, egg whites, and nightshades.
2. don't worry about being low carb and eat as much SOLUBLE fiber as possible (soluble fiber usually comes along with insoluble fiber, but I did what I could to get more soluble fiber and less super-harsh insoluble fiber). This involves eating a lot of onions, garlic, and starchier things in slightly larger quantities like our banana bread and sweet potatoes.
3. drink fluids every day. This has mostly been tea, but I'm fine with that. Minimum 2 glasses, hopefully at least 4.
4. have AS MUCH probiotics as possible. I'm eating yogurt, sauerkraut, kombucha, kimchi, pickling my own veggies...EVERYTHING. AT LEAST one serving a day, but if possible, with every meal.
Having done these four things, I have seen my painful episodes become less intense and frequent, and haven't had any severe pain in several weeks. I've been going to the bathroom at least once every day (not that this is a requirement, more an observation).
August 2013