I didn’t accept the fate my doctors gave me and you don’t have to either. In this episode I talk about how Ayurveda and Yoga have helped me heal from ulcerative colitis.

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Welcome to the Simple Ayurveda podcast. I’m Angela Perger, and this is a place where we discuss how ancient wisdom can be applied to your everyday life, so that you can be your happiest, healthiest self. 

Welcome to Episode 3 of the Simple Ayurveda Podcast. Today I’m sharing my own health journey and how I used Ayurveda and Yoga to heal from ulcerative colitis. The reason that this topic is so near and dear to my heart is because I want you to know that just because a doctor diagnoses you with something, it doesn’t mean that it has to control your life, or that you’re stuck with it forever. You are the one that has the power. 

I was a child of the 80’s so I grew up eating all of the processed food that my parents believed to be healthy at that time, like hamburger helper, canned vegetables, plenty of packaged junk foods, and then my mom also gave us fresh fruit for snacks and typical foods that kids ate at that time. And I don’t blame them for offering those processed foods because at that time they believed what they were doing was giving us healthy, nutritional food. But when you know better, you do better and so since then of course I’ve completely changed the way that I eat. 

When I moved away to college I lived in the dorm and I ate ramen noodles and a bunch of crap. I worked, and somehow I contracted mono. Probably from a water fountain I’d like to think, but who knows. And so I was 21 and I spent 3 weeks living on a friends couch, this was after the dorm. I couldn’t get out of bed except to get to class and then to get home, and I slept, I slept I think 15 hours a day. I started to experience some digestive distress, and by that I mean diarrhea. Eventually, I had no choice but to go to a family practitioner and start getting tested because it had to be something more than mono. And I went through a series of tests including a colonoscopy, an ERCP where they put a tube down my throat, and all of this landed me with a diagnosis of ulcerative colitis and PSC, primary sclerosing cholangitis, which is basically a rare auto-immune liver condition where the body supposedly attacks its own bile ducts. And the bile ducts are little teeny tiny passageways in the liver that move bile or toxins out of it. So when those get clogged up they could basically harden and hold on to the junk in the liver. That’s the simple version of it. 

So at this time I was, I was sick for about 6 months I think I remember, and there was a day where I was going to take the laundry to the laundromat, and I literally pooped my pants. I was in college, I was young, I should have been healthy. And I could not control that urge. And I’m telling you this because I think it’s really important to hear the low of lows, and the laundromat poop was the low of lows. I was mortified, thank God no one was around. After that I went on steroids, so my face blew up like a chipmunk but my symptoms became under control. I also had to eat a diet, a low residue diet, known as BRAT where basically it was bananas, rice, applesauce, and toast, that’s what mainstream medicine recommended at the time. 

To add on to these symptoms, I also suffer from alopecia, where a huge chunk of my hair fell out, it was toward the bottom but it was a big bald spot about 2 inches in diameter around. And that couldn’t be explained by any of my doctors. My mom came to visit me in college and we traveled to a university specialist a few hours away where he told me that I would never have kids, and that I would definitely need a liver transplant within 10 years. 

I started to change the way I ate, I shifted towards more vegetables, salads, sandwiches with vegetables on them, so leaning more toward what would be considered a “healthy” diet in mainstream culture, but nothing like Ayurveda. I definitely kept up my drinking ways, so a few weeks after all of this happened I remember meeting up with one of my girlfriends and telling her the doctor said I could never have kids and then going out and getting drunk with her. So I didn’t start to connect these symptoms or what was happening to anything I was doing, I sort of thought this must be hereditary in my family, and it's bad luck, and it’s this combination of catching the virus of mono and it triggering something that was already dormant in my system through my DNA, because we found out later that my grandmother also had some sort of colitis symptoms that weren’t diagnosed. 

Up until that time I had planned on doing the Peace Corps, I had already applied and had been accepted to teach English in Costa Rica which was a dream come true. I was taking college level Spanish courses and was basically packed and ready to go. When I was given the diagnosis of colitis I found out that the Peace Corps at that time anyway, did not accept volunteers with medical conditions that required care or prescriptions. And I was devastated at the time. So I decided to move to New York City and go back to school to become a teacher through CUNY, the City University of New York, which is more affordable than most graduate programs. So moving to New York exposed me to a lot of ideas, and different ways of thinking, and the seeds of vegetarianism were planted for me, by going to a Buddhist meditation class. 

And after I finished school in New York I moved to Philadelphia and became an inner city school teacher, which was not exactly the...the job was a lot different than what I thought it was going to be. And I started practicing yoga at a studio that really helped me to manage stress, and completely changed my life. And I’m so grateful that I did stumble upon Yoga. 

