r/CrohnsDisease•
Pizza_120

Is there anything in an app that would help navigating this disease? (Not a self promotion)

Hi everyone. I'm 26M and have lived with Crohn's for 5 years. I've seen my fair share of this disease's hell with multiple fistulas and abscesses. At my worst point, my calprotectin was over 5000. And yet, it feels like nothing compared to others' experiences in this subreddit.

For me, diet was one of the most stressful things to deal with. Having no appetite, and not knowing what to eat was horrible. But what was worse is having other people tell me to avoid the few things that were actually sitting with me (like nuggets from Mcdonalds lol). I don't need to explain the effect of this to you.

I started working on an app for myself. to track my foods and symptoms. This is not novel because there's stuff out there that this does part. But I wanted to figure out what exactly is triggering me. I didn't want to accept that pizza as a whole was bad for me. I wanted to know exactly what on that pizza wasn't working. And I wanted evidence to show to people that nuggets are fine for me. And I wanted something that could use my body's tolerances to find safe options at restaurants so that I could go out with my friends or even just eat out when I was too weak to cook. I couldn't find anything that did all of this so I started building it myself.

I just got tired of getting a blanket restrictive diet from doctors (I've seen at least 15 to date), and my family telling me only what to avoid. No one who doesn't live with this understands that your world is already small and the last thing you want is for people to make it smaller.

My reason for this post is to ask you all if this could help you too. Or if there's anything else in an app you're looking for that might make living with this disease a little less stressful. Like I mentioned, I started building this for myself but now after seeing it work I thought it could help other people too. This is not a self promotion because you couldn't find this app if you wanted to lol. It's only on my phone. But if I'm building this, I might as well build it to help the people it's actually intended for.

I would really appreciate your input.

Posted May 12, 2026, 6:17 AM UTC

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