73: What Caused Your First Flare, And What's Causing You To Flare Now?

Crohn's, colitis and diverticulitis flares are the worse - but why do they keep happening? It's certainly not random like your doctor's told you. 

TOPICS DISCUSSED:

• What caused your first flare
• Why flares keep happening
• The 3 biggest reasons you get sick
• Why flares and inflammation are not random and the science behind it
• The 4 stages of immune dysregulation that lead to flares and immune hyper-reactivity
• Real client scenarios of how they ended up with IBD so you can understand your root causes
• What the path to healing actually looks like for you

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Transcript

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) You probably got diagnosed with bowel disease only after symptoms got really, really severe or you hit that wall and flared up, which caused you to eventually seek medical attention. That's typically how it goes. But this flare, that first and any other flare since didn't come out of nowhere. And it's not your body just randomly deciding one day that it's allergic to you and wants to attack. That's just not how it works. So the question is, what caused your gut to flare up in the first place and what is still causing it to keep happening? Contrary to what your doctors told you, Crohn's and Colitis are reversible. I've helped hundreds of people reverse their bowel disease and I'm here to help you do it too. Because inflammation always has a root cause. We just have to find it. This is the Reversing Crohn's and Colitis Natural Podcast. I do these live trainings in my Facebook group every single week and put the audios here for you to listen to. If you want to watch the video versions of these episodes, just click the link in the show notes to get access to our Facebook group and YouTube channels. For weekly updates, information, tips and tricks, you can sign up for our email list by clicking the link in the show notes below. Now if we haven't met net, met net? If we haven't met net, my name's Josh Dech. I'm an IBD specialist, physician's consultant and researcher and I'm here to help you heal yourself naturally. Now, any questions at any time, please drop them in the chat. We will get to them in the end. These conversations, if you're new, are typically about 15 minutes long. So make sure you're here for those questions. We'll get to all of them for you. Now, I'm gonna show you during today's lesson, I suppose we'll call it, what caused your first flare, why you keep flaring to this day. You need to know your first flare was not random. It's that your body just hit a limit and your immune system overreacted. And then what we're looking at now is the root cause was never handled. Therefore, you continued to overreact and that's why you've been sick and reacting ever since. And so there's only one thing that you take away from this conversation today. One thing ever at all. You need to know this much. There are only three things that make you sick. That is it, three things. And these three things push you through the four stages of bowel disease or inflammatory reactions. Are we having trouble on the live or on the side? No, you're live. I just can't see it on the feed. Oh, weird. Well, we are live, so we're successful. That's fine. Anyway, if Facebook is missing us, maybe Instagram is good. You're in the group feed? Ah, yeah, pop over to the Crohn's colitis group. You'll be inside there. Weird. All right, well, we'll keep going. It's all right, the show must go on. So as I was saying, if you remember one thing today, one thing only, remember there are three things that make you sick and these three things and these three things only push you through the four stages of immune responses and collectively, this is what creates bowel disease. It's only when you get pushed too far and for too long that you flare. Full stop. That is as simple as it can get. Now, I'm gonna tell you this. I'm gonna walk through what these three things are and these four stages are, but you need to remember this for the rest of your life. Inflammation in your gut, in your body, anywhere is never random, ever. Ask yourself this question. Have you ever gotten a blister without friction, like wearing socks without shoes? Have you ever gotten a blister without a burn or an infection? No, they don't just happen randomly. Have you ever broken a bone without some sort of mineral deficiency or osteoporosis or a high impact injury? No. Have you ever gotten sick without there being a viral or bacterial infection? No. Have you ever stubbed your toe on nothing? No, it's always a coffee table, right? There's always a reason why you get sick or your body is dealing with something. There's always a root cause. And so again, I will say it. There are three things that make you sick which push you to the four stages of immune responses. And if these three things are never corrected or addressed to happen in the first place, it will continue to come back over and over and over and over and over again. So what are these three and four things? Let's figure it out. Are you troubleshooting on the Facebook side? Well, it says you're live, but now it says the live video is starting. Facebook is having some trouble. Sorry, guys. We'll just post a replay on Facebook later. Okay. All right. So I'm gonna walk you through the three things and the four stages. This is the information, guys. I cannot make it simpler than this. So if you wanna remember anything, you wanna take notes, do so now. There are three reasons you get sick. It is a toxin, it is a microbe, or it is a deficiency. That's it. Toxins, microbes, deficiencies. These are three things that make you ill. Toxin can be anything from EMFs to Wi-Fi to chronic stress, chronically high blood sugar. Toxins can be