Something's Fishy

Today's new food:  salmon.  I used to grill halibut on my hibachi on the patio of my apartment in San Leandro 23 years ago, but I don't remember ever cooking salmon; I don't even remember eating it, but I'm pretty sure I have.  I broiled it, since that's one of the approved cooking methods at this point; thank goodness for the internet, I found step-by-step directions for broiling salmon on wikihow.com.  Jenny was on Febreze patrol after my dinner, but I didn't find the smell overpowering, and the salmon was pretty good.

So here's what's on the meat portion of the menu at this point:

• Broiled hamburgers (not a fan, I'm skipping ground beef for the time being)
• Boiled chicken (in SCD chicken soup; quite bland)
• Broiled chicken (not bad)
• Broiled pork loin (quite good)
• Broiled salmon (quite good)

I've been buying the meat at Whole Foods, and our food bill has increased substantially.  I know that I could get cheaper meat at Safeway, but without any information about where the meat came from.  If I'm going to have to do this, I'm willing to pay a premium to feel better about the purchase.  And I feel better about the purchase at Whole Foods, since they have a rating system for the conditions in which the animals were kept.  While I still think that killing, by definition, isn't humane, I'd still prefer that treatment up until that point be humane, and I think that's more likely (though not guaranteed, since I can't actually go to the companies they buy from and inspect the conditions myself) with Whole Foods meats.

And the vegetable portion of the menu:

• Carrots -- boiled (to death) and pureed
• Butternut squash -- boiled (to death) and pureed

Basically, when it comes to vegetables, I'm eating baby food: bland and extremely easy to digest.  Fortunately, salt and pepper are allowed, and at this point I can start adding other spices.  I can stop pureeing pretty soon as well: the scdlifestyle.com guys recommend 14 days, so I'll probably puree my next vegetable (zucchini), which I'll probably add this weekend or just after, and then start cooking them in other ways.

Tomorrow I'll be cooking up a batch of pearsauce, and it will be nice to have something sweet.  So far the only things that I've had that have been sweet are grape juice and apple juice, each diluted 50/50 with water -- and not much of either.  These are allowed because they only have simple sugars.  I believe the same is true with pears, and the cooking makes them easy to digest (back to the baby food idea).

So, you might ask, is this working?

Hard to say.  I've still had several episodes of diarrhea, but I've also had relatively long stretches without, and I've had far less gas.  I still think that any gut explosions may be attributable to a sudden change to a meat-centric diet, but at this point the whole die-off thing might be in play.  A friend read my two-steps-forward-one-step-back description and said that he thought it sounded more like two steps forward and one step left.  I like that way of looking at it better: the diarrhea is different than it was, so it doesn't exactly feel like a step back.  It's still frustrating, but I'm doing the best I can to stay positive and to continue to view this as a reasonable approach.