Transcript
Hey guys – welcome back to the Help for HS YouTube channel.
I just want to talk to you guys quickly about all of the stress surrounding the diet changes, and hopefully give you some reassurance and peace of mind.
And what I mean is, we get a lot of emotional comments on our videos from people who are really upset about some of the diet recommendations, and feel that it’s not a sustainable way of eating, or that the diet is too extreme.
But here’s the thing. We want you all to be able to enjoy good food – during your healing journey and afterwards.
And this type of diet, which is really aimed at getting inflammation under control, is not meant to be super strict forever.
The diet is meant to remove the most common food triggers of inflammation and the most common foods that can trigger a flare, so that your system can calm down and we can break the cycle of inflammation.
And it can be a slow process for some people, but the ultimate goal is to rebuild and balance your system so that you get to a place where you can reintroduce some of these foods again.
Now that’s not to say that everyone will be able to add back every food they were eating before, especially gluten, but almost everyone will be able to expand their diet to be able to tolerate a much broader range of foods.
But you have to first get to a place where your symptoms have stabilized and things are really under control, and then you can slowly and carefully add certain things back into your diet to see how your body responds.
Sometimes we can’t tolerate a food every single day, or even 3 times per week, but maybe we can have it once per month with no problems. Or maybe someone can’t eat a large serving of a certain food, but a small amount used in a recipe won’t cause any symptoms. So this is how we want you to look at things.
We’ve found that your body will tell you when something isn’t good for you, if you really pay attention, but we have to start with a clean slate and give your body a chance to heal first, by removing the most common offenders for a while.
And then when you start adding things back one by one, you can gauge your response. Someone commented recently that she does really well with sauerkraut. That’s a yeasty food! So that’s a great example of everyone being different and tolerating different foods. You have to do what works for you, and our diet recommendations are based on removing the most common triggers first.
I’ll tell you a story. When I was young and in college, I had a terrible diet. I ate whatever I wanted, my diet was mostly sugar, and then my health hit a crisis point. I had some serious GI problems and I developed really bad cystic acne.
And I’d been reading about natural health and diet, and I knew deep down inside that I needed to overhaul my lifestyle and start taking my health seriously, but I wasn’t ready. I had a lot of resistance. I didn’t want to change anything.
Until finally, I reached my breaking point, and my health got so bad that I couldn’t take it anymore.
I had zero confidence and I couldn’t eat anything without my stomach hurting. I was a mess. So finally I said “enough is enough!” – I was just done — and I decided to make some big changes. And it was the best thing I ever did. It was also one of the hardest things I ever did because I had to give up a lot of things and cook more and plan ahead more. But you know what was even harder? Being sick and in pain. And not being able to enjoy my life the way I wanted to.
So my point is that you are more capable and powerful than you might realize. And you can do anything when you have a big enough motivation. A big enough why.
So please know that this diet is not about us wanting to deprive you of delicious food for the rest of your life. We don’t want to deprive anyone, but we do want to help a lot of people get better.
And this is definitely not an overnight fix, and some people need a long time to heal, but this is a journey. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. And you have nothing to lose by trying these changes, but you have a lot to gain.
Please know that everything we do on this channel and through our email list is coming from our hearts and from a place of wanting all of you to live your best life.
So thanks for spending time with me today, and I’ll see you in my next video!