3 months on SCD

Three months ago we began the journey of the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. Journey is a good way to describe it. There have been hills and valleys, rough roads - but all paved. Paved by the hundreds of people that have gone before us in this. I'm mighty thankful for them.

We'd been on the diet about a month and a half, and we had to travel. Not an easy thing to do when still a "newbie" on the diet. We were able to take our homemade bread, muffins, cookies, and crackers, but towards the end of the trip we had to really ration them. Our hotel had a stove-top, but no oven, so at least we could make our pancakes for breakfast.

The problem at the end of our trip was trying to find food for our last day when we would be traveling by plane and car all day and wouldn't be able to have our food warmed. (We are still at the stage of cooking all of our fruit and vegetables before eating them.) At Whole Foods, I grabbed some dried fruit (without any sugars or preservatives) which is perfectly legal on the diet, but is a more advanced food then where we were. It had lots of seeds (blackberries and strawberries) and we didn't start off with "just a little." Not a good thing. We all flared (lingo that spares you the details.)

I ended up restarting the diet - getting back to the intro foods. I also found and hired a SCD counselor that helped me get on the "straight and narrow." She told me a few other things I'd been doing wrong and gave me some suggestions of what to do differently. I'd definitely recommend anyone who wants to start the diet, to hook up with a counselor FIRST. Even though there is a wonderful e-mail forum of experienced people to ask questions to, a counselor can look over all the details of what's happening with you and give you guidance that sees the "whole" picture. She'll tell you things you might not have even thought to ask about on the the forum.

Something else that helped was each getting a few colonic treatments. We'd had a quite a series of these last year, which helped us immensely. Then for some reason we decided we didn't need them anymore, which at a the time might have been correct,but we shouldn't have stopped them completely. Next time we won't go nine months in between treatments until we're pretty healthy. I'm really thankful we can drive 45 minutes for this kind of help. If you want to hear about the many symptoms that have been helped by our getting these treatments, just ask - it's amazing! It's only been about 60 years since hospitals were doing these treatments, so it's not some new kind of radical protocol.

I'd hoped we'd be a little further along in progress at this point in our diet, but yet, I'm glad for what we've learned. We're starting to know our bodies - what we're reacting to, better then ever. How wonderful is that?

Here's something I concocted last night, inspired by my craving for chili or goulash (it's October, you know!) - and I think we all handled it pretty well. Even if you're not on the SCD, you might enjoy this fall dish.

Vegetable Chili

Ground Hamburger (I used 2 pounds)
tomato juice (from farmer's market tomatoes - peeled, cooked, and strained)
2 garlic cloves minced
butternut squash (I usually have some on hand that I've roasted, but last night I used 3/4 bag of frozen butternut squash cubes) - this helped thicken the chili
1 small zucchini (peeled and seeded as per our diet)
3 handfuls or so of chopped broccoli (I steamed it first)
2 tsp salt
2 or 3 dashes of nutmeg
1 dash of cayenne pepper