During my Yoga teacher training in Philadelphia, I met an amazing group of people that inspired me to stop using so many toxic products. So I switched to organic food, organic beauty products, cleaners for my house, anything that I could. I also started making kale smoothies, green smoothies and salad every day for my lunch. So I had a really big shift toward more healthful habits, but something wasn’t quite right according to Ayurveda that I now can look back and see in all of these decisions. 

I also felt uncomfortable that I was taking prescription drugs. My doctors had told me that I would need them for the rest of my life as maintenance, but deep down inside I knew that, I didn’t believe that I needed them. Forever. So as I began eating, what I considered to be really healthy, I would start to experiment with weaning off the medication, and when I would take less of the NSAID, the anti-inflammatory medication, for the intestines and colon, I would get those symptoms of diarrhea back. So I’d have to keep taking the medication. So although I believed that I was eating super clean and healthy, my body still needed the medication to function normally. 

After I had my son, I remember googling “how to cure ulcerative colitis naturally” because I had gotten back my colonoscopy results that there was some red inflammation, and that was despite eating what I believed to be a healthy diet and taking the medication. And I came across the GAPS diet, the Gut And Psychology Syndrome diet by Natasha Campbell. And she’s a neurologist and nutrition doctor that used this diet protocol to heal her own son from autism. And basically it’s like a paleo diet with lots of bone broth and it’s very strict. Not a drop of sugar, no carbohydrates, and there’s no sweet potatoes, potatoes, so I remember crying to my husband because I was practically vegan at the time, thinking that this is the only way that I’m going to be able to heal this health condition is by drinking bone broth. So I researched and found a farm that had a co-op through the Weston A. Price foundation where I went and took my son to visit this farm two hours away so that I could see that the animals were treated fairly and humane, and I started eating meat and I started drinking a lot of bone broth, and I did not eat any sugar or any processed foods or any carbohydrates. And that lasted for about 4 months, and I started to slowly wean off my colitis medication. Now none of this was with approval from my doctors. So please don’t do this on your own. And I was able to wean off the medication and I did not have the typical colitis symptoms that I had had before when Iwas doing the kale smoothies. So I basically did not get diarrhea. My colon was okay. And then I went for my yearly MRI, I get an MRI every other year with an ultrasound just to check the liver and make sure everything is okay. And that year, my doctors saw something on the MRI that alarmed them, and they called me in for a second appointment, they gave me a team of specialists, and told me that they thought I might have cancer. Now my doctor is an hour away and he’s near a T.J. Maxx and a Whole Foods, and a Nordstrom, so I did not bring my husband that day, I left my son with him and I said “Oh let me go to my doctor by myself” because I thought I’d be in and out of this appointment and I’d be on my way shopping. 

So, when I went into that appointment by myself and I saw a cancer specialist in front of me, it was pretty shocking and I was crying in the office which I don’t like to do, I felt like I was being dramatic, and I came home and told him what they said, and I felt really devastated, obviously. I thought I had cancer. And just like “what can I do?” if I eat green smoothies I’m not healthy, if I drink bone broth everyday and not a drop of cake for six months I’m not healthy. And I felt a little bit hopeless But I’m also a natural optimist so deep down inside I felt like there is still something out there I just don’t know what it is. 

I had always been interested in Ayurveda since that first Yoga teacher training, but I was confused by it. Eventually, last year, I found out that one of my Yoga students was studying Ayurveda so I started meeting with her. And she introduced me to the basic principles of Ayurveda. Meanwhile, my hypothyroidism was back. I didn’t mention that yet, but during my pregnancy with my first child I had it. After I had him I googled “how to get rid of hypothyroidism naturally”, and I also saw a naturopath, and both my internet research and the doctor recommended going gluten-free which I did and was able to wean off, with doctor permission, from thyroid medication. And then when I became pregnant with my daughter my hypothyroidism was back. I took the medication again during pregnancy and then started weaning off after pregnancy. But this time when I got the blood test to check, the hypothyroidism was raging. So at this point my new Ayurveda health counselor and friend suggested another doctor, and I realized after going to a naturopath and a counselor and another counselor, and specialists from all over, I had to figure out the answer for myself. I was really fed up with having these conditions hanging over my head and with feeling tired. So I enrolled in the Health Counselor program, with no intention of doing anything with it but figuring out my own issues. 

