After more than 20 years of struggling with gut problems, changing the way I ate became one of the biggest turning points in my health.
For twenty years I lived with colitis: two or three flare-ups a year, bleeding, and days when I couldn't leave the house. Today I'm 48, in full remission and off all medication. These are the 12 foods I eat every week to keep my gut that way.
This isn't a fad diet. It's close to how people ate for thousands of years, before ultra-processed food arrived.
But the order you bring these foods in matters as much as the foods themselves. Food number seven is one of the best things you can eat for your gut. If I'd started with it, it would have made me worse.
My story
I was diagnosed with proctitis, a form of colitis, at 25. At its worst I thought I would lose part of my bowel. I missed social events and my children's activities, and every outing was planned around the nearest toilet.
I was on medication, and in bad flares I needed enemas. The dietary advice I was given was simply to carry on as I was.
In 2023, at 45, I was overweight and pre-diabetic. To fix that, I switched to a keto, mostly carnivore way of eating: eggs, meat, fish, butter and a few vegetables. Within eight to twelve weeks the bloating and pain had gone. Within four months my gut had settled completely.
Meat didn't heal my gut. What I'd done, without realising it, was remove everything that was irritating it, which gave the lining a chance to repair. Then I rebuilt, slowly, over the next six to twelve months.
Think of it like physiotherapy
If you tear a hamstring, you don't go straight to the gym and load a heavy barbell. You start with resistance bands and build your capacity back step by step.
Your gut works the same way. So I've grouped these 12 foods into four stages: calm, repopulate, feed and strengthen.
This is what worked for me. It isn't medical advice, and please don't stop any medication without talking to your doctor.
Stage 1: Calm
Stage one takes the load off your gut: simple, easy-to-digest foods and nothing that irritates. These four were the backbone of my first few months.
1. Eggs
I eat eggs most days. They're easy to digest, contain almost no fibre for an inflamed gut to struggle with, and supply vitamin A, vitamin D and choline.
Why it matters: your gut lining replaces itself every three to five days, making it one of the fastest-renewing tissues in the body. It needs those nutrients to rebuild.
2. Oily fish
Salmon and sardines, as often as I can. Both are rich in the omega-3 fats EPA and DHA.
Why it matters: omega-3s turn down an inflammatory signal called TNF-alpha. That's the same signal some of the most powerful colitis and Crohn's drugs are designed to block. Fish doesn't replace those drugs, but it pushes in the same direction.
3. Butter and ghee
Yes, really. Butter is where a fatty acid called butyrate gets its name.
Why it matters: butyrate is the main fuel for the cells lining your colon, supplying around 70% of their energy. It also binds to a receptor called GPR109A, which tells immune cells in the gut to calm down. Butter supplies a little; most of your butyrate is made by your gut bacteria, which is what stage three is about.
4. Extra virgin olive oil
I use it on almost everything, and it's my only salad dressing: olive oil, herbs, spices and sometimes a little mustard.
Why it matters: the peppery catch at the back of your throat comes from a polyphenol called oleocanthal, which acts on the same inflammatory enzymes as ibuprofen.
What came out: emulsifiers
Emulsifiers are in bottled dressings, many oat milks, ice cream and most ultra-processed food. On labels, look for carboxymethylcellulose, polysorbate 80 and carrageenan.
Your gut wall is protected by a mucus layer that keeps bacteria at a distance. In animal studies and small human trials, these emulsifiers thin that layer, letting bacteria get closer to the gut wall and triggering an immune response.
So emulsifiers went, and so did refined sugar. While I was healing, wheat and corn went too. I can handle small amounts of those now, but not then.
Stage 2: Repopulate
Once my gut was calm, it was time to bring the good bacteria back. This is the resistance-band stage: small amounts, every day.
5. Sauerkraut
I eat sauerkraut every day, and I kept it in even during my carnivore months. Buy the unpasteurised kind from the chiller cabinet; shelf-stable jars have had their bacteria killed off. Start with one forkful.
Why it matters: in a Stanford study, people who ate fermented foods daily for ten weeks developed a more diverse gut microbiome and lower levels of 19 inflammatory markers.
6. Kefir
Also every day. I buy it, and I make my own too, which is far easier than it sounds.
