Brittany Roman Green
IBD Focused Registered Dietitian
It isn’t very often that you find someone who can speak from both personal experience AND from years of professional training but that amazing mix of qualities is exactly what you’ll find in Brittany.
A wealth of knowledge! Brittany has literally done her homework on nutrition and IBD! As a Registered Dietitian, Brittany completed a four year undergraduate degree along with 1,200 hours of supervised practice in various clinical settings, before passing the nationally recognized and accredited dietitian exam. Brittany has since also completed a masters in applied nutrition and has helped people live happier and healthier lives for over 10 years.
In addition to her vast scholarly achievements, Brittany also has the street smarts only obtained through life experience. At the age of 9, Brittany started showing symptoms of Ulcerative Colitis which was a major factor in the trajectory in her career and education. Thankfully she is now in deep remission from diet, lifestyle, and medication.
By the time that Brittany was diagnosed, she was in a bad place with her disease. She was having 15 bloody stools a day along with intense pain and cramping in her abdomen which led to malnutrition from nutrient loss. Brittany was 20 pounds underweight.
Brittany recalled the fear of being 14 and not knowing what her future would hold. "Just tell me what is wrong with me!!" she would emphatically say to her parents and her care team, but the only response they could give her was to run more tests. Without answers, Brittany feared the worst, she believed she was terminal. She was finally relieved when she was given a diagnosis and reassured that life was going to continue - albeit a little different than what she had envisioned as a child.
Hands down, stress management! For Brittany, managing her stress in addition to diet was critical for her to sustain remission. Brittany's last flare could not have come at a worse time in her life, it came right after what was supposed to be one of Brittany's happiest moments in life, her wedding! She was doing everything "right". She was eating right, she was doing medication right, and she was living right - or at least she thought she was. She quickly realized though that she had been overlooking one of the most important aspects of her health - her mental health. All of the planning, busyness, and pressure of making things perfect sent her stress skyrocketing and contributed to her flare. It was a few months later that her care team found she had inflammation in her bile ducts and she was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis in addition to UC. Thankfully the inflammation in her bile ducts subsided and she hasn't had any since.
Meditation and gratitude are now a big part of Brittany's daily routine - both personally and professionally. In my time with Brittany she shared several success stories of patients who have worked with her to find relief with IBD. One such story she shared was a powerful example of this practice in action!
Brittany had a client who was battling urgency issues who had to wake up 2 - 3 times every night just to go to the bathroom. After working with Brittany, this patient realized that she would wake up with fear that she would need to go to the bathroom again which then amplified her need to actually go to the bathroom. Brittany worked with her client to have her relax when she woke up in the middle of the night by practicing diaphragmatic breathing techniques. Within a few weeks, her client was able to reduce her midnight trips to the bathroom to ZERO - yes, I said ZERO - just by reducing her anxiety at that moment.
Brittany's support is always individualized. She won't put you on a prescribed diet plan because everyone has different triggers, eating preferences, and lifestyle. She will work with you to understand where you are at in your journey and suggest tweaks to your existing routines so you see success quickly and easily. She helps clients find their trigger foods, helps those of us who are malnourished to gain weight, expands people's diets, and helps us have better relationships with the food we eat. She also helps empower her clients with the right questions to ask to be better advocates in their own health journeys.
One area that Brittany is passionate about is helping IBD patients with eating disorders. There are so many diet options out there for IBD (I myself have tried some very restrictive things over the years) and with all of the noise it's hard to know what to really believe. Is fat bad for you? Should I eat low carb? Should I eat vegan? What even are lectins anyway?? Do inflammatory foods affect everyone the same way? Brittany helps to guide patients through this complexity. "Sometimes diets that are too restrictive are more damaging than the trigger foods themselves." It's all about finding what works for you!
Thank you so much Brittany for helping to guide us to the correct answers to all of these complex questions. We need clarity amid all of the content that is available at our fingertips.
Brittany always keeps things educational and entertaining! You can tell the moment you pick up the phone to talk with her or just by her fun filled posts on Instagram. You aren't going to find someone more qualified to talk with about diet and IBD combined than Brittany!
Brittany's Instagram: @brittanyb_therd
Brittany's Website: https://www.brittanyroman-green.com.
