How I Cured My Ulcerative Colitis by Becoming a Vegetarian

The winter of my senior year in high school I started having very bad digestive problems. I was in constant pain after eating, I was going to the bathroom about six times a day or more, and I had rather embarrassing diarrhea and gas. I was so reluctant to talk about what has happening to me that I quietly asked my mother to buy me some anti-diarrhea medication and tried to keep my uncomfortable problem a secret for months. After noticing that the whole bottle of medicine was gone after only a short time, my mom asked if I was alright. I confessed that I had been having problems for several months and she rushed me off to a naturopath nearby. We have always had an aversion to traditional doctors because ailments really can usually be fixed without chemicals that are in medication. I was a very healthy child and had only visited an allopath two or three times in my life.

I had acupuncture, took herbs and filled my diet with fiber. I was tested for parasites, and my blood was tested for everything else. When that didn’t work, she told me to take sugar, wheat, rye, dairy, soy, raw vegetables, and artificial sweeteners out of my diet. I ended up eating rice, steamed vegetables and meat for two months. I lost thirty pounds, but not my digestive affliction. Naturopathic option exhausted, my mother then carted me to a traditional doctor. I was scared.

The gastroenterologist gave me a colonoscopy to determine what was wrong, and then formally diagnosed me with ulcerative colitis. He said that it was pretty much a severely inflamed GI tract, and I was less worried. But then, he told me there was no cure and that I was likely to have this condition for a very long time. I started crying. I was seventeen, and I was being told that I was going to be in constant pain and have diarrhea for the rest of my life. Then, this man went on to tell me that after ten years with it, I would have a huge increase in my chance of getting colon cancer and graphically described what that would entail. He said that there was no way to know how I got it, and that it didn’t matter what I ate, nothing would help. Then he put me on steroids and told me to have a nice day. I thought my life was over, and I hadn’t even gotten to college yet.

Today, I am only months away from graduating from my university. It has been four years since I got this disease… and I am now entirely healthy. I suffered through the pain and the steroids that only sort of helped for about a year before I decided to take matters into my own hands and not be a victim of my circumstances any more. I thought I would try one last time to fix my own body. Before getting ulcerative colitis, I had been a vegetarian. I gave up that lifestyle and chose to eat meat again because I thought that it would be easier. I never made the connection between my diet change and the problems that occurred because they were separated by several months, but I thought that maybe if I became vegetarian again I might have a shot at a full recovery. It worked. I stopped eating meat, and then weaned myself off of the steroids. Three years later, I am still without problems.

Ulcerative colitis is a scary and depressing thing to endure, but don’t believe that it is incurable. Try different things. Stop eating meat for awhile. If that doesn’t work, try cutting out dairy. Move on to wheat. It turns out my body couldn’t handle meat. It might be inconvenient, but it is entirely worth a small diet sacrifice to have a chance at being healthy again.