Once the word gets out that you have diverticulitis, everybody you know will be offering you home remedies. Your challenge will be sorting through those suggestions and figuring out how to find diverticulitis food that also meets your doctor's recommendations.

Diverticulitis -- you might already know this -- means that you have little pouches called "diverticula" in the walls of your colon. Those diverticula have gotten infected or inflamed, or maybe even torn. That happens because the pressure inside your colon is too high -- which happened because the food you've been eating didn't have enough fiber.

During a diverticulitis emergency, you'll be on a liquid diet, or perhaps a "low residue" diet. The goal is to empty your colon so that activity stops. You may feel like the clock moves in slow motion during those few days, but it's important to get through this phase.

The next phase will have you eating low fiber diverticulitis food during a transition period. You need to change your diet gradually, so that your system can build up to the high level of activity that you're going to ask it to maintain.

A few weeks later, you will want to start working toward a diet with a lot of roughage. The fiber in that kind of diet will help you avoid developing more diverticula. It'll also help you prevent damaging the diverticula you already have, because it lets your colon move things along with less pressure.

Getting a lot of fiber has other health benefits, too. Your risk of heart disease will drop, and you'll have more energy because your blood sugar will stabilize. If you're like me, you'll also appreciate the fact that a high fiber diet can help you lose weight!

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Diverticulitis almost never happened back when people lived on farms and ate fresh food. It only started to become a problem when people moved to the city and started to eat differently. Our food today doesn't have the fiber we need, and that causes the majority of people to get diverticula during their lives.

That means you should center your diverticulitis food choices around fruit and vegetables, just like people used to eat back in the old days. Add a fiber supplement if you're not meeting your goal. Stay away from packaged, processed, artificial, and junk foods.

The good news in that story is that you have control over your diverticulitis future. If you eat the way people used to eat -- fresh foods that bring that life-giving fiber -- you can enjoy a trouble-free life for many years to come.

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What is the diverticulitis mystery so powerful your doctor can't tell you about it?

Discover the answer at Diverticulitis Food Secrets!