Anyone with IBD, and several of those of you who don’t, have been subjected to the *ahem* unpleasantries associated with diagnosis.
I had a lovely nurse, who it turned out lived in my hometown for 15 years, walk me through everything I needed to know for the dreaded “prep”. “3 days before,” she says, “you eat naughty food”, writing with word “Naughty” next to the list of acceptable food. White bread, white rice, white pasta, startch starch starch. The “low-residue diet” infamous to anyone who has been subjected to this.
As certain foods had been making me more ill over the summer, things started dropping away from my diet. Alcohol went first. Then anything heavy and creamy. Then fresh fruit. At one point, I eliminated wheat for a week. It didn’t make any difference, so I went back to it. My one really bad habit of a daily fizzy drink went. Previous experience with ciprofloxacian taught me it doesn’t go well with dairy, so that went. Attempts to eat re-introduce yoghurt after two lots of antibiotics were a disaster. Fresh veg started to disappear. Cold meat and peanut butter were making me sick. Jelly, Lucozade and Dioralyte were becoming my constant companions.
As my weight was dropping at an alarming rate and my health was declining, I had been googling food options for Crohn’s before the “tests”. At one point, I ran across someone who fully admitted that were currently subsisting on Spaghetti Hoops and Alphabetti because they didn’t have the energy to cook. And you know what, I had hit that point.
So here I was in Sainsburys, with a shopping trolley of stuff for “the prep” - Lucozade, lime jelly, various cordials to cover up the taste of the dreaded stuff, Dioralyte, Sudocream, baby wipes - and several tins of Alphabetti and screw it, it’s on the “Naughty” list, so I bought Frosted Flakes.
The shame.
I was completely and utterly embarrassed.
Normally, I’m someone who cooks virtually everything, even soup stock, from scratch. I drive 15 miles to a country village to buy meat from a top-notch butcher once a month. I love trundling around farmers markets looking at produce. I LOVE to bake. I can cook one hell of a meal on a one-burner stove when camping. Lakeland is known as the “kitchen porn shop” in my house. Cooking is how I unwind.
Although I’ve never been a big vegetable eater, I have gotten into the habit of making myself eat them. I was that single woman who felt smug about her mostly healthy food choices standing behind the haired working mother in the supermarket queue whose trolley was full of ready meals and crisps. And now I was buying tinned pasta.
And you know what? I ate it. And it didn’t hurt. So after all the nasty tests, I carried on eating like that.
I received the diagnosis the following week, and was promptly sent in to see the dietitian. I told her how much I normally like to cook and how I make virtually everything myself. I could see that she thought I was going to be an easy patient because she wouldn’t have to drag me out of the chip shop. Then I confessed to what I had been eating for the past two weeks. And you know what she said? “Great! Eat more of that! What about canned soup?”
WTF!! Did a dietitian honestly just tell me to eat Alphabetti??!!! Yes, she did. And she agreed that this was the only time that I would hear those words out of a dietitian’s mouth. Plain, white, soft, bland and boring with lots of calories. Rice, pasta, white bread. Virtually no fibre. I’m allowed one to two very well cooked (i.e., pureed) vegetable a day. Only one serving of fruit, and it has to be either a very ripe banana or applesauce. Only very lean, tender meat.That’s what I’m meant to eat for the next several months. She assures me this is only temporary (bloody hell, I hope so!!).
So now the search for food that I can eat begins. Searching for “low-residue recipes” online doesn’t bring up a whole lot, mostly just people commenting how unhealthy it is and how it is only meant to be temporary, but not actually telling you what you CAN cook. One of the only truly useful threads I’ve found was this post on Jeantte's Healthy Living where the comments kind of ran away with a discussion by people with IBD and there frustrations at trying to find things they could eat which were at least mildly interesting, and the writer of the blog making a pretty decent attempt at thinking of ways to adapt things. (Thank you, Jeanette!)
