Healing Interstitial Cystitis Diet: What I Ate So Far to Get Better
The most frequent question I received from interstitial cystitis readers on Instagram was "What diet you did eat to start healing?" I do not follow the IC diet. It contains many inflammatory foods and ingredients that hurt a sensitive and damaged bladder. I've come to learn that the IC diet was not enough to heal me as I progressed through my healing journey.
If I had to sum up the diet that I am currently doing, it is:
- 80% vegetables / 20% meats (poultry and white fish meat only)
- dairy-free
- gluten-free
- sugar-free
- vegetables not high in oxalates (google oxalates and kidney stones, I won't go into detail here on it)
- But I will detail even more on it below.....
I eat a diet that is very clean, very plain, and not processed at all. I amusingly call it "Rabbit Food" or "Mother Earth Diet". It is very similar to what is written below. This was posted by the Admin over at the Facebook Group Healing Interstitial Cystitis Naturally:
Please remember that everyone’s body is very different and we do not believe in the typical IC diet that gets handed out by doctors here. We all need to be eating a healing diet which will look the same and different based on our individual sensitivities. I highly recommend doing a real elimination diet to find your sensitivities. It’s the best way to find them. The expensive tests are pretty worthless for many reasons.
This is what the base of a healing diet should look like -
The IC diet that allopathic doctors hand out is full of foods a healing body should not be eating. Dairy, sugar, gluten, processed.
They also tell you to remove things like fruit which is ridiculous. Fruit is alkaline forming in the body and has the phytonutrients our bodies need to heal.
The “IC diet” should look like this -
All organic and as local as possible:
• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Nuts
• Seeds
• Good fats (avocado, coconut)
• Plant based non refined sweeteners (honey, maple syrup, coconut sugar, date sugar)
• Pseudo grains (quinoa)
• Gluten free grains occasionally
This is what a real elimination diet looks like and how you can find your personal triggers to eliminate them. A true elimination diet is where you choose a few foods, 3-4 that give you no to very little pain that you can live on for a few days.
Eat only those foods for 1-2 days then add in 1 new food. Eat only those foods for 1-2 days then add in a new food and keep going.
You should be journaling the entire time how each food makes you feel when you first start eating it and after the day or two right before you start adding a new food in.
If you are going to eat meat and/or eggs they shouldn’t be eaten more than once a day and should be removed for the first month of healing or while you are doing healing protocols, and have to always be the cleanest, highest quality you can find.
As for me, my diet was similar to this but I started mine differently and some foods I can't eat due to food sensitivities. Just like Jessica Parks on Youtube, I ate the same 5 or 6 foods for an entire half a year. If you read My Story, my bladder pain was so severe it put me into a wheelchair, so my self-made protocol was very strict, and although extremely lacking in nutrition, I was able to accelerate the healing of my bladder. I lost so much weight that I ended up at 79 lbs, but my bladder healed substantially. By 1 year and 3 months, I have gotten much better. I still have mild pain in pelvic regions that come and go or shift around, but nothing horrendously immobilizing like before. So my diet was mainly this:
• The first 6 months: I ate the same 5 or 6 foods for half a year or even longer - almost vegetarian, with home-made organic chicken bone broth, and organic chicken and wild-caught fish and mostly salads
• No Seasonings: No salt, no seasonings, no vinegar, no sauces, no sugar or any sweeteners
• Fruits: Only blueberries, then I added in pear and watermelon about 7 or 8 months later
• Gluten-free everything
• Fats: Avocado and olive oil - I could not eat coconut oil since I found out I have an allergy to them
• Sweets: Exceedingly rare. Maybe once or twice a month when I felt brave, I would eat organic figs and dates very sparingly
• Seeds, nuts and nut butters: I stopped all those because my TCM doctor told me not to do them as they can be inflammatory to IC bladders. He was right, because when I stopped the nut butters, I felt much better. If you do not know what a TCM doctor is, it is mentioned in my old posts
• Pasta: I do not eat regular pasta. I eat pasta that is made of only 1 ingredient such as rice. I avoid noodles unless it is made by myself such as buckwheat flour noodles, since noodles are man-made with many inflammatory ingredients. June 2 update: I was doing quinoa and brown rice, and stopped those right away when I heard they were medium to high oxalate food and should not be eaten for UTI'ers who have history of kidney stones or history of kidney stones in family.
• Meat: I am not vegan or vegetarian, but I eat 80% vegetarian and 20% meat. However, I notice when I eat vegan, I feel much much better. I will do spurts of eating vegan to accelerate the healing.
• No dairy: Inflammatory for most ICers, and I'm Asian = quite lactose-intolerant
• No sweet vegetables: no yams, sweet potatoes or squashes
• No mushrooms: advised by TCM doctor
For meats, I eat organic free-run turkey and chicken, and wild ocean fish. I check on the internet to see which meats and fishes are alkaline or acidic. I will only eat meats that are mildly acidic, but not more than that. Red meats and certain seafoods are very acidic and damaging to a battered bladder with little lining left. You need to get the bladder repairing by not constantly bathing it in high acid.
As of today in late May, I still eat a rather limited diet. Just off the top of my head, I remember that I can eat: Blueberries, pears, watermelon, zucchini, broccoli, carrots, cucumber, potatoes, rice, quinoa, chicken, turkey, halibut, salmon, tuna, celery, romaine lettuce, spring mix leaves, spinach, bok choy, choy sum, gai lan (Chinese broccoli), cabbage, chicken eggs. I can't remember if there are more, but this is what I eat with no sauces nor seasonings. As for what I drink, I avoid tap water and only drink from plain bottled water that is either neutral or alkaline and sourced naturally (not chemically created alkaline), which is explained on my YouTube. I do not drink any other beverages, except for the occasional chicken or fish bone broth (home-made), Corn Silk Tea, Chamomile Tea, and Slippery Elm Tea. Everything I buy is organic, non-GMO, wild caught and/or free-range and as clean and high quality as possible.
If I go out to restaurants to eat, I only go to Whole Foods, Freshii or some Poke bowls (no sauces, no vinegar rice) and stick to eating those to keep my bladder safe. Once in a while, I will be at a 'normal' restaurant and when I have to eat a 'normal' meal with friends, I take 2 - 3 Prelief tablets to help reduce the acidity. But I always feel the damage after eating a regular meal hours later, it brings burning urgency and a stinging bladder. If I don't eat those 'regular restaurant foods', I can lead a semi-somewhat-almost normal life.