When Your Body Rewrites the Rules:

Living Without a Pancreas, Trusting Your Gut, and Learning from Sourdough

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in this wild, beautiful life-after-pancreas is that our bodies are always working for us — even when the rulebook gets rewritten. And trust me, mine has been rewritten from cover to cover.

When you live without a pancreas, your entire inner world shifts — your hormones, your digestion, the way your hunger feels, the way your blood sugar behaves. And yet somehow, your body figures it out. It adapts and reorganizes like a determined little orchestra that refuses to stop playing just because one instrument packed up and walked offstage.

And strangely enough, watching my sourdough starter come back to life after a vacation taught me more about my own biology than any textbook ever could.

🌟What Happens When the Pancreas Steps Out

Without a pancreas, your body no longer makes five hormones:

• Insulin

• Glucagon

• Amylin

• Somatostatin

• Pancreatic polypeptide

These hormones help regulate blood sugar, digestion, fullness signals, and the timing of how quickly food moves through the stomach. Losing them reshapes the internal landscape — but not in the hopeless way you might expect. Far from it.

✨Side Note: Digestive Enzymes — and Where Creon Steps In

Hormones aren’t the only things that vanish when the pancreas is removed.

The body also stops producing digestive enzymes — the essential little workers that break down:

• fats (lipase)

• proteins (proteases)

• carbohydrates (amylase)

Without these enzymes, food can move through you without being fully digested or absorbed, leading to all sorts of uncomfortable symptoms and nutritional gaps.

That’s where Creon comes in — my quiet hero in the background.

Creon simply replaces the enzymes the pancreas used to make. It helps me break down food, absorb nutrients, and keep my gut happy and supported. It’s not flashy, but it’s essential — and it’s a big part of how I still get to live such a full, active life.

🌿The Rest of the Body Rises to the Challenge

What I’ve learned — and what I want you to feel in your own bones — is that your body doesn’t give up when something changes. It doesn’t sulk or negotiate or ask “why me.” It doesn’t spiral when a major organ is taken away.

It adapts.

Without a pancreas, your liver becomes the new conductor, stepping into a bigger role with glucose regulation.

Your gut hormones take on new responsibilities, helping with satiety, digestion, and blood sugar timing.

And most astonishing of all, your microbiome steps up as a quiet, steady partner — fermenting, stabilizing, soothing, strengthening.

And this is where the sourdough metaphor gently bubbled up for me…

🍞A Honey Note: My Sourdough Starter Taught Me About My Own Gut

I’ve watched my sourdough starter rise, fall, stall, get hungry, rest in the fridge, and slowly wake back up. I’ve seen how microbes behave when you feed them well… and how patiently they recover when you don’t.

One morning, as I stared at my sleepy starter and wondered whether to feed it right then or wait until evening, it hit me:

My gut does the same thing — only I can’t see it.

But I can feel it.

Just like my starter:

• it never once gets dramatic

• it doesn’t resent the extra work

• it doesn’t give up

• it simply adapts

• and keeps doing its best for me

Realizing that made me fall a little in love with the miracle happening inside us every day.

My gut loves me back — and now that I truly understand the load it carries, I’m even more intentional about loving it right in return.

🍝Resistant Starch, Cooling Pasta, and Why Fermentation Matters

One thing I’ve been fascinated by lately is how much food can help the gut heal — even in just a few days.

When you cool pasta, potatoes, or rice, the starch changes into resistant starch — which feeds gut microbes and lowers the glucose impact. And yes, you can reheat it the next day without losing the benefit.

Fermented foods do something similar. They reduce sugar, create organic acids, soften the glycemic impact, and make nutrients easier to absorb.

Your gut loves when you give it foods that let microbes do what they do best — repair, rebalance, and nourish.

💛A Gentle Thought to Carry With You

Every one of us has a body that is quietly working in the background, doing its best with whatever we give it.

Mine is living proof that even with major changes — even with a whole missing organ — the body doesn’t quit.

It shows up.

It adjusts.

It works around obstacles with a kind of humility that feels almost spiritual.

Maybe we could all stand to honor that miracle a little more.

And maybe we could feed ourselves with that thought in mind — not out of guilt, but out of gratitude.

Because a body that keeps fighting for you… deserves to be cared for with love.

💛 With love and light,

Honey (MaryNell)

PS: Stay tuned for the next post — a simple, beautiful breakdown of how you can help heal the gut in 3–7 days using food alone. It’s going to be such an encouraging one, and I can’t wait to share it with you.