My Story

I ate my first piece of lettuce when I was twenty-one. It was iceberg. A vegan friend had asked me to try it. I did, and declared it "okay." Then I went back to my cheese fries.

Is it any surprise I ended up with IBS-C?

It's hard to know where to point the blame. There's my synaesthesia, a sensory condition that makes me gag if I bite into a piece of fruit. There's the teacher I had in first grade who refused to let me use the bathroom. There are the years of tastykakes, pizzeria pretzel combos, mac n' cheese, and Ellios pizza that I ate because, like most Americans, I knew nothing about food or nutrition.

Look at the stats in America. Unhealthy kids grow into unhealthy teens and adults. It was worse for me. Because I couldn't see the signs of being unhealthy. I looked down at my body and saw skin and bones. 

I was skinny. Skinny = healthy. Right?

Wrong.

There were a host of problems raging in my body. I was constipated all of the time. I had horrible allergies. I had chronic insomnia and sleep paralysis. I was exhausted all of the time, but I couldn't sleep. Scaly dried fungus covered the bottoms of my feet.

Over the years, I saw many doctors. None ever suggested that diet could be causing my problems.

So, when I turned fourteen, I turned the unhealthy up a notch.

Oh, how I loved to drink. I smoked too. The tobacky and the whacky. And, unknowingly a few times, the cracky.


Drinking was my fave though. It helped me sleep. Rarely did I feel hung over. When I did, I just drank my second favorite drink. COFFEE. 


Of course, this eventually caught up with me. I got fat! By 2001, my weight had shot up from 110 to 135. 

(fatty photo forthcoming)

In 2005, I stopped being able to eat. Food hit my belly like a rock. It lodged in my guts and fermented into a giant fart baby. When I walked, my ass sputtered like the Muppets' Studebaker. 

Doctors diagnosed me with IBS-C. IBS-C is the lesser known IBS. It's not the IBS of Ben Stiller's character in "Along Came Polly," who eats Middle Eastern food and runs to the toilet. This is the exact opposite. 


Basically? IBS - C means you can't shit.

Doctors offered me meds. I waved them away. I was an adjunct English professor. I made about a grand a month. I was uninsured. And I lived in Boston. 

I hit the library, determined to fix my gut through diet.

The quintessential IBS diet is full of white, low fiber, starchy foods. I tried it. It made me sicker than ever. 

Next, I got healthy. I cut all preservatives, chemicals and flavorings. I cut high fructose corn syrup and trans fat. I went Atkins. I went raw. I went organic, ayurvedic, vegetarian, vegan, wheat-free, dairy-free, gluten-free, sugar-free, caffeine-free, and alcohol-free. I ate a diet followed by only the Abkhasians of the Caucasus Mountain region in southern Russia.

Fart baby aside, eating healthy changed my life. The more foods I cut from my diet, the better I felt. My hypoglycemia went away. I stopped craving carbs and sugar. I no longer needed five cups of coffee to get through the day. I could run for miles.

Oh yeah, and I lost twenty pounds.

Today, I eat a high fiber, high raw, high probiotic, vegetarian, gluten-free, and sugar-free diet. I enjoy light exercise - jogging, swimming, basketball, or yoga. I don't smoke. I rarely drink coffee. I take medicinal herbs to tone my nerves and my digestive system.

And I can safely say I've pretty much kicked IBS-C's ass.

The story ain't over though. 

IBS-C is temperamental. It comes and goes. Nobody really knows a foolproof cure. Those of us who have it take one day at a time.

That's what this website is for. I'm not a doctor or a nutritionist. I'm just a girl on a crusade to stop farting. I read the books. I study food labels. I sample all the indie brands. I pass that info on to you, in easy-to-digest blogs.  

In the real world, I am a writer born and raised in the Philadelphia area. I teach English, Literature, and Creative Writing to college students. My fiction and non-fiction have been featured in Post Road, Fogged Clarity, The Kenyon Review, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.