I believe our bodies are designed to heal with nourishing food.
After being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease at age 22, I was able to find complete healing through diet and lifestyle changes. This page is a way for me to share my story and inspire others to use food as medicine.
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Reversing Crohn's Disease with Diet
my story
Two faint red lines started appearing on the pregnancy test I was holding. I was shaking with excitement. Being a mom is something I’ve dreamed about since I was little, and a year ago I thought it might never happen. Just three months ago it was still out of the question. I had been sick with Crohn’s disease to the point of being bedridden for several months and my body was hanging on for dear life. This is the story of how God used nourishing food to heal my body.
june 2024
Getting an IV in the ER
Let’s backtrack to before any Crohn’s symptoms ever appeared. In March 2023, I was 22 years old and in perfect health. I was 5'5", weighed 126 pounds, and worked out at a CrossFit gym 5 days a week. I ate relatively healthy and had never had any health complications, not even a single food allergy. Medical worries were foreign to me.
I got sick in mid-March with what I thought was food poisoning. When it wouldn't go away after 12 days, we decided to go to the ER to see what was going on. I was given an IV for dehydration, but sent home without any direction. A week later, my symptoms had gotten even worse and whatever this was was starting to scare me. I went back to the ER, where they did a CT scan and saw that my gut was visibly inflamed and swollen. A few weeks later, a colonoscopy confirmed I have an autoimmune disease called Crohn's disease.
By June 1st (just 2.5 months later) I had lost 32 pounds (I now weighed 94 pounds), was bedridden, and had extreme joint pain. Everything I ate gave me intense abdominal pain, and I wasn't absorbing any nutrients from it. When I went to see the doctor, I was told that there is no cure for Crohn's disease, only medication that can help mitigate the symptoms. I'd have to be on this medication for the rest of my life and probably need at least 1-2 surgeries as the disease progressed. When I asked about diet change as an option, I was told that food does not affect the disease. I felt defeated. This didn't sound like a solution.
March 2023
Our sweet baby boy, born February 2025
The next month, our life was turned on its head. My husband and I moved into a fixer-upper house in a new state for his next military assignment. I still wasn't able to walk or take care of myself, and we didn't have a hospital in our new city yet. My husband is a real-life superhero - he spent all of June working his new job, fixing our house, doing grocery runs, and cooking healthy food - hoping the diet would start to heal my gut. All the while, I was confined to the one bedroom in our house that was livable. Most of my memories from this month are pretty blurry - I slept a lot and when I was awake I wasn’t fully present. My body was in survival mode.
I hadn't gone on any Crohn's medication, but I was suffering and needed to try something. We committed to eating the Plant Paradox diet, which focuses on eliminating inflammatory foods and foods high in lectins. In his book, "The Plant Paradox", Dr. Gundry explains that lectins are a plant's natural defense system, designed to deter animals (and us) from eating them. They're considered "anti-nutrients" because they can interfere with digestion and nutrient absorption by causing inflammation and gut problems such as leaky gut. We hoped that eating this way could eliminate some culprits that may be causing my leaky gut and allow my gut lining to start healing.
June 2023
A few of our first "plant paradox" recipes
Extremely underweight - 95 pounds
An AMAZING meal my sister made for one of our family beach days
In July, my husband left on a three-month deployment. I flew back to California to stay with my parents and two youngest sisters while he was away. I was still so weak that I had to be pushed through the airport in a wheelchair. Even though I was very sick, this summer was one I will never forget. My whole family was on board with helping me heal, and all 5 of us ate the plant paradox diet that summer.
At this point, my gut was so compromised that anything I did (or ate) seemed useless towards any real healing. I was stuck. I got a phone appointment with a functional doctor who recommended I take Sacro-B probiotics and prescribed a short dose of Prednisone (an anti-inflammatory steroid). The Prednisone was life-changing. I was only on it for 10 days, but it gave my body the boost it needed for the food to start making a difference. I started seeing big improvements, my joint pain had disappeared and I had gained 8 pounds back. I still wasn't fully healed, but I was beginning to see the profound effect that food has on our bodies. After getting a lot of blood work done, I started taking several different supplements based on where my doctor had discovered nutrient deficiencies. I was slowly making progress.
When I learned the importance of vitamin D for autoimmune diseases (and that I was severely deficient in it), my family and I started doing what we called "sun sessions" - we'd all put on our swimsuits and lay in the sun with a timer. We started with 5 minutes on our bellies and 5 minutes on our backs so that we wouldn't burn. As the summer progressed, we worked up to 30 minutes on each side (at high noon!) without burning. Our “sun sessions,” combined with lots of vitamin D supplements, put my levels back in a great place by my next doctor's appointment.
By the end of this summer, I was back to a place where I could function on my own. I still had hard days and on-and-off pain, but I was no longer bedridden and was making slow progress toward complete health. The diet was beginning to work.
July 2023
First dinner on the carnivore diet - 2 steaks!
On December 5th, I decided to try the carnivore diet. I started with eating only grass-fed beef, pasture-raised chicken, wild-caught fish, eggs, and coffee. I started feeling much better and my abdominal pain significantly decreased, but was still present.
Later that month, I got more blood work back - including a food sensitivity test. This revealed a bunch of foods I was sensitive to that I had no idea about. Some of the results were obvious (such as dairy, which was off the chart for my sensitivity score), but others I would have never guessed. Among those were eggs, coffee, and black pepper. I cut those three things out of my carnivore diet the day after Christmas.
Within 2 days, I started feeling better. And within 2 weeks, most of my symptoms were gone. I continued eating exclusively beef, salt, and water for all of January and February. As I started feeling better, my appetite returned and I ate about 4 pounds of meat every day. It’s amazing how much meat you can eat when you don’t eat anything else! By the end of these three months, I was back at a healthy weight, had my energy back, and all of my symptoms were gone.
The last day of eating carnivore, I had more blood drawn to see how my body was doing. One of the tests run was an ANA IFA Panel which detects autoimmune responses in the body. This test has been positive for me since March of this year. This time it was negative. Food had reversed my autoimmune disease.
I started adding other ingredients back into my diet one at a time. The first food I tried was avocado. I gave it a couple of days to make sure I didn't have a reaction and then added in onions. I continued doing this with every new food I tried. If it was a whole food that I knew I didn't have a sensitivity to, I considered it fair game to try adding to my diet.
december 2023
The slow progress continued until November. One weekend, I decided to make quesadillas with grain-free tortillas, goat cheese, ghee, and some organic sour cream for dipping. I had a really bad reaction and that meal made me realize that I have a dairy sensitivity. Eating so much dairy in one sitting undid several months of healing. I cut out dairy the next day, but the damage was already done. By Thanksgiving, my weight was the lowest it had ever been and I was extremely weak.
november 2023
I truly believe that with nourishing food, our bodies are designed to heal themselves.
Stocking up on meat for our freezer
Enjoying the yard with our little guy :)
MARCH 2025
Even though I still don't eat gluten, dairy, refined sugar, or seed oils, I have expanded my diet quite a bit. I’ve felt healthier this year than I felt before my Crohn’s symptoms ever started. I’m able to lift more weight than I ever have (eating so much protein does wonders for strength training!) and I have more energy throughout the day. I delivered our first baby in February 2025 and had a wonderful pregnancy. After eating the way I have for almost 2 years, it feels like I have so much freedom when it comes to food. And my taste buds have changed to where I feel like I'm enjoying food more than I ever have before!
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