This week, we are talking all about what you actually need to do after you've been diagnosed with celiac disease to heal your body.
Now, when I was diagnosed with celiac disease, my doctor simply said, "You just need to eat gluten-free for the rest of your life". And that was all I was given.
If you've read my previous posts, you would have heard me talk further about how I went to a dietitian and he didn't give me any information either, which I don't expect dietitians to know too much about how to help heal the body. But, you know, there was no information about what I needed to do to actually get my Villi back into a healthy state.
We do need to know though what is best to do in order for our bodies to be at their best, because I hear it all the time. Basically I hear all of these people that have got celiac disease, and they say that they cut out gluten and they don't feel any better. They still feel tired. They still feel lethargic. Some people complain that they put on an astronomical amount of weight and other people complain that they are still very underweight and not gaining weight.
I think it's so important that as people with celiac disease, we need to know exactly what we need to do to be able to heal our bodies . Now, when I say heal , I'm not talking about recovering from celiac disease, because as you probably know, by now, that's not the case. When I talk about healing, I'm talking about healing our Villi and making sure that our bodies are perfectly healthy in order to absorb all the nutrients from our food that we need to be able to thrive. Okay?
This is a really awesome example that I heard quite some time ago. Now let's just pretend for a moment that you have been stabbed. You've been stabbed in your body by a knife and you go to the hospital and the doctors remove that knife from you. Now that's great that they've taken the knife out, but it doesn't just take that to heal. Your body isn't instantly better. Is it it's going to take time to heal. You may need some stitches and, and you're probably going to need a whole heap of rest and some other things to help that knife wound heal.
So let's compare that to celiac disease. So you've taken gluten out of your diet. You don't automatically feel better. You don't automatically go, "Okay. I've taken out the knife /gluten, and now I'm great. I feel better". That's not the case. We need to heal our body to be able to feel our best. Therefore if we don't heal our body, what's going on is we have all this major inflammation. The inflammation is going on in our body from the damage from the gluten that we've been consuming for however long (in many people's cases, it's many years, it can be even decades). So we need to remove the gluten. And if we don't remove the gluten, obviously that inflammation doesn't have a chance to go down.
Now there's so many issues that can be linked to celiac disease that cause our health to be even worse. And these issues can be caused by ongoing problems with celiac disease and continuing to eat gluten as well. This is why it is super important to cut it out and super, super important to make sure you're not getting any gluten in your diet because type one diabetes that is up there as one of the other issues linked to celiac disease. Along with Arthritis, M.S., Ulcerative Colitis, Crohn's Disease, and even Psoriasis as well as a massive increased risk in Cancer. So you don't want to be dealing with those issues as well.
I think compared to many of those celiac disease is quite minimal compared to some of those issues. I have a niece that has Type 1 Diabetes and give me celiac disease any day. I feel so sorry for her, what she has to go through. It's terrible.
I had a client in the past that had Ulcerative Colitis and again, just an awful, awful thing to be dealing with. So I do highly recommend that if you are having a little bit of gluten or think you're going to continue having a little bit of gluten or a cheat day, please, please learn a little bit more about this because it's really, really not worth it.
Okay. So back to what we need to know about how to heal our villi and get our health back on track. So the villi is where our body absorbs the nutrients from our food. So to be able to heal our villi, I do highly recommend a range of supplements. I suggest you start with a Digestive Enzyme, definitely a Probiotic, Fish Oil L-glutamine, and definitely Multivitamins and Vitamin D.
Now please talk to your doctor or your primary health care giver first, before you take on any of this information start a new regime with the supplements. These are the ones that I want you to look into because these are the ones that all together can make a huge, huge difference to your health.
I go into great detail what we are talking about today, in my course Ultimate Celiac System. You can click this link here to learn more and check that out if you haven't already, because there's lots of amazing information on this entire topic in module five of Ultimate Celiac System.
All right , so next up is Restorative Sleep. So we all know we need sleep. We all know we cannot survive without sleep, but there's a difference between sleep and restorative sleep. Restorative sleep is where our body goes into that deep sleep and heals . If we don't get restorative sleep, our body doesn't heal. It's amazing really it can be as simple as getting a really good night's sleep. And that starts the whole kickoff of getting your body back into health.
