As promised, here’s some details on how changing our daughter’s diet has really improved her ulcerative colitis. I had her on a fairly healthy diet to begin with, or so I thought…organic, minimal dairy, but she’d still get grains, processed foods, sugar, and fast foods on occasion. Once we got her diagnosis though, I immediately started looking into diet changes. (Because, duh, if you have any type of digestive issue, wouldn’t what you put into it directly affect it?!) We considered some trigger foods and avoided them, like corn! No corn for us now! We first started supplementing with Kate Farms shakes on the advice of her dietician in April 2017. And once I came across an article on several children having success with their IBD by diet change only (no meds!), I was on board. We researched and started Rowan on a modified Specific Carbohydrate Diet in May. And we started adding VSL#3 probiotics to her regimen, prescribed by her GI doctor, right around the same time we started on SCD.
I was not comfortable in the kitchen at all, and I was all of the sudden making all sorts of homemade stuff for my daughter (including mayo!). I was too nervous however, to make the SCD yogurt, which is a staple on the diet, but I thought the VSL#3 would be enough probiotics for now. We started with the SCD Intro Diet, which is very minimal foods, and slowly introduced foods to her one at a time. I wrote down everything we have added (still do), and we only do a new food about once a week now. Keeping track of this really let’s us know how her body handles new foods. We also check her poops thoroughly. (We are poop-checkers now. She even checks, and says, “No blood!” Poor baby.) Not super fun, but since a two-year-old cannot always communicate how they are feeling, and especially relate it back to what they ate, this is what we do.
Anyway, this diet change has really been helpful. And now that we are over eight months into it, I am realizing that she is actually on more of a Paleo diet, which is what my husband and I are mainly on now. Several things she does are not SCD legal: VSL#3, lots of the ingredients in her shakes, breastmilk, to name a few. And after researching ALL. THE. TIME. I have come to the conclusion that Paleo is really what is going to work for Rowan and for our whole family. So now instead of taking so much time to make things just specifically for her, “Rowan food,” we are all able to eat the same things at mealtimes. If some of the ingredients in a recipe haven’t been introduced to her yet, we just omit it from the whole thing, substitute with something else, or make a portion of it just for her. This has helped so much. Now we are all grain-free, very minimal dairy (cheese), and my husband and I are very minimal sugar.
She has not had any real UC symptoms due to food since starting this diet. (She had what was considered a flare-up a few months ago after having the chickenpox, but I am not really 100% convinced it was a flare-up and needed to be treated as such, but I’m still learning. Maybe I’ll share more on that later. Keeping this post about her diet though.) So at her most recent GI appointment last month, her bloodwork labs came back perfect! Another doctor there (jokingly?) said, “We’ve decided that you need to give a lecture to the other parents about diet.” Comments like this from her medical team (and the obvious health and well-being of my child) make me think we’re doing something right! And I believe a huge part of that is her diet. She is still on a very mild daily medicine (basically a topical aspirin that coats her colon), but I am hoping to eventually be able to even get her off of that and just manage her disease naturally. Of course, this will take time, and she needs to be older and know how to recognize her body’s signs, but the future looks bright and promising! I will continue to research and find what is going to work best for my girl, and share what I find through the process. If I can help anyone going through similar conditions, I am more than happy! Who knows, maybe I will do a little lecture to other parents someday! But right now, here at Camp Finley, this is where the sharing starts.
Camp Finley 