How to Make Your Crohn’s Worse for $10 a Week

 

For obvious reasons these extreme budget food haul videos are very popular, where people who live in BFE rural America where a gallon of milk is $1 manage to eke out a sustenance diet on almost no money.  I’ve lived on these extreme budget diets myself for many years, where “beans and torts” was a staple and I could almost never afford a $5 block of cheese but when I could, mmmm, cheese.  What a treat!

These days of course, as a Crohn’s patient, there are more limitations on my diet than a lack of funds although as I am disabled and mostly unable to work, that limitation still applies too.  While I have managed to remain medically stable with no hospital visits or emergencies for almost 5 years due to “lifestyle changes” and importantly, daily marijuana use, I am still severely limited in what I can eat.  For example, through painful trial and error, and as corroborated by the medical literature as well as anecdotal evidence/reports from other patients, I have learned that I, like most Crohn’s patients, am severely lactose intolerant.  For me and many Crohn’s patients, it would be less (well, equally) painful to eat industrial solvent than most dairy products including milk, soft cheese and ice cream.

And since Lactaid and other lactose-nullifying agents don’t work for me to make dairy products tolerable, I also think it’s the proteins in dairy and not just the lactose/sugar I’m reacting to, which makes sense: it seems to be proteins in food that my immune system is attacking which makes eating most foods impossible.  To be even more specific, it seems to be genetically modified proteins — in other words, GMOs — that give me the most trouble.  But genetically modified or not, I cannot tolerate most dairy at all.

The woman in the above vid was able to get a gallon of milk for a dollar, which in most parts of the country is unheard of — it’s usually closer to $4 if not $5.  But as a Crohn’s patient who cannot tolerate most dairy, even if I could get 10 gallons of milk for a nickel I couldn’t drink it, blend it with other things or cook with it.  And of course, a lot of premade and processed foods contain dairy and so are also inedible.  Hard cheese is still on the table and I still look forward to that budget-busting block of cheese when I can afford it.  Of course, now it’s more like $12 and it has to be organic. 

A Cannabis Treatment Protocol for Crohn’s Disease. What Worked for Me.

My experience treating myself with medical cannabis is that it was a feat of trial and error which was both expensive and time-consuming, but that’s probably the way it should be.  People are not carbon copies of each other and there is no reason to believe that Big Pharma poisons will affect different people the same way although that is the lie we have been told.  Similarly, people will respond differently to different cannabis strains, products and dosages and the only way to find something that you know will work for you is to try it.  I was advised in the beginning to document my treatment progression to help me figure this out in an organized way but I was too sick and didn’t have the mental, physical or emotional reserves to document anything.  The “budtenders” at the cannabis shops played a very minor supportive role by describing the most common uses and effects in alleviating different symptoms but probably their best advice was that “the nose knows.”  With regard to whole flower cannabis (bud) you are supposed to inhale the scent of the different strains and the ones that smell the best to you are the ones you should try and obviously the ones that smell offensive to you are best avoided.  Contrast that sage and benign advice with that of Big Pharma particularly in the case of Crohn’s and other autoimmune and chronic illnesses where we are advised and expected to take Big Pharma poisons that we know make us feel worse.

Paleo a No-Go? GMOs, Gluten, and Crohn’s Disease. Dietary Changes That Finally Worked.

I started having noticeable issues with gastrointestinal symptoms and food intolerances early in life, if you can call diet sodas and artificial sweeteners “food.”  I was about 12 years old when NutraSweet went on the market.  It became immensely popular and was used in the diet sodas and sugar-free candies and gums all my tween-aged friends were drinking, eating and chewing.  Personally, I couldn’t stand the stuff.  It made me nauseated and bloated and made my mouth water sickeningly.  Over the years, other so-called sugar substitutes came to market and I tried them all, but every one of them made me sick.  My grandmother’s Sweet n’ Low was clearly poison and I never touched it.  As for reacting badly to actual real food, that didn’t start until later.