alcohol, food emulsifiers, artificial food, nitrates. Toxins can be pesticides and chemicals and mold toxins, all kinds of toxins, thousands of them. Toxins. The second, microbes. Parasites, viruses, bacteria, fungi. And then, of course, deficiencies. Deficiency of what? Well, fresh air, sunlight, exercise, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, good quality relationships, good quality stress, downtime, relaxation, deficiency of sunshine. Any of these things, any lack of these vital things we need are going to make you sick. So here's what we have to understand. Three things make you sick. Toxins, microbes, deficiencies, which push you through the four stages of immune responses. And these are the four stages. Stage one, this is acute. Now, let's talk about you getting the flu, right? A broken bone, an infection, whatever it is, there has to be something that gets into your body, your body reacts to it. You get the flu, a little virus came in, kicked you up. No big deal, your immune system reacted, your nose got stuffy, little inflammations, your immune system started to work, and you kicked it in a week or two. You're good, that's acute. Any healthy immune system and immune responses will kick that and they'll ramp up, kind of like this meter here, right? So we're just gonna call this high and we're gonna call this low. Any immune response will kick up in acute stage one, and then it kicks back down. Easy, it comes up and comes down. A little reaction, you're good. It throttles itself, it regulates itself, you're fine. Here's the problem. When these toxins, microbes, deficiencies happened in your body, which led you to this acute reaction, with their other underlying toxins, microbes, deficiencies in your body, or it hits you really hard and heavy for whatever reason, there's all kinds of factors why, but it comes back down to a combination of these three things, instead of it becoming acute, it goes into stage two, which is called chronic. So these toxins, microbes, deficiencies would have made you sick. Your body ramped up just a little bit for a short period of time, it came back down, that's acute, it can't come back down, so now it's resting at chronic. So you're always inflamed just a little bit. Your body just, it's just never healthy, it's never happy because there is always a toxin, microbe, deficiency of some combination in your body, chronically driving you to have these chronic immune reactions, chronic inflammation, chronic disease, chronic whatever you call it, comes down to these three things. But here's the problem. When you have a chronic disease for long enough, picture a blister on your heel, if you walk on that heel long enough, and it starts beating on that skin, it is rubbing it red, it blisters, it bleeds, what happens if you keep going? Damn right, you're gonna get to the bone, damn right, it's gonna start to create a hole in your foot, damn right, it's gonna lead to hospital stays or surgeries or something. So when a chronic condition, toxins, microbes, deficiencies that your body couldn't fight off and calm down from stick around long enough, you end up in stage three, which we are going to call immune mediated. What is immune mediated? It's a hyperactive response. So instead of your body going, ah yeah, we're inflamed a little bit, no big deal, it freaks out, it goes really hard and heavy, it doesn't know how to calm back down because it's been going on for so long, so long, the toxins, microbes, deficiencies continue to get worse, which increases the burden, therefore increasing the demand on your immune system, it's gonna freak out. Just like you having a stressful day, that's acute, you can deal with it. Chronic stress over time, over time, over time, over time that wears and tears on your mind, on your body, on your everything, one day you freak out and punch your boss in the mouth, a little bit of an overreaction. That's what your immune system's doing. It couldn't handle the chronic stress of toxins, microbes, deficiencies, it became overreactive. The problem is now an immune mediated response is a hyperactive immune response, so inflammation then becomes more inflammatory, there are cells, part of that inflammatory response, which are meant to heal you, which over time, as they wear and tear on you, break down tissue, they become cytotoxic to your body. You have these different cells, it'll turn what's called CD57, it's like the super toxic kamikaze cell, which is doing its best, it's like last hurrah, I'm here to do a job, I can't do it, boom, let me see what I can get rid of while on my way out. So these cells become more and more toxic over time. That breaks down tissue, that increases calprotectin, that leads to ulcers, that leads to fissures and fistulas, it leads to architectural changes and stricturing and scar tissue and all this stuff, simply because the immune system never understood how to come back down because it was chronically burdened over time until it freaked out. Now we talked about four stages. You're watching right now, there's probably a 95% chance you're in stage three for Crohn's and colitis, that's where most people sit. I would even argue 98% from what I've seen in over 600 cases now in my practice. But let's say you get pushed way over the edge now. This is stage four. The fourth stage we're now calling immune dysfunction. This is the big kahuna, this is the big problem. The problem in Western medicine is your doctor looks at you and goes, oh yeah, you're inflamed, autoimmune. I'm not even convinced autoimmune disease exists and that's an entirely different conversation. I'm working on that one to try to publish something more formal so people believe me and take me seriously, but point being, let's talk about immune dysfunction. Hyperreactive immune responses go on for so long, your