Anyone doing SCD?

[*farmergirl*]

I noticed there are some really old threads about doing the SCDiet is there a current one? or maybe an active group? Also any experience with sticking to the diet while pregnant would be great too.thx

[joybird]

There's an old thread on the front TF page that I just resurrected a few days ago without much response.  As for staying on the diet while pg, I am no help at all.  I went astray pretty quickly once I got pg and am finally getting it back together now, and baby is 20 months!  I really wish I had stuck with it but I was so sick this last pregnancy and sooo tired.

[*farmergirl*]

I've been off and on for years. I think now " if only I had stayed on it from the start...." I feel so much better when I'm on it i don't really know why I stop- I think it's mostly that I'm half starved some days (not from the diet but from not having anything on hand or not eating when i should have). This will be my second pregnancy since finding the SCDiet but I am horrible at staying on it while pregnant. Mostly cause of the first trimester and not being able to stomach much of anything but THIS time I'm already in my second trimester (but now the half starved is kicking in).Hmm what do you like to snack on? i think i need a snack arsenal.

Prehaps we should start another thread/group for the SCDiet? I bet there are other people currently on it-though maybe theres a reason all the threads are old?

[MomOBrien]

I started my daughter on this diet one week ago...it's been tough! She was diagnosed with colitis this past August and the meds aren't really working. Her Doctor wants her to start imuran but I have been putting it off because of the nasty side affects. The diet has helped cut her trips to the bathroom in half. She doesn't really want to do the diet, she wants to be able to eat whatever she wants. I have talked to her until I'm blue in the face....so hard. Her only cheat so far has been ketchup. She won't eat the one I made because it tastes like tomato soup she says. She also doesn't want the chicken soup although she ate a ton of it when she was on steroids. I wish she would at least try.

[*farmergirl*]

Hi MomOBrien- Healing thoughts your way! how old is your daughter? I think it might be harder when your too young to really grasp the food gut relationship. To her it might be more like: i could eat all these foods and now I can't. I personally find breads and sugary /processed foods to be a bit addictive & the hardest things to stop eating. I assume she is still doing the intro diet? It does get easier when you have more food choices. Maybe she's a little food fatigued (you get tired of having the same thing)? What can she eat? Maybe I can think of some new ways to eat it. I have a bunch of SCD cookbooks- great for inspiration & knowing that unless there is a particular food you can't eat every recipe is one you CAN have. I have come a long long way since starting the SCD and have managed to stay off meds (i was diagnosed with moderate crohn's 3/12 years ago and was undiagnosed for about 5 long years). There are some really good blogs out there too- oh that makes me think prehaps pecanbread might help you I seem to recall they have a section just for intro diet and onward. SCD info has grown! when I started 3 1/2 yrs ago I could only find a handful of resources. Is her GI diet supportive? Mine just told me that diet has no relationship to IBD (right just like the air you breathe has no effect on your lungs) and pushes drugs. it takes courage to say no!

[MomOBrien]

Thank you Farmergirl! My daughter is thirteen. What an awful birthday she had....an ambulance ride from one hospital to another for surgery which she didn't end up having. Both GI docs she had said diet had nothing to do with her diagnosis only that nutrition is very important for this disease and that she could eat whatever she wanted. Well that hasn't been working out so great. My biggest worry now is that she is so tiny....lost a lot of weight. I visit pecanbread often along with some other blogs and I just received my first cookbook....Eat Well Live Well. She will hardly eat anything on the intro diet so it's been chicken, beef, squash, carrots, green beans, peas and eggs. Now her joints are sore too. I'm exhausted and so worried!

[*farmergirl*]

MomOBrien, for some reason I was assuming she was younger i'd say at 13 she should be able to grasp the science behind the diet. Has she read Breaking the Vicious Cycle's chapter on the science behind the diet? Is she for the diet or is she doing more cause you say so? if she's doing it for you I really hope she didn't hear the GIs say food had nothing to do with it! I hear that adding nuts really helps with weight gain. I know I have to be careful not to eat too much nut products or I start gaining and i don't need to. Of course don't introduce them if she's not ready. I LOVE Eat Well Feel Well. some recipes aren't really my style but the ones I 've tried usually go into the make again pile. The pecan waffles out of it are excellent- they rate the best of any recipe I've tried that replaces a bread product. Even when I've fallen off the SCD wagon I still make the pecan waffles. off the top of my head I also like the marinade she uses for I think drumsticks. Marinades and spices might be a good way to liven things up for your daughter. I don't know if she likes to cook but I think having a hand in preparing the food and add a whole nother degree of acceptance and willingness to eat this very different diet (compared to SAD). I two other Scd cookbooks I really like but I can't remember the titles right now. I didn't like anything i tried out of Lucy's Cookbook and the ones out of the back of Breaking the Vicious Cycle weren't too hot either IMO.  There are quite a few blogs I frequent but they're bookmarked so i'll have to comeback later when i have more time to share those & I have a kid approved recipe for squash crepes too. I'll have a look an see whatelse fits the list of what she can eat. oh and i think the joint thing is often related to yeast die off which certainly happens when you stop feeding them. It will get better! It really sucks to have these diseases which is why I'm willing to do this diet myself but now that i'm a mother and know what the worry is like when my kid is sick i think it might almost be worse to have a child with UC,crohn's etc. take care of your self too.