But there isn’t much out there, so I will be experimenting a lot and posting my experiments here.
I had a lovely nurse, who it turned out lived in my hometown for 15 years, walk me through everything I needed to know for the dreaded “prep”. “3 days before,” she says, “you eat naughty food”, writing with word “Naughty” next to the list of acceptable food. White bread, white rice, white pasta, startch starch starch. The “low-residue diet” infamous to anyone who has been subjected to this.
As certain foods had been making me more ill over the summer, things started dropping away from my diet. Alcohol went first. Then anything heavy and creamy. Then fresh fruit. At one point, I eliminated wheat for a week. It didn’t make any difference, so I went back to it. My one really bad habit of a daily fizzy drink went. Previous experience with ciprofloxacian taught me it doesn’t go well with dairy, so that went. Attempts to eat re-introduce yoghurt after two lots of antibiotics were a disaster. Fresh veg started to disappear. Cold meat and peanut butter were making me sick. Jelly, Lucozade and Dioralyte were becoming my constant companions.
As my weight was dropping at an alarming rate and my health was declining, I had been googling food options for Crohn’s before the “tests”. At one point, I ran across someone who fully admitted that were currently subsisting on Spaghetti Hoops and Alphabetti because they didn’t have the energy to cook. And you know what, I had hit that point.
So here I was in Sainsburys, with a shopping trolley of stuff for “the prep” - Lucozade, lime jelly, various cordials to cover up the taste of the dreaded stuff, Dioralyte, Sudocream, baby wipes - and several tins of Alphabetti and screw it, it’s on the “Naughty” list, so I bought Frosted Flakes.
The shame.
I was completely and utterly embarrassed.
Normally, I’m someone who cooks virtually everything, even soup stock, from scratch. I drive 15 miles to a country village to buy meat from a top-notch butcher once a month. I love trundling around farmers markets looking at produce. I LOVE to bake. I can cook one hell of a meal on a one-burner stove when camping. Lakeland is known as the “kitchen porn shop” in my house. Cooking is how I unwind.
Although I’ve never been a big vegetable eater, I have gotten into the habit of making myself eat them. I was that single woman who felt smug about her mostly healthy food choices standing behind the haired working mother in the supermarket queue whose trolley was full of ready meals and crisps. And now I was buying tinned pasta.
And you know what? I ate it. And it didn’t hurt. So after all the nasty tests, I carried on eating like that.
I received the diagnosis the following week, and was promptly sent in to see the dietitian. I told her how much I normally like to cook and how I make virtually everything myself. I could see that she thought I was going to be an easy patient because she wouldn’t have to drag me out of the chip shop. Then I confessed to what I had been eating for the past two weeks. And you know what she said? “Great! Eat more of that! What about canned soup?”
WTF!! Did a dietitian honestly just tell me to eat Alphabetti??!!! Yes, she did. And she agreed that this was the only time that I would hear those words out of a dietitian’s mouth. Plain, white, soft, bland and boring with lots of calories. Rice, pasta, white bread. Virtually no fibre. I’m allowed one to two very well cooked (i.e., pureed) vegetable a day. Only one serving of fruit, and it has to be either a very ripe banana or applesauce. Only very lean, tender meat.That’s what I’m meant to eat for the next several months. She assures me this is only temporary (bloody hell, I hope so!!).
So now the search for food that I can eat begins. Searching for “low-residue recipes” online doesn’t bring up a whole lot, mostly just people commenting how unhealthy it is and how it is only meant to be temporary, but not actually telling you what you CAN cook. One of the only truly useful threads I’ve found was this post on Jeantte's Healthy Living where the comments kind of ran away with a discussion by people with IBD and there frustrations at trying to find things they could eat which were at least mildly interesting, and the writer of the blog making a pretty decent attempt at thinking of ways to adapt things. (Thank you, Jeanette!)
But there isn’t much out there, so I will be experimenting a lot and posting my experiments here.
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