Wayne Eskridge, who lives in Idaho, began his liver disease diagnosis journey in 2010, and was formally diagnosed with cirrhosis in 2015. He shares how wise daily choices around diet and lifestyle are the toughest yet most effective means of managing his liver disease.

The most difficult part of managing the disease is really managing your diet. So many aspects of our modern life — the amount of food that we get when we go out to eat, the overabundance of saturated fats and sugars that are in our everyday diets — those are enemies for a patient struggling to manage their liver disease.

So it’s really most challenging to have habits of not falling back to the things that got you into the trouble in the first place. it’s an everyday decision process. There’s no magic bullet. There’s no supplement you can take that fixes it. There’s no magic flush that’ll take care of it.

It’s — you make a dozen decisions a day about the way you’re going to live, the things you’re going to eat, the amount of exercise you’re going to get.

But it pays real dividends if you can adopt those habits, because the difference between suffering from the consequences of liver disease and having a functioning liver is so dramatic. I mean, it’s gigantic — the difference between being ill and being functional — that it’s well worth adopting decent habits to manage the disease.