From my Crohn's diagnosis
to a life without pain.

Who am I, and why this work?

A story that began with my own body.

My name is Jeroen le Duc. In 2014 I worked as a Railroad Police Officer. I was 28 and always on the move. I worked irregular shifts, was in the gym five times a week, and did a part-time degree on the side. My days were packed minute by minute. As long as I kept moving, life could not catch up with me. Or maybe I was just running from my past.

Until my body forced me to stop. First a fistula, followed by three courses of antibiotics in a single year. During one of my shifts I felt an immense stabbing pain in my belly. It came out of nowhere. The whole world stopped. I did not know where it was coming from, or how long it would last. And then, just like that, it was gone. I did not even think about going to a doctor. It felt like a glitch somewhere on the inside. Until those pains came back more often, almost daily, and I could no longer ignore them. My GP sent me to an internist. At the hospital they did a colonoscopy. And the verdict: Crohn's disease. The internist told me it was chronic and incurable. My immune system was attacking my own intestinal wall. Food would have no effect on the symptoms, he said. I had to come back the next week to discuss which medication I would be put on.

That follow-up appointment? I never went.

I was 28. I had just met the love of my life. I was studying for a management position. Chronically ill did not fit anywhere in that picture. And there was one thing I could not get my head around: that food played no role at all. As far as I knew, food was the only thing that passed through my gut every day. How could that have no effect on the inflammation sitting right there?

I grew up with homeopathy. If you had a complaint, you first looked at whether that could take care of it. And if it could not, then you went to a doctor, where you would be handed medication with a symptom list so long that, in many cases, you would just give it a few days to pass on its own. Medication was never the first option. So I held on to that.

My own body became my experiment. Every free moment, I was reading. On the train to work and back, during quiet stretches on a shift, late into the evening. I devoured everything I could find about food, the gut and chronic bowel disease. Out went the gluten. Then the dairy. Anything I read might help, whether it was cutting out a food, adding one, or taking a supplement, I tried it all.

After just a few months, a brutal flare-up hit me in 2015. In a single week I lost eleven kilos, and it took me two and a half months to get my weight and strength back. That taught me something else: sleep and routine mattered just as much as what was on my plate. Step by step, I built a completely different life. Within six months, the symptoms my doctor had called incurable and permanent were gone.

By 2017 I had been free of them for a full year. Without ever taking the medication. What started as my own search became my work. I trained as an Orthomolecular Naturopathic Therapist and specialised in Crohn's and ulcerative colitis. My very first client had been in pain every single day for five years, all day long. She was on medication and had even undergone surgery. Four months later she was symptom-free, and in consultation with her internist she came off her medication. Since then, together with my team at First Aid for Your Gut, we have guided hundreds of people with all kinds of gut complaints.

I do this work because I know, from the inside, how much gut complaints can take over your life. And because I also know, from that same place, that recovery is possible when you are willing to put in the time and energy. We help you understand what is happening in your body, what is really causing your symptoms, and what you can do about it yourself, so you can live free of them again, the way you want to.