immune system becomes deficient, it collapses, you end up with what's called MCAS or mast cell activation syndrome. Maybe it is true autoimmune disease, but not 100% of bowel disease cases, probably not even 10%, if not less, maybe 1% of bowel disease cases have true autoimmunity, I have yet to see any of them. Maybe you have chronic inflammatory response syndrome, again, immune deficiencies. That can happen, but it's a very small subset. I say this confidently because the research is very clear. Your doctor looks at the disease, puts you in a box, oh, it's Crohn's, colitis, diverticulitis, ah, it's autoimmune. Show me the autoantibodies. Show me where it's actually autoimmune. I've gone through the research. The antibodies that are present less than 5% of the time, all the way up to 80% of the time are not autoantibodies. They do not attack you. There was old rhetoric in medicine where they assumed it was autoimmune. They found a bunch of antibodies, went, yep, they're probably auto. Later discovered that they were not self-attacking, they were attacking bacteria or proteins or yeast or something within your body, not your actual self-tissues. It got lumped in and the rhetoric carried for the last 100 years, went, oh, it's autoimmune. That got picked up around the 60s, give or take, and it just never died. But there are no autoantibodies. It is simply a hyperactive immune response due to a chronic problem that never went away of toxins, microbes, deficiencies. That is all. So there are three reasons you get sick which push you through the four stages of immune responses. If you never address those first three things, your immune responses only get worse over time, especially in genetically susceptible individuals. But here's the split. That does not mean it's a genetic disease. It means you have a genetic weak link and something pulls on that chain. That's it. Maybe you have the HLA gene. Okay, whoop-dee, doesn't mean anything. It's useless until you're exposed to mold chronically and can't get rid of it. Then that mold chronically causes issues and you go up the ladder of the four stages of immune dysfunction. But the gene didn't cause a disease. The gene made you susceptible to a toxin, microbe deficiency which pushed you through the four stages of immune dysfunction. So again, the one thing you need to remember from today is that there are three reasons you get sick, toxins, microbes, deficiencies, which push you through the four stages of immune responses which are acute, chronic, immune-mediated, and then immune dysfunction. That is all. And I'll tell you a couple of stories to walk you through how this happens. Now, you might be going, well, my kid's only four years old. I've seen that. Yep, there's a lot of reasons why. I'm gonna tell you two stories from two ladies who are in their 30s and well into their 60s. But I'll give you an idea of the range that this thing can happen in. So one story I've been telling a lot lately, we just saw her about three months ago and actually just published the episode of her recording of her first call with me on the podcast because she gave us permission. Thank you very much, Lena. But here's what happened. Born and raised in Columbia in 1984. She grew up in a poor home and she remembers there was a big, long house. She grew up with her grandparents and she had a room at the back of the house. There was mold up and down the walls. Then she moved and there was more mold. She was exposed to, because of the mold, it led to UTIs and tonsillitis and skin boils and all kinds of stuff. Chronic antibiotics for chronic tonsillitis and all these issues until she was about 20, 25. She grew up, there was probably 40 doses of antibiotics before she turned 20, 25 years old. 40 doses. It can take a healthy body six to 12 months to recover from one. So she never recovered. She just got hammered and hammered and hammered which damages your immune system. You got microbiome, your mitochondria, your gut lining, et cetera, et cetera. Climbing up the ladder. On top of that, she was born in Columbia in 1984. So if you don't know much about the history, this is the rise of Pablo Escobar, the largest cocaine empire in the history of the world, making something like a billion dollars a day. They were feuding with the Cali Cartel at the same time, late 80s, early 90s. So there were guns going off, bombs in the street. In her words, if mom wasn't home by 6 p.m., we just kind of figured she died in a bombing. So you have antibiotics and mold exposure and trauma and all these different things which lead to infections and parasites and bacteria and fungus, et cetera. Toxins, microbes, deficiencies. Climbed up the ladder till she got diagnosed. Another woman, we'll just tell you the story without her name, but she grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. She was the 11th child in her family. She had four family members who died from cancer, several other family members who are actively alive and have cancer today. So you got 11 kids plus mom and dad, that's 13 of you, and you have seven to eight of you have cancer. Something's wrong. Well, it turns out they grew up in a moldy home and they grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, which was where they dumped a lot of nuclear waste for the Manhattan Project. It's like Cancer Alley down there. She had chronic urinary tract infections. She was on chronic antibiotics. There was a bunch of stress and trauma in the 90s when her house burned down. She had viral infections that she was treated for more antibiotics. She had psoriasis. All these immune reactions piled up and piled up chronically over time until she hit this ulcerative colitis diagnosis where her immune system was so overclocked it broke down her tissues. And now she was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, but