Recent developments

I haven't posted anything recently because not much of note has been happening.  I thought I'd take a moment to share a few minor changes and insights as I near my three-month mark.

I'm continuing to do very well, with only occasional, very mild, IBS-D symptoms.  I think my gut is behaving very similarly to how it was behaving for most of my life prior to the appendectomy, or slightly better (less gas).

There's not much new in the meat area, although I've been experimenting with marinating chicken before grilling it, and I've been really happy with the results.  I'll definitely try some more of the marinades that are in the Weber's Real Grilling book that I recently picked up at a used book store.

I've added some vegetables back in, making sure that I kept the rest of my diet stable while adding them one at a time, and adding them for four or five days before adding the next one.  My vegetable rotation now includes carrots, butternut squash, zucchini, green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, and asparagus; less often, it also includes other squashes like yellow crooknecks, and bell peppers.  On the fruit side, I'm regularly eating tomatoes and avocados at meals (still weird to think of them as fruits!), and for sweeter fruit snacks I'm having a banana a day, homemade applesauce several times a day, and dates.  I also recently got some oranges and had some fresh-squeezed orange juice (it was heaven), and I've had a couple of plums recently.  Olives, one of my favorite foods, are also back on the menu.  Infrequent items have been cucumber and homemade pear sauce, and neither seems to have been a problem.

I've been eating much more cheese than I thought I would ever eat.  Several types of cheese actually have little or no lactose, and are permitted on the SCD: swiss (I've been eating Emmentaler and I like it, I'm going to buy some Jarlsberg next), gruyere (which I love!), and cheddar (since this one has a more variable amount of lactose, I've stayed away so far, but plan to research which types/brands would be most suitable).  I've also been buying dry-curd cottage cheese, which is similar in flavor to regular cottage cheese, but is made in such a way that it is free of lactose.  Jenny suggested stuffing some dates with dry-curd cottage cheese, and I loved it, so it's now part of my nightly dessert: a small bowl of homemade applesauce followed by 5 stuffed dates.

I continue to believe that the one item that has had the most profound impact has been homemade yogurt.  The first few batches I made I used the YoGourmet lactobacillus acidophilus starter; the yogurt is quite tart (which I like), and seemed to help a great deal.  Then I bought a bottle of starter from GI Pro Health -- without noticing before I ordered that it uses lactobacillus casei, not lactobacillus acidophilus.  The l. casei yogurt isn't nearly as tart, and it has seemed to me that I'm just very slightly more susceptible to old familiar symptoms than I had been, so for the batch that I just finished this morning, I went back to the l. acidophilus starter. I'll see how things are working over the next few days before deciding whether or not to stick to the l. acidophilus variety.  At some point, I'll also stop eating yogurt and take one or two l. acidophilus capsules a day to see if the benefit is the same: I bought them to test so that I'd know whether or not it would be something I could use instead of homemade yogurt while traveling.  I realize I need to do this test for future traveling reference, but it's hard to get excited about it when I know what the outcome will be if the test is a failure!

Most recently, it seems that a few symptoms were triggered by wine.  I'm not happy about this, as a glass of wine with dinner was a pretty regular thing for me.  But I have to be honest with myself about what caused the problems, and make decisions accordingly.  It doesn't mean I'll never drink wine, it just might be a much more infrequent activity than I'd like.

In a few days I'll hit the three-month mark.  Transitioning to this diet was not easy, but I can't argue with the results.  I'm posting about it frequently at ibsgroup.org: if I can help even one person decrease their symptoms from any sort of gut dysfunction, I'll be happy!