Think of a time in the past, when maybe you've had a cold or a flu and you need rest, your body needs to rest and you need good sleep to be able to get better. We are exactly the same with celiac disease. And even when you get glutened, you need to rest your body. So to be able to get back on track, restorative sleep is a big one.
Movement or Exercise is great for your body. I like to call it movement because not all not all movement is typically classed as exercise. So, you know, even just walking up and down stairs, that can be a simple movement that just gets your body and the muscles moving and the blood flow happening. This can really help with healing. If you don't feel up to it , maybe just some gentle stretching or some yoga, gentle walking, things like that can be really, really great for helping your body to get back on track.
Now, the next one is Eating Well. This may seem pretty obvious. It really is pretty simple, but what I see time and time again is people get diagnosed with celiac disease.... They hit the shops and they go searching for all the different packaged, gluten free food, and they bring it all home and they think they're set because now they have access to all this delicious gluten free food . But I want you to compare it to your previous days when you didn't have a celiac disease diagnosis. This is now your junk food, okay? Packaged food is not going to help your body heal. Packaged food is generally full of things like preservatives and flavorings and additives and lots of sugar and salt. So it's not exactly the ideal food for us to be eating when we are trying to get healthy nutrients back into our bodies.
So I really recommend that you start what I call Crowding Out.
Now I'm going to pop a link here about crowding out because I explain this further, but I'll just give you a little overview here.
Crowding Out is basically where you add one thing in to crowd out something else. So for example, recently I've been cutting back on my coffee intake. In the morning, instead of having a coffee, I have a cleanse tea. That is what we call crowding out. Instead of me saying, I'm no longer drinking coffee, or I'm not having two to three coffees anymore, I simply say I've crowded out my extra coffee and I'm having a cup of tea instead.
It's a much more positive way of looking at, you know, not having something. This way there's no deprivation. It's just a different way of looking at what you're doing. So you might think, "Okay, I'm going to add in two fresh vegetables a day on top of what I'm already having. So what am I going to crowd out instead?"
You might be having a bag of potato chips. So you might say, "Okay, I'm going to have an Apple instead", or, you know , something along those lines, something healthy in place of something, not so healthy.
It's not about going gung-ho and, you know, changing everything all at once. It's just about doing your best, add in more healthy food, because that's where it's at. My friends, it's all about the healthy food. I definitely eat packaged food, or I love, you know, certain traits, but it's not all the time.
It's following the 80 20 rule where 80% of the time you eat well, you exercise, you know, you do the right thing. And then 20% of the time you have treats and you know, you let hair down and that that's, you know, that's real life. That's not living by calorie counting and all that type of thing. And I'm going to get into this more and another episode when we're talking about weight loss and weight gain, but in this episode, it's more about getting your body healthy and getting your villi healing.
And the last one is actually Positive Mindset.
Would you believe your body reacts to your thoughts? So if you're thinking negatively and you getting down on yourself and constantly feeling these negative thoughts towards you now have celiac disease and you feel deprived and you can't do this and you can't do that. Your body will react to that. And it will start to create stress and anxiety. And that is no way to live. So it's best to try and focus on the positives. And that's one thing that I did in the beginning. I was positive and I was relieved and I was actually so happy that I'd got a diagnosis that I now had celiac disease, and that I didn't have Crohn's disease because that was what my doctor originally said. He thought it was. So I took that as, okay, we're going to be positive about this, that thank goodness. It's, it's not Crohn's disease, it's celiac disease. So you, you can put a positive spin on things.
I know life that it can be hard to do, but you know, if you make a conscious effort to try and be positive about these things, it can really make a difference.
So I hope that this article has helped you and given you some ideas.
And if you have any questions, please shoot me a DM over on Instagram here and I will join you again next week in this short series of when you first get diagnosed with celiac disease and giving you the answers that you need to know.
So thank you so much for joining me. If you enjoyed this episode and would like other celiacs to find it, please do me a favor and pop on over to iTunes and leave me a review and some feedback, and that will help to get the word out there about this podcast. Thanks so much for listening and I will talk to you soon. Bye.
To navigate the challenging journey of Celiac Disease, I recommend joining Ultimate Celiac System for guidance. This will not only provide the practical advice required but also the emotional support necessary for coping with this lifelong condition. You can learn more here.
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