After a LOT of hard work (mostly getting out of my own way!), I’m so excited to finally announce that I have a new book coming out, “Crohn’s Disease AIP Cookbook”. • The Crohn’s and AIP connection—Get an overview of the science behind autoimmune symptoms and how the AIP diet is built to combat them. • Amazing food—I dug deep to create amazingly satisfying and delicious AIP-friendly dishes that ...

The Secure-IBD project is an international effort being led by doctors at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York to act as a database of outcomes of COVID-19 occurring in patients with IBD. At their site, https://covidibd.org, they are collecting data on reports of coronavirus cases as well as providing summaries of that data. If ...

We frequently hear and say these things that are supposed to be motivating and inspiring (or at least make us feel better about the choices made in the quest for happiness) but upon examination are simply glib sound bites designed to take you away from the best parts of being alive. “Life only feels short in retrospect - when we look back and reminisce about the time that has passed - it is act...

As the COVID-19 virus pings closer and closer to home we have been running through all the questions, What should we cancel (answer: as much as possible)? What happens within our kids who are at college? Maybe more importantly, what happens if we are all stuck at home together? And, how do we keep Joshua from getting sick? Having an immunocompromised person in the house adds another level of co...

They say that we have a lizard brain, but I know it’s a lion—fierce and territorial—that emerges when there is nothing else to keep us safe. Six years ago I was woken up from what was supposed to be a relatively routine surgery related to Crohn’s and told they found something unexpected, a cavity the size of a softball that was filling from my leaking intestines. On the day before Thanksgiving,...

Over two years ago I was put on Remicade (infliximab), a TNFa immune blocker, to control my Crohn’s disease. Two of the main biomarkers they use to measure inflammation with IBD is C-reactive protein (CRP), a protein released by the liver as a response to inflammation, and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) which is the rate at which red blood cells sediment in a period of one hour. My CRP ha...

A vendor I frequent at the weekly farmer’s market was emphatically describing how healthy I looked, “amazing!” and recounting how frightened she was for me a few months back when I visited her booth while recovering from complications from major surgery, “like the walking dead!”. She espoused the advice she had once read, “live each day like it’s your last”. In the moment I considered each wor...

367 sessions, 188 hours, 365 consecutive days of the original biohack. It started as a three month experiment—I remembered reading a Wired article while on a flight in 2006 about The Dalai Lama and a neuroscientist, Richard Davidson, who hooked several Tibetan monks up to an EEG machine and scanned their brain as they meditated. Since then, more studies have shown how the brain changes with co...