Did you know that your digestive tract is the size of a small football pitch?

If you’ve got colitis then this football pitch sized bodily organ has become damaged at one or various points along its enormous area. When the cells of the digestive tract become damaged it makes the digestive tract more permeable – hence the term Leaky Gut. When your gut is leaky like this it can let through the digestive wall some incompletely digested food particles.

Some research has been done into the link between IBD and Intestinal Permeability and one study found that Crohns patients had a six fold increase in intestinal permeability.

A leaky gut can lead to food sensitivities as any food particles leaking out of the digestive tract may cause an immune response in the body, leading to inflammation. Elemental diets where patients are fed a diet of pure nutrients have been shown to bring about a reduction in intestinal permeability. Researchers have also found that low-allergenic diets where grains and dairy are avoided can produce welcome relief from Ulcerative Colitis.

How to fix a leaky gut?

There are several steps we can take to heal a leaky gut –

• Initially identify any foods you may be allergic to or have intolerance to. Try a York Test which is a pin prick blood test that you can do at home. A small blood sample is sent away to a lab where they test it to look for any anti bodies to specific foods. It will tell you if you have any food intolerances.
• Next you need to get some probiotics in there, to correct any in balance between the good and bad bacteria, and correct any Dysbiosis in the gut. You need more good than bad!  A good Probiotic is Primal Defense or VSL-3. Probiotics have been shown in several medical studies to be very helpful in the treatment of colitis.
• Get some l-glutamine powder, glutamine is an amino acid which is very useful for healing the digestive tract. Glutamine is the preferred ‘fuel’ for the cells lining the mucosa of the small intestine called enterocytes. These cells have the ability to take up glutamine directly rather than waiting for it to be supplied through the blood stream. Glutamine is also required for the production of both intestinal mucus and Secretary Immunoglobulin Type A (SIgA). As a result of these functions, a good supply of glutamine will help repair  a leaky gut. Glutamine also has the benefit of helping to prevent bacteria from getting from the gut to the bloodstream. You can buy l-Glutamine powder, or try juicing Cabbage as this is a good source of Glutamine.

Ulcerative Colitis Breakthrough

After my first Colitis flare up I was left weak and unable to even walk up stairs. I had drop foot which meant whenever I went for a walk I was likely to keep falling over, so I needed to find a way to get exercise which wasn’t to hard, would build me up and wouldn’t cause me to damage my self in any other way. Basically I needed exercise that wasn’t like normal forms of exercise. Prior to my illness I used to go to Tai Chi classes, which I really enjoyed. Although I was really too weak to do Tai Chi, there is an exercise that I had learned in Tai Chi called Zhan Zhuang which is pronounced Jam Jong in English. It is best described in simple terms as Standing Exercise, that’s right an exercise that only involves standing still!. In china it is used as a method to heal the weak and sick, but it is also far more that that. Zhan Zhuang is a form of Chi Kung (Qi Gong), which actually forms the basis of many Martial Arts, often in China Marial Arts students are taught Standing Exercise before learning any kicks or punches ! It really is a unique form of exercise and has many benefits, it helps to build up muscles and tendons, improves balance and coordination, builds up your Chi energy, exercises the Heart and also has a meditative element which calms the mind. It  is an amazing form of exercise, which has really really helped me in so many ways. If you want to learn this form of Chi Kung and I would strongly recommend that you do there is an excellent book on the subject for beginners called The Way of Energy.

I discovered the Chapel in the Hospital whilst I was there and found myself visiting it and praying for recovery from Ulcerative Colitis on a regular basis. I have always been brought up as a Christian but never before had I really done much praying, but the way things were I found that going to the chapel and praying for help from God made me feel better. I didn’t really expect much to come of it but all I can say is that I am now better and maybe it was that my prayers were indeed answered.

Whilst lying about in hospital I realized that even though I wasn’t doing anything I still wasn’t particularly relaxed, and that being relaxed would be helpful to me in my recovery. I already had  an audio recording of the sounds of gentle waves, which combines these relaxing sounds with something called binaural beats, this is basically where the sound you here in one ear is at a slightly different frequency to the sound you hear in the other, you brain realizes this and the result is that it can put you in to a very very deep state of relaxation, which is good for helping your  body’s natural healing process to work more efficiently. I found this incredibly useful in hospital as I could use it to make myself rest at any time of day or night – not always easy when nurses keep disturbing you every 2 hours ! You can find out more about this amazingly relaxing product here. It comes on a CD but I managed to put it onto a little mp3 three player like this and it still worked fine as I used the highest quality audio setting.

Having had some previous experience and training in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) I already had a great deal of knowledge about various ways to help myself recover from Colitis using my thoughts and mind. One of my first realizations was that I just needed to let go of everything – all my worries and fears, I needed to put myself in a state of not really caring about anything at all, that’s not to say I stopped caring about my kids, wife or family, what I mean is that I had to stop being concerned with things that in the greater scheme of things don’t really matter at all – like whether you have the latest car, tv, biggest house, or what other people think of you, etc…  These things can become unduly important in day to day life. I actually remember lying in bed in Hospital and laughing out loud to myself – when I realized how much time I had been spending wasting my thoughts and emotions on what suddenly seemed like complete trivia, I suddenly just got the fact that I had to concentrate on things, thoughts and emotions which create positive emotional states within like joy, happiness, love, peace and healing.

So I started doing several things on my journey to heal myself of Ulcerative Colitis, I would lie in bed and visualize myself being completely healthy in the future, how I looked and felt, I would then imagine myself stepping in to that visualization and feeling how it was to be healthy again now. I also created an imaginary image of a control panel in my mind with various sliders and knobs and switches, I had one for poo consistency, one for blood loss, one for pain, and many, many others, depending on what I needed to work on at the time. I would simply picture the control panel and turn all the controls down, then I would check back a few hours later and if any of them had gone up I would turn them down again ! I kept on doing this over and over again. Another technique I used was to imagine myself floating up to a place of healing where I was surrounded by white fluffy clouds of energy which would direct energy lines to me where I needed healing. I found these things incredibly beneficial and they coincided with me beginning to recover from colits. I you want to find out more about this kind of thing I would recommend reading How your Mind can Heal your Body