The Control Paradox (Why I'm Still in Remission)

You may have seen the news this week. Bryan Johnson, the man who has spent millions of dollars trying to outsmart ageing, has been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition affecting his stomach lining. Eleven years of tracking, testing and optimising, and his own body still found a way to surprise him.

His response was to double down. More data, more intervention, more control. He wants to solve it the way he has tried to solve everything else about his biology.

I read that and had a different thought entirely.

What if the very thing he is trying to master is part of what allowed this to take hold in the first place?

I want to be clear here. I am not diagnosing a man I have never met, and no single factor explains an autoimmune disease. But I see this pattern constantly, in my clinic, in the Facebook groups, and in the mirror. So many of us with UC are Type A. We plan, we push, we optimise, we hold everything together. I built a PR company from nothing while raising a child alone, and I know exactly what that kind of relentless self-management does to a gut. It took me 12 years to get into stable remission after my diagnosis in 2010.

This year has arguably been the hardest of my life. And yet I have stayed in remission through all of it. When I ask myself why (which i do regularly), the answer isn't that I have finally cracked the code. Yes, I know a lot more about Ulcerative Colitis and IBD in general than I ever did, and I have a protocol that I believe works. But what I think is more significant is that I am learning, imperfectly, to let life flow instead of gripping it so tightly.

What letting go actually looks like

I am not talking about a wellness routine. I am talking about contradiction, and being at peace with it.

I've danced for five hours and been the last one off the floor at 2am. But this week, I've let myself sleep twelve or thirteen hours on three separate nights, with no guilt attached. I have sixteen meals prepped and sitting in my freezer, and there are still nights I eat a packet of crisps on the couch and call it dinner. I gym most days, but I have stopped running, because the only route that feels safe to me right now isn't one I can easily get to, and for now I am letting that be okay rather than forcing it. I push, build and drive hard, and some days I collapse in a heap and cry, and that gets space too. I meditate and do red light therapy every morning. But there have been days I've had shouting matches I'm not proud of. And just this past weekend I spent the morning enjoying a brisk walk on the beach with a close friend but then spent the rest of the day and night on the couch bingeing romcoms.

None of that is a strategy. It is just what letting go actually looks like in a real life, rather than on a wellness app.

The client who almost refuses to be well

A client of mine messages me almost every day with a new symptom to worry over. His calprotectin sits under 25. No blood, no urgency, nothing his gastroenterologist is concerned about. Still, he lives on edge, scanning his body for the next thing to go wrong.

I asked him in one of our sessions what it would feel like to simply admit to himself he was in remission.

He cried.

That question was not a trick. It was an invitation to put something down.

Why this belongs in the Gut Health Triangle

This is why the Gut Health Triangle, which I teach and practice always includes more than diet. Inflammation is not only driven by what is on your plate. The nervous system is deeply wired into the gut, and a body that never gets to switch off the vigilance is a body that struggles to fully calm the inflammatory response, no matter how clean the food is.

Rebalance, the fifth R in the framework, exists precisely because none of the other work holds if this piece is ignored. Remove, Replace, Reinoculate and Repair can all be done perfectly and still not be enough if the nervous system never gets permission to rest.

If you want to see how all five pieces fit together, and where Rebalance sits alongside the rest of the framework, that is exactly what I walk through in the Understanding Your Gut with Ulcerative Colitis masterclass. It is the simplest way I know to see the whole picture at once rather than one piece of it.

Why I built Proviscera the way I did

This is also part of why Proviscera looks the way it does. Not because a capsule can undo years of gripping too tightly. It cannot. But between the Qing Dai, curcumin, zinc carnosine and the rest of what is in the formulas, I wanted to take one more thing off the table for people to obsess over and second guess. There are a thousand natural remedies that can help, in a thousand small ways. I know, because unpicking them is my job. I have done that work so you do not have to turn supplementation into one more thing to control. What should you take? How often? How much? In what format? For how long? The questions are relentless. I've simplified the answer. You can see where FLARE, REPAIR and CARE fit into your own phase of recovery over at proviscera.com.

Where to start

So here is what I am sitting with this month, and what I would ask you to sit with too. Is it so hard to let things be what they actually are? Not fixed. Not solved. Just as they are, right now, while you keep doing the next right thing.

If any of this lands, I would love to hear about it. Come tell me in the Facebook group, or drop a comment on the blog, or reply to this month's newsletter, and let me know where you are gripping too tightly, or where you have managed to loosen your grip even a little.

Dr Jacki McEwen, PhD (ND) Doctor of Natural Medicine and Integrative Nutrition Health Coach Author of Well Now: Reclaim Your Life from Ulcerative Colitis