My new diet of chicken soup, chicken, eggs, other meats, cooked veggies, yogurt, fruits, nuts and healthy food was a dramatic switch from my vegetarian status quo, aka a steady diet of junk food. Up until then I had eaten 19 pieces of fruit. 1 fruit every year. I didn’t research SCD at all.
There are
SCD-legal and SCD-illegal foods and I thought I could eat anything legal. I assumed incorrectly; I should have done my homework.
I did the SCD intro diet and then gleefully feasted on almonds, almond flour baked edibles, and dried fruits among other things all day (set on making it to the 30 day trial benchmark). As you can imagine, a compromised gut can only do so much. Within a month of SCD, I was out of commission and officially stopped the diet after losing about 20 pounds in 2 months. Though I had really stopped it a month earlier, when I started pouring down the drain the challenging-to-my-taste-buds-but-made-with-♥-by-my-parents chicken soup.. and instead going for the vending machine. In short, it was a nightmare, and not even my incredibly understanding roommates (shout-out!) could cheer me up. There’s a reason why doctors tell you not to eat nuts, popcorn, seeds, etc. and raw veggies/fruits when you are experiencing a flareup (note: my first doc never saw fit to share it with me though…) and the reason is this – imagine if the top layer of your skin was exposed. Now imagine if you were to scrape that with your fingernails. Fingernails: skin:: Fiber: digestive tract. (Don’t you love the SATs?
) It would be painful and maybe bloody, and it was both. Now if you need to replace that mental picture with something else… imagine lying in the sun with a fruit smoothie in one hand and your Ipod in the other! It took me three years to get from the former to the latter.
