Month: March 2015

Intermittent Fasting Update/Upcoming Posts

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So, I’m a week in to my little experiment with IF, as I wrote about last week.  While I don’t have a ton to update on at this point, I want to at least check in on it week to week, as I think that will help me process whether or not it’s having a positive effect on my symptoms.  My goal is to do it for a month and then really evaluate whether or not I should continue with it. First, I will say it hasn’t been as bad as I expected.  Choosing the fasting window that I did (8pm through noon the following day) probably helped with that.  I still have my green tea with a little honey and lemon juice first thing in the morning, and I drink lots of water with my Nuun hydration tabs all morning.  I start to get hungry around 11am, and at that point, waiting an hour isn’t really that bad.  I’ve kept my diet constant, and I have lunch at noon, though I have added a …

Chronic Disease From a Physician’s Perspective

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***Please note that this is not a post I have written, but rather an article on a Crohn’s Facebook page I follow.  I thought it was a great read and wanted to share, but for some reason the link was bad.  –Michelle A LETTER TO PATIENTS WITH CHRONIC DISEASE July 14, 2010 by Rob Lamberts Dear Patients: You have it very hard, much harder than most people understand. Having sat for 16 years listening to the stories, seeing the tiredness in your eyes, hearing you try to describe the indescribable, I have come to understand that I too can’t understand what your lives are like. How do you answer the question, “how do you feel?” when you’ve forgotten what “normal” feels like? How do you deal with all of the people who think you are exaggerating your pain, your emotions, your fatigue? How do you decide when to believe them or when to trust your own body? How do you cope with living a life that won’t let you forget about your frailty, your limits, …

Intermittent Fasting and Inflammation

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Admittedly, I’ve been hearing about the concept of Intermittent Fasting (IF) for a couple of years now and gave it no thought, as I love food way too much to voluntarily accept any kind of a fast, not to mention that the concept basically flies in the face of everything we’ve been conditioned to accept as gospel in the field of diet and nutrition.  Who hasn’t been told that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and that skipping meals can slow your metabolism?  Up until recently, I have been a follower of the “eat every few hours” mindset, to avoid blood sugar dropping and keeping metabolism up.  Additionally, I have found that since all my surgeries, I can’t consume as much food as I used to in one sitting, and that smaller, more frequent meals were easier on my system. If you’ve read any of my posts in the last few months, you know that my Crohn’s Disease has certainly been beating the hell out of me, what with frequent obstructions, ER …

The Soundtrack of Life – and Surgery

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Most moments in life have a soundtrack, if you think about it.  From iconic movie moments like Judd Nelson raising his fist in the air as the sound of “Don’t You Forget About Me” plays while the credits begin to roll in The Breakfast Club to Matthew Broderick lip synching “Twist and Shout” in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, music recalls a specific time, place or moment for many of us, good or bad. Music has been used in medicinal arenas going back thousands of years, when ancient Greeks identified Apollo as the God of both Healing and Music.  One of its more recent proponents, Dr. Evan O’Neill Kane, supported the use of music in the operating room, as he felt it helped “to calm and distract the patient from the horror of the situation”.  And he should know.  This man operated on himself not once, not twice, but three times, in order to better understand the experience of surgery from the perspective of the patient.  In 1919, he performed a self-amputation of one of his …