And the program that I’m enrolled in, the first three months are just about yourself. So I had to journal my food, try out recipes, commit to new routines, and during that, something magical happened for me. Not only did my colitis calm down-I started to get energy back. So I did this when my daughter was one year old and my son was four, and I started making really simple food at home for most of my meals. I started following Ayurvedic recommendations for food combinations, I started using spices that are supposed to help the food digest, help your body digest the food, I began reducing caffeine based on the recommendations. And I started to feel better. And I started to again test that weaning process from the colitis medication, the same process that I had gone through before when I did the GAPS, and I do this super super slow. So I was prescribed 6 pills per day and basically I would cut one in half every other day for a couple weeks. And when I felt ok with that, then I would cut one in half in the morning every other day for a couple weeks, and it was a very, very slow process. So if you are thinking about testing the waters of reducing medication, please talk to your doctor. I recommend talking with an Ayurvedic health counselor and it doesn't have to be me, and if you don’t know where to find one you can send me an email at angela@simpleayurveda.com and I will recommend you someone. I have a list of wonderful people that I trust. 

And I started this process of removing the medication from my system which I now believe was toxic because it didn’t allow my body to function naturally. I am now symptom free and medication free of ulcerative colitis. And earlier this year my doctor of 15 years who is a department head at a major university hospital told me “whatever you’re doing is working.” And that was a moment of celebration. That the papers from that procedure, from that test, showed that there are no symptoms or signals that I even have ulcerative colitis, that I am completely healed from it. That is scientific evidence that Ayurveda is working in my body. Believe me, I’m over the moon and that’s why I’m talking about it. 

When it comes to my liver I did not nor do I now have cancer, I’ve never had it. What I did have was inflammation of the bile ducts. And my studies of Ayurveda has taught me that inflammation, redness, is all pitta dosha out of balance. And basically that’s heat. So I need to take a little more seriously the recommendations for calming down pitta dosha. The things that have healed my body are reducing caffeine, reducing alcohol, eating very simply, following the rhythm of the day, so eating lunch as close to noon as possible when digestive fire is the strongest. I have shifted away from raw food and salads and kale smoothies, things that are cold, toward warm, cooked food that is nourishing and easier to digest. I’ve started using digestive spices like fennel and cumin and ginger and turmeric, and I plan to get into more specifics of these healing suggestions deeper in the podcasts and I also write about them on my blog and I post about them on my Instagram which is @simple_ayurveda. And that is really what I’m excited to share is how to start doing these little things that really add up. 

I also realized that my vata was completely out of balance and that is mobility and movement. I’m always on the go, half the time I’m eating food in the car, out and about, and this past year I’ve made the conscious effort to ground myself. To stop eating in the car. And if I do eat in the car, I turn the music off so that I’m not engaging all of my senses. I try to make it as mindful as possible even though it’s not ideal. I also stopped doing things that overheat. So I’ve stopped looking at Yoga as my exercise and I now practice slow flow or a creative style, or yin Yoga only. I don’t do things that make my face bright red. Right? Because that’s heat, and that’s good for someone that’s kapha. So if you have stagnant energy or if you need to move around, then you don’t have to follow these same suggestions that I’m telling that worked for colitis. Because in Ayurveda we all are individuals and we all have our own things that are out of balance and so we all have different ways to bring ourselves back into balance. And what I’ve discovered is that I was out of balance through vata, through movement, through changing where I lived in college, working full-time while I was a college student, and just always on the go go go. And that made me very susceptible when I caught that virus. And the lifestyle choices and the food choices didn’t help things. 

And so Ayurveda has helped me to take full responsibility that I don't feel like a victim, that I feel empowered, that I was able to heal colitis, and my liver enzymes aren’t totally perfect right now and that’s ok. That I can be in this place of acceptance and know that I have a little more work to do, right? That’s life. We’re never done learning or working, but that what I’m doing is working so I can just relax in what is. And what I’d really like for you to take away from this is that if you do have an imbalance, or a diagnosis which, the more I share my story, the more I find out that I think everyone has some sort of imbalance. If not, then you are living a wonderfully balanced life and I look up to you and hope to be inspired by what you’re doing. But, the more I share with friends or family or strangers on the internet, the more I find that we all have our own story. And when I let go of being a victim or thinking why me, or any of those type of thoughts and instead look at this from “what kind of energy is pushing this imbalance to grow, and where can I shift and make changes to soften, and to create counter balance” then that is where I find health and healing and well-being from. 

I would love to hear your story. I would love to know how Ayurveda or natural wellness has helped you to heal. So you can visit me on social media or email me or stop by the blog and leave a comment. You can find out more at simpleayurveda.com. All of the social media will be listed in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here. Namaste.