Digestive health & nutrition

My career change came about through a desire to get healthy and help others be healthy too. I know I've probably mentioned that before, and lately in my posts I've been talking about developments in both my career and in my own health separately. But believe it or not, when I find companies I want to work for, I sometimes look at them through the lens of a job seeker AND a consumer. Not all companies – for example, I would not be seeking weight loss services or health insurance. But for some companies that promote holistic / integrative health, I think to myself, “yeah, I'm a consumer of that.” I guess specifically, though, I'm trying to repair my digestive health. And I did not study gastroenterology, so I would not be qualified to help anyone with that, but digestion and nutrition are such relatable and accessible topics that it makes sense that they'd be driving forces behind my being in the health and wellness field in general. Everything is connected.

While it seemed that I'd found a solution to my problem, I'm finding that even though there is a specific medicine to treat the specific condition, there's an ongoing process of maintenance that needs to be carried out. So I might simply never be able to go back to my previous ways. Just as maintaining weight is a way of life, so is digestion. I can't really say if there's anything I did to cause my condition, but for whatever reason, I couldn't digest certain carbohydrates or foods containing fodmaps (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols). There's a special diet built around avoiding such foods, which is really restrictive (at least in my opinion). There are so many foods normally considered healthy that you can't have if you want to avoid intestinal backlash. And it sucks because it makes me rethink everything I thought I knew about what was good for me. I DID know what was good according to what they teach in school, but in school I never learned about specific GI problems that make that stuff moot. I wish it could be as easy as finishing my medicine and going back to what I knew was healthy and adding probiotics. But I don't know if it will be yet. I don't know if I'll need to avoid certain foods indefinitely.

And here's another thing. I haven't even totally adopted the suggested diet modification yet because it seems too difficult! For instance, take whole wheat. It has fiber and vitamins and nutrients. If you eliminate it, you have to make sure you get those things elsewhere. But the urgency of eliminating it isn't as great for me as it'd be if I had a wheat allergy or celiac disease (which I don't). But I may have an intolerance. Intolerances don't really do any severe damage to your body the way food allergies and celiac disease do, but they cause discomfort. So the question becomes, do you want to deal with the discomfort or not? And one more final thing. I've come across a plethora of special diets for GI problems like mine. Not only is there the low fodmap one, there's also the “specific carbohydrate diet,” the GAPS diet, and some others. And there are some differences in them – like one food that may be okay on one of them isn't okay on another. So it sort of drives you crazy. Who knew that digestive health could be so damn complicated? But I guess that brings me back to the beginning when I was saying that it's an ongoing process to stay healthy in life.