ok the books i use (besides eat well feel well) are Healing foods cooking for  celiacs,colitis,crohn's and ibs by sarah ramacher

recipes for the specific carbohydrate diet by prassad

everyday grain-free gourmet and grain free gourmet both by jodi bager and jenny lass

most blogs are fairly advanced so listing those might not help.if you want tho-let me know. some have great inspiration. i was following one woman's blog but it tapered off I assumed cause she had twins- well it was that and she had to have surgery not because of IBD but because of adhesions from the c-section scar. Good news tho- during the surgery they discovered she had absolutely no signs of an IBD. Another SCD success!

rcipe wise- so many i have are advanced- i think mostly soups and sauteing/roasting etc meat in different ways. the eggs tho might help change things up you can mix them with veg and make pancakes or bake a squash pumpkin pie.

[MomOBrien]

Hey Farmergirl thank you so much for the encouragement! My daughter hasn't read the book even though I have asked her if she wants to. She is very intelligent, but also very stubborn! She doesn't like to lose an argument even when she knows she's dead wrong. She keeps telling me the diet isn't working and I keep telling her that she isn't in the bathroom anywhere near as often as she was. She even went eleven and a half hours yesterday between bm's. She had been going every two to three hours. Also she goes in just to pee now....that hasn't happened in quite some time! TMI? Sorry. 

I am so excited to hear that the stiff joints are from yeast die off! The doctors keep telling me it's part of the disease. She was in the hospital on Dec 20th and we complained about the stiff joints then and the doctor told me that the remecade infusions would help with that and I said she just had one on the 2nd so apparently they aren't working. He didn't have anything to say about that. She is scheduled for another remecade infusion on the 29th of this month but I think I'm gonna cancel that one. They don't work and my insurance might not cover the whole thing. I just received a note from them that said they would cover a little over five thousand of the last one and we may be responsible for almost three thousand. So if we do another one it will cost us six thousand dollars!

I stumbled on the blog about the lady who had twins a couple of days ago....how awesome for her! Ihope the diet works that well for my daughter! I also ordered the secon book you mentioned about healing foods by Sarah Ramacher but it hasn't gotten here yet. I have been looking for a good bread recipe that doesn't require a food processor. I have one but it's really small and won't work for the recipes I have seen so far. Might have to go out and buy one. I haven't seen to many good recipes in Breaking The Vicious Cycle eithier although she did like the peanut butter cookie one but I don't want to give her those until the diarrhea goes away again. Again, thank you so much!

[Llyra]

In my experience (I have ulcerative colitis) the stiff joints are a sign that the disease is not well controlled. When I'm really solidly in remission, the stiff joints go away. As soon as I start to flare, before I notice any *ahem* BATHROOM symptoms, the stiff joints show up again. Another outside-the-gut symptom I have is red, inflamed eyes. So I would guess that as her disease starts being more well-controlled, she will notice the stiff joints improving.

Is she recently off steroids? You mentioned them in one of your posts. I ask because I never have any appetite for anything at all, in those first few weeks after tapering off the steroids. The hunger, with prednisone, is fierce-- I could and would eat just about anything. But when I came off it, there was this flat lull, for about a month, where no food looked good. And a lot of people with IBD have very weird relationships with food, to start with. So I have a lot of sympathy for her-- I can't imagine going through that as a child. I was an adult before I got sick.

Anyway, best of luck to you and to your daughter. I'm no longer on SCD-- I started easing off it eighteen months ago, and I'm doing very well. I had a lot of success with it--- I was steroid dependent before. I got off those, and onto 6-mp. Then off that, and now I'm only on Asacol, and symptom-free for two years.

OP: I was fortunate that my colitis goes very, very quiet when I'm pregnant. I ate mostly anything I wanted during my pregnancies--- with my twins, I even drank a half-gallon of liquid milk a day with no trouble. Then three days after birth, I got SLAMMED. I'm wondering now if staying on SCD in the second and third trimesters could have prevented the after-birth flares.

[*farmergirl*]

I wish you continued improvement. I think once she notices undeniable improvement (& maybe has a wider diet) she'll be much more supportive of the diet. I know once i started feeling better I suddenly had hope that maybe my whole life doesn't have to be this sentence to pain and needing a bathroom at moments notice (once you have an IBD there is no such thing as TMI anymore lol). It is certainly hard both physically and mentally. I'm not sure if you've heard this but it's common to have a flare on the SCD at 3 month and sometimes at 3 month increments up to a year. Most people find after that flares can be connected to to something ie eating off the diet,too advanced of a food, stress. I just want you to be aware so that if it happens you don't freak and think oh no it's not working. I've also noticed that the flare has decreased in intensity and length. For me a flare would last at least a week but now a day tops often just an unpleasant bathroom run. i just wish I had stayed on the diet full time. A flare certainly renews my devotion tho. Perhaps a journal would help her to notice this? it doesn't have to be detailed but a list of symptoms sort of thing. I did at first along with what I ate- it was enlightening. 

I can't believe the drugs cost that much! I'm not staying all drugs are just companies trying to make a buck but it makes you think especially when there are "studies "proving"" for instance antibiotics