The Proctitis Pages
On the Loss of Appetite
I thought it might be value to say something about the subject of "loss of appetite" because although everyone is different & responds in their own ways too having either colitis, proctitis or inflammatory bowel disease. One of the most commonly experienced symptoms is the loss of appetite. Please be aware that I am not talking about a short term loss of the appetite for example one that's gone in one or two days, I'm talking a consistent and a sustained loss of desire for food, a loss that occurs over a number of weeks possibly even months.
Loss of appetite is a major or significant symptom or sign of colitis (or any digestive condition), basically your body is trying to tell you something fairly important & all I can say is that if you don't pay attention to this message then 100% certain you'll get extremely poorly (very sick!).
Your digestive system & your body has an extra ordinary wisdom of it's own & will always attempt to bring you back into state of balance if you listen carefully to it. But if your rational mind or intellect over rides or refuses to listen to these intuitive, bodily felt signals then the sicker you end up getting.
Sometimes we carry on hoping (or praying!) or thinking that this nasty condition is going to go away by itself but it doesn't. Yet we don't look at "THE" most obvious thing we are doing to our selves & our digestive system. That is we go on eating all the wrong foods, foods that are now wrong for our body, foods that our digestive system can no longer cope with for what ever reason.
We carry on eating these wrong foods because we are creatures of habit & our eating habits are very deeply ingrained into us (& our psyche's). Our food like's & dislike's are learned before we are 5 years old & so we rarely change our food preferences within our life times. Yet an illness such as colitis may force us (it certainly forced me to NOT eat bread any more!) to make far reaching changes to one or more of our deeply held food like's or dislike's. (food patterns or food habits).
The experience of loss of appetite is often associated with a state of either depression, despair or moroseness (flat energy states). This loss of energy can be partly understood by the fact that when the colon is inflamed it just cannot digest food well & in addition to this the food we give the gut is all wrong & so the result is that we end up feeling tired all the time.
Loss of appetite is a good signal for starting to fast
Fasting will help to turn around the loss of appetite
Starting to change the diet & eating a gluten free, sugar free diet will improve the appetite
Changing to a gluten free diet will often lift the depression & improve your energy levels.
The fear of all or any food (although this is rare, it can happen but is an extreme reaction).
Finally, another experience I had myself which is pretty extreme and hopefully more rare with colitis & proctitis is a fear of food itself or perhaps that should be the fear of eating any food at all. This is the fear of becoming even more sick, this is usually only experienced when the condition is at it's absolute worst (especially in what is termed the "Acute on Chronic stages") and my experience is that it is short lived & passes in one or two days. Again if you are experiencing fear of eating then my advise is DON'T EAT the body is telling you something important, we don't have such fears for no reason and we should pay attention to them. I would advise that you stick to juices or fasting, this is what I recommend to you from my own experience (the fear will pass away but you need to trust this process).