Taking stock

I've been on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet for almost two and a half months now.  I thought I'd take stock of how things are going, and what I've learned.

For the past 12 days, I've been almost symptom-free.  Only two very brief episodes leaning towards diarrhea, but not quite there.  A friend recently asked how much better I thought I was, and I replied, "Right now, this minute, I'd say 95%."  I think this is huge.  Unfortunately, I realize that it's unlikely that this will continue indefinitely: 3-month and 6-month "flares" are common in people who commit to the SCD, and even people who do not suffer from IBS or other gut dysfunctions have occasional bouts of diarrhea and constipation.  But for now, I'm very happy with how things are going, and I will definitely continue with the diet for the foreseeable future, adding things in slowly so that I can try to keep track of what doesn't work for me.

I have far less gas than I used to.  I remember listening to Dr. Dean Edell in the car one afternoon, and he threw out the statistic that the average person passes gas 17 times a day.  I think I laughed out loud, thinking to myself that if I went an HOUR without passing gas 17 times it would be a record!

I'm now eating breakfast every day, something I couldn't do without triggering an episode of diarrhea for almost 2 years.  I believe that my diet is quite healthy, with fairly lean protein and generous portions of one or two vegetables at every meal.  I eat virtually no processed foods, and only have small afternoon and evening fruit snacks (I look forward to being able to eat more fruit, but high-sugar foods like fruit seem to still be somewhat problematic, so I'm keeping the quantity small for now).  I just bought some shorts with a 30-inch waist, something I haven't done in probably 30 years or more, and although losing weight wasn't my goal when I started this diet, I can't say losing those 15 or 20 pounds is a bad thing, I've been wondering how to get rid of 5 or 10 for many years.

The Specific Carbohydrate Diet has also apparently affected my body in another, non-gut-related way: for years I've had very, very mild eczema all over my back (not a big problem, it simply made my back itchy from time to time) and an acne-like rash (or rash-like acne, either way probably just another form of eczema) in a small area on my torso from my sternum to my belly button.  Both are now much less prominent, and I haven't made any changes other than my diet.  I've read that for people with compromised gut function, healing the gut can cause many non-gut-related changes in the body, and that seems to be the case here.

I've learned that many things I thought I knew about my body were either incorrect or at least questionable.  Years ago, I often had difficulty in the morning before school, either having diarrhea or feeling like it was coming.  I hypothesized it was because of a milk allergy, or lactose intolerance, or the fat content of the bacon I'd eaten; now I'm virtually certain that there was an element of lactose-intolerance, but it wasn't because the lactose was lactose, it was because the lactose was a complex carbohydrate of any kind -- and I have to wonder if the high sugar content of the daily glass of orange juice I drank didn't play a part as well.  If anyone had told me back then that I'd be eating a half-gallon of homemade yogurt a week, not knowing that you could incubate your own yogurt in such a way that the lactose is all eaten up by bacteria, I would have laughed out loud.

One of the most important lessons I've learned on this journey is that Every Body Is Different.  Many of the generous and knowledgeable folks on the BTVC-SCD Yahoo group that I joined a few weeks ago have said many times that SCD must be individualized for anyone who attempts it.  It's not just a matter of what's legal and what's not.  It's a matter of understanding why things are legal or illegal, and then including only those things on the legal list that don't cause symptoms.  Some people can eat only small amounts of fruit; some people can eat all the fruit they like.  Some people can eat a whole jar of peanut butter but can't tolerate tree nuts at all; others are just the opposite.  For me, so far, it seems that I can tolerate cruciferous vegetables (for which I'm thankful, since broccoli is one of my favorite vegetables); others are never able to.

My thoughts about diet in general have changed fairly dramatically.  As a vegetarian for over 20 years, I can't tell you how many times I heard the "evolution" argument against vegetarianism: humans evolved as meat-eaters, so excluding meat from the human diet is a mistake.  My (usually non-verbalized) response to that argument was that looking at the evolution of man over those many eons way back when fails to take into account many changes that are very, very recent, e.g., instead of working by hunting and gathering and carrying water from a river a mile away, we now work by sitting in a cubicle staring at a monitor.  But what I've come to believe is that, in essence, man's intellectual evolution has far out-stripped his physical evolution, and the physical attributes of the species are still virtually unchanged from thousands of years ago.  So the diet from thousands of years ago, though it should be modified somewhat due to different activity levels and different activities, is, by and large, still reasonable.  One thing I'm going to attempt to learn more about in the near future is when cultivation of grains became so prevalent.

I now think that living for so long on a vegetarian diet did not serve me nearly as well as I thought it was.  For years, I believe I was slowly damaging my body internally by relying heavily on grains and legumes and other complex carbohydrates that my body was not able to process well.  That led to inflammation, and I'm sure I wasn't getting nearly the nutrition that I thought I was.  This doesn't mean that a vegetarian diet can't work for someone, since Every Body Is Different.  I just don't think it was working for me, even though I thought it was.  I'm still not happy about eating meat in terms of being responsible or partially responsible for the death of another creature so that I can eat.  And if it was just a matter of longevity -- if someone could say to me with certainty, "You'll live 4 years longer if you eat meat, but otherwise your life will be the same" -- I would probably switch back to a vegetarian diet.  But it's not about longevity in my case, it's about quality of life.  And quality of life goes up, way up, in the absence of IBS symptoms.

So, the journey continues.  I have no doubt that it will not be a straight path to being completely healed.  But I think I'll be able to handle the twists and turns ahead.