For almost three years, I cut more and more foods out of my diet to manage my reflux. The list kept getting longer. The number of meals I could safely eat kept getting smaller.

I tried everything. Omeprazole. Lansoprazole. Cutting coffee. Cutting wine. Cutting tomatoes, citrus, vinegar, spice, fat. Eating dinner at 4pm like a resident in a care home.

Nothing actually fixed it. Every food I removed bought me a few quiet weeks. Then a new trigger would appear. Then another. Until I was eating plain chicken at my own birthday and declining dinners I used to look forward to.

Then five weeks ago, at a family dinner, my cousin's husband (who's a stomach doctor) put down his fork and explained something I'd never heard from any of the 4 GPs I'd seen.

He told me reflux isn't really about the foods you eat.

Your esophagus, the tube that carries food from your throat to your stomach, has a protective coating. Like a rain jacket. When that coating is healthy, normal amounts of acid don't bother you. But after years of reflux, the coating wears down. Holes form. And once those holes are there, even foods that never used to bother you start to burn.

That's why removing triggers only helps for a while. That's why the safe list keeps shrinking instead of growing. That's why you end up at the table with a glass of water while everyone else has wine.

You weren't getting more sensitive because of what you were eating. You were getting more sensitive because the damage underneath was never being repaired.

He told me about an approach that helps coat AND repair those weak spots at the same time. I've been using it for five weeks. Last weekend I had pasta and a glass of wine at a friend's birthday for the first time in almost three years.

Below are the 10 things I wish someone had told me 3 years ago, including the ONE shift that finally let me sit at a dinner table and order whatever I wanted.