Why it matters: kefir carries many more strains of bacteria and yeasts than ordinary yoghurt. If dairy has been a problem for you, start with a couple of tablespoons and see how you feel.
Stage 3: Feed
Once the bacteria are back, you have to feed them, and this is where most people go wrong. Hand someone in a flare-up a big bowl of lentils and you'll make them worse; it's the heavy barbell on the torn hamstring. So start with the gentlest fibres.
7. Oat bran
This is the food I warned you about. Oat bran is rich in a soluble fibre called beta-glucan, which forms a soft gel and is gentle on the way through.
Why it matters: your gut bacteria ferment beta-glucan into butyrate, the colon fuel from stage one. Even now I don't do well on a very high-fibre, starchy diet, but soluble fibre like this suits me.
8. Green bananas
Green, not yellow. Green bananas are full of resistant starch.
Why it matters: resistant starch escapes digestion higher up and reaches your colon, where it feeds the bacteria that make butyrate. As a banana ripens, that starch turns to sugar and the benefit fades.
9. Cooked and cooled potatoes and rice
A simple kitchen trick: cook potatoes or rice, then chill them overnight.
Why it matters: cooling changes the structure of some of the starch, turning it into resistant starch. You can reheat them the next day and most of it stays.
The flare-up smoothie
If you're struggling right now, this is where I'd begin:
1 green banana
1 spoonful of oat bran
coconut milk
kefir
Blend it very well, because blending does some of the work your gut would otherwise have to do. Check the coconut milk label, as many cartons contain emulsifiers.
Beans and lentils are the heavy lifting. I've only recently brought them back, and they're fine for me now, but they came last, not first.
Stage 4: Strengthen
The final stage is variety. The wider the range of nutrients and plant compounds you eat, the more resilient your gut becomes.
10. Berries
Blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, whatever is in season.
Why it matters: their colour comes from polyphenols. These switch on Nrf2, your body's master antioxidant switch, and turn down NF-kappa-B, the master switch for inflammation. Most polyphenols aren't absorbed higher up; they reach the colon, where your bacteria feed on them.
11. Cocoa
Proper cocoa powder or very dark chocolate, not a milk chocolate bar. I also drink herbal teas through the day for more polyphenols.
Why it matters: in one study, people who drank a high-cocoa drink for four weeks had more of the beneficial bacteria bifidobacteria and lactobacilli.
12. Broccoli and cauliflower
These are the two vegetables I kept in from the very start. Cook them well, and add butter.
Why it matters: in animal research, compounds in these vegetables activate a receptor on immune cells in the gut wall that helps keep the gut barrier intact.
For fruit, the ones that have always sat well with me are kiwi, oranges and dates.
Why this isn't another strict diet
If this looks familiar, it's because it sits very close to a Mediterranean way of eating, and there's good evidence behind that.
In the DINE-CD trial, nearly 200 adults with Crohn's disease followed either a Mediterranean-style diet or the much stricter Specific Carbohydrate Diet. After six weeks, just under half of each group had their symptoms in remission, with no real difference between them.
The flexible diet did just as well as the strict one, and it's far easier to live with. That matters, because a diet you can't stick to doesn't heal anything.
The short version
Calm, repopulate, feed, strengthen: 12 foods, in that order, building your gut's capacity one stage at a time.
I've put all of this into a free guide, The Gut Health Guide, listing the foods to include and avoid at each stage. [Download it here: https://www.eattohealguide.com/gut-reset-guide].
For more meal ideas, see What I Eat Each Week to Stay Inflammation-Free.
References
Omega-3s and TNF-alpha: Endres et al., New England Journal of Medicine, 1989
Butyrate as colon fuel: Roediger, Gut, 1980
Butyrate and GPR109A: Singh et al., Immunity, 2014
Oleocanthal and ibuprofen-like activity: Beauchamp et al., Nature, 2005
Emulsifiers and the mucus layer: Chassaing et al., Nature, 2015 (mice); Chassaing et al., Gastroenterology, 2022 (human trial)
Fermented foods and inflammatory markers: Wastyk et al., Cell, 2021
Cocoa and gut bacteria: Tzounis et al., American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2011
Broccoli compounds and the gut barrier: Li et al., Cell, 2011 (mice)
DINE-CD trial: Lewis et al., Gastroenterology, 2021