it didn't come out of nowhere and it wasn't genetic. You don't get a disease in your 60s that's just genetic. That's nonsense. That's what pushed her over the edge till she got blood in her stool, went in, got medical attention, they said, oh, it's colitis. Yep, it's just genetic. It's just autoimmune. How about this entire history of exposures and toxins and traumas and deficiencies? Toxins, microbes, deficiencies. It keeps coming back to the three things that make you sick which push you through the four stages of immune responses. Full stop. Now you might be asking about kids. Well, I had a four-year-old who came in to see me and he had a severe ulcerative colitis. He was 15 bowel movements a day, pale gray, limping around the house, losing hair, losing weight, like on death's door. Doctors had him on Antivio, so a biologic, right away. Here's the thing. He's four. He didn't grow up in Columbia. He didn't have all this trauma. Well, he was exposed to heavy doses of mold. Brand new home was just built in like 2021. Nobody knew. But the wood that was used to build the home was moldy and all these toxins pushed to the drywall and the paint and the plaster. The whole family was sick and nobody could figure out why. Doctors said, oh, yeah, it's just genetic. You've all got illnesses. No, it was a toxic environment which led to dysbiosis, which burned up all of his nutrients, his antioxidants, this and that, which lead to deficiencies. So he just had this rapid onset due to a mega dose of toxins creating microbial imbalances and deficiencies in his body. On top of that, we now live in a more toxic world. We have EMFs and Wi-Fi everywhere, which are cellularly toxic. We have mold in every, all of our environment. 70 plus percent of US homes and commercial buildings have a mold problem, which is highly toxic. We have diet now, which our food and our soil is so depleted of nutrients. We have so many emulsifiers and food dyes and chemicals and colorings. Are these the hill to die on? No, but it's death by a thousand cuts. We have generational dysbiosis. As more toxins have come into our system over the last 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s, guess what's happened? Your body has taken more and more of a beating. You've lost microbes which have died over time. Toxins have come up, microbes have come down. So we don't have the immune response and defenses we used to with an extra toxic world with less defenses than we biologically should. Of course we're gonna be sick. Our air is polluted. They spray all kinds of junk. There's chemicals in the air. The bloody rain has glyphosate in it. There are pesticides in everything. Our water is full of fluoride and pharmaceuticals and antidepressants. It sounds depressing. Listen to all of this. But a clean home, test for mold, run an air filter if you need to, and get a high quality water filter. If you can't afford like a five, $6,000 Kengan, get a $300 AquaTru, it's what I use, it's incredible. Get a $200 water distiller. I've used one of those, they're great. Brita, no, they had a class auction lawsuit. But a distiller, a high quality filter, carbon reverse osmosis, et cetera, does the job. Turn off your wifi at night. There's basic stuff you can do. The issue is it feels like a lot because our environments are no longer compatible with our biology. And so we have an abundance of the three things that make us sick. Abundance of toxins, microbial issues such as generational dysbiosis or overgrowth, whatever it is, and deficiencies. And they rapidly push us through these four stages of immune responses, being acute, chronic, immune-mediated until we hit mediated responses for extra inflammation and ulcerations or immune dysfunction. That's why we are where we are. Your first flare is not random, it never was. And your body just hit that limit. Your immune system overreacted and the root cause was never handled. Therefore, you've been reacting ever since. And once you can understand your history, what things piled up to get you where you are today, finally then you can understand where the issue started and why you have this disease, which gives you the tools to make a roadmap. It was mold? Great, let's check to see if you have any active exposures. Can we know mold does a damage to these areas of your body? Ask Chachapiti. Mold damages mitochondria, connects to bile and it stores in fat, so you gotta be sweating. You need these vitamins, you need these supplements. Chachapiti could build a decent enough program for you as long as you go slow and talk to your doctor about it. It's not that hard to do. I mean, it is and it isn't, but you get the idea. If you can just understand your history and your root causes, the path forward, it spells itself out. It's not that complicated, it just takes time and the medical system we now have today gives you seven minutes of time, not an hour to figure it out. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. One of my favorite things to hear as an IBD specialist is something along the lines of, I learned more from you in 15 minutes than from my doctor in 15 years. And if this, for the first time, is really starting to click and it's starting to make sense, you're going, wait a minute, this might be reversible. I think there's more that I can do. This condition came out of nowhere. It happened to me out of the blue. I was healthy for 10, 20, 30, 40 years and suddenly I wasn't and you're telling me there's no cause. If you're understanding finally that there is a cause, that something is driving this, I want to invite you to check the link in the show notes below. Send me an email, ask a question, see if a program is the right fit for you because I promise you, this doesn't have to be a lifelong sentence. You're not doomed to this and IBD can be reversed.