One Month!

This is the final day of my first month on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet.

If you've read my previous posts, you know that this has not been an easy month.  The extreme change in diet from long-term vegetarianism to a meat-centric diet; the initial week of mostly boring fare that took a lot of time to cook; the roller coaster of feeling better and then having a setback (which, unfortunately, is continuing, but -- fortunately -- to a much lesser degree); all of these things have made the past month quite challenging.

But I continue to believe that, in terms of IBS symptoms, I'm now doing as well or better than I was before I started, and without taking Immodium on a daily basis.  I'm virtually convinced that a long-standing Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth situation was going on, and that this radical change in diet is almost entirely responsible for mostly or completely eliminating it.

My diet is now fairly diverse, as I've added many vegetables back in, and I'm usually eating two at lunch and two at dinner along with whatever the meat course is.  I've also been enjoying some great summer fruit, and will be adding berries and other fruits in soon (the peaches and nectarines at Whole Foods are great right now!).

I'm definitely going to continue with the diet, and I hope that my gut function will continue to improve.

There will certainly continue to be challenges.  Jenny and I are now both basically cooking for one, since our diets are so different.  And our eating schedules are different, mostly because the kitchen is small enough that both of us cooking at the same time is difficult.  There are still times when I seriously long for a bag of Mission tortilla chips and a tub of hummus, any variety, but I can't eat either corn or chickpeas on this diet.  We've also only been out to eat once in the past month -- yesterday -- and I've only had wine once in the past month, also yesterday (and yesterday evening was one of those "setback" evenings, which is sort of depressing, though I can't really tell whether either of those things had anything to do with it).  So there have been challenges, and there will continue to be challenges.

But since I seem to be heading in the right direction, I'm sticking with it.  If things continue to seem better, I'll probably put together some sort of challenge to my system to see if my gut has healed enough to tolerate a small amount of complex carbohydrates (and you can bet that chips and hummus will be part of that challenge!).  But I probably won't attempt that until I hit the three- or six-month mark, even if I'm feeling pretty normal before then.

Tomorrow marks the two year anniversary of my appendectomy.  It's hard to believe I've put up with the awful aftermath of that operation for this long, but I'm glad I tried this approach to change things, and I'm glad it seems to be working!