Eating, Digestion and The Daylight Diet

As a teenager, I became interested in playing sports and began to pay closer attention to what I ate for the first time in my life. I wanted to be bigger and stronger and I assumed eating more was the answer. It wasn’t until I was diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) at 20 years old that I discovered I was consuming a very unhealthy diet. Prior to my illness, I thought I looked fine and felt wonderful. My endurance and strength were superb. I ignored all the warning signs I experienced, like my growing belly, unhealthy skin and unpleasant attitude. Nothing was able to keep me from eating anything I desired. Reminiscing about my teenage years now with much more awareness about health, I realize it wasn’t endurance, but stimulation that kept me going, stimulation from unhealthy, processed, chemically laden foods. Countless children and teenagers appear to thrive while eating unhealthily, but eventually the damage they are building will supersede the stimulation, resulting in a state of disease.

Being diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease was my worst nightmare. It brought about everything I was striving to avoid. I was exercising to be big and strong, and I became weaker and smaller. At one point, my weight plummeted to 118 lbs. Talk about a humbling experience. Too bad I didn’t perceive it that way at the time. My main concern was how to avoid the symptoms of my illness because I didn’t want to look skinny. To me, having a scrawny appearance as a young man was worse than the pain of my illness. I’ve since overcome that shallow thinking, but back then I was young and naive. I was so focused on looking good on the outside that I was not interested in dealing with the inside. Finding a cure was not my top priority. With urgency, I had to stop the weight-loss that comes along with IBD. In addition, I had to reverse the muscle loss that was a result of malnutrition because I was not able to completely assimilate nutrients. The only solution I could think of was to greatly increase the amount of food I was consuming. I attempted to consume high fat foods and high protein foods. They became the mainstay of my diet. But the more I ate, the worse my condition seemed to get.

Finally, after several trips to the hospital throughout the years, and surviving on drugs prescribed by doctors and seeing no improvement, I decided to give up! I was in my bathroom, the toilet was full of blood, my stomach felt like it was getting punched non-stop, and I was as thin as a twig. I couldn’t deal with this anymore. After trying everything I knew, it seemed I was out of options. Surgery to remove my colon seemed like my only choice. This was my doctor’s advice if the condition continued to worsen. Apparently, people with IBD have a much higher risk of getting colon cancer, so my doctor wanted to play it safe by removing my colon. At that point, if it was going to relieve my pain, help me gain weight and save me from cancer, I was going to give it serious consideration.

To make matters worse, at that time in my life everything seemed to be going wrong. Along with my illness, I had an unsupportive wife who was upset with my emaciated appearance, a job I didn’t enjoy and I was in deep debt, getting deeper. 
So I gave up. After spending several hours in the bathroom, I finally stopped trying to get better. I didn’t know about prayer at that point in my life. I just asked over and over again “why me?” I struggled not to become depressed, but as the pain worsened, my mood darkened.

I left the bathroom that night and lay down on my bed. I decided I wasn’t going to eat. I really didn’t have a choice because it seemed the more I ate, the worse I felt. I wasn’t trying to starve myself, but if that happened, I thought it would be better than living with the pain and other issues that came along with my illness.

I wasn’t looking for an answer at this point. I gave up fighting or looking for a cure. I just wanted to be out of pain. For three days, I ate nothing and just drank small sips of water. On the third day, I realized I was going to the bathroom less often. When I did go, there was less blood. I thought this was interesting, but I was more curious to see how much weight I had lost during those three days. I got on the scale and noticed I actually gained one pound. WOW! Here I was trying to get better by eating more, when my real healing began by eating less. It didn’t take long after that to realize there was something to eating less, especially during times of pain and inflammation.

The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. When I was a teenager, I sprained my lower back playing in the water at the beach. It was only a minor sprain, but still very painful and I had to stay in bed for a few days. Putting pressure on it would have made it worse. Until the inflammation went down, I had to rest. If I did walk, I had to go very slow.

I now began to understand something I had been missing all along. Inflammation is the body’s way of saying we are putting too much pressure on a certain part of the body. I was putting too much pressure on my digestive track by overeating and not eating healthy foods. Just as if I had tried to do jumping jacks on a sprained ankle, the more I ate the more pressure I was creating on my digestive organs. Only when I removed what was contributing to the problem, did I begin to heal. Years later, when I met Dr. Fred Bisci, he told me repeatedly, “Health begins with what we leave out of our diet.”

I researched and found that poor digestion is the most common illness today, and if not addressed properly, will lead to worsen conditions. I read several books that stated the condition of your colon would determine the status of your heath. To be healthy, you must keep the colon clean and working well.

I discovered information that wasn’t new, just overlooked. Poor digestion creates a toxic bowel! Overeating creates poor digestion! The colon can only handle so much food at one time. Any amount beyond that is gong to result in serious discomfort or dis-ease. Inflammation of the colon is a result of excess food. My illness was in a more advanced stage, however anyone can have inflammation of the colon and not suffer from IBD.

If you are overeating, chances are there inflammation somewhere in your digestive system. 
When inflammation occurs, the digestive organs shift from a digestive mode to a cleansing mode. This cleansing mode is an automatic, built-in garbage disposal that helps keep the body clean. After years of using excess energy to keep cleansing, the organs lose their vitality. At this point, there is very little energy to digest food and the garbage disposal cannot do its required job, so it shuts off. The next stage is usually constipation, and finally, more fatal diseases like colon cancer. Anyone eating a healthy diet who has a clean colon will not suffer from inflammation of the colon or any other part of the body.

A clean colon is the opposite of what so many people have today. Their digestive tracks are filthy. They suffer from constipation and continue to put more food on top of undigested food. This creates fermentation and putrefaction. Keeping your colon clean, and assisting your body in the digestion of food is the answer to optimum health. The good news is that we have control to make that happen. After my experience and helping hundreds of others, I am convinced we can do certain things to improve our digestion. Following food combining, eating less frequently, and eating fresher foods are just some of the ways to assist digestion. But the best way is to have temperance while eating and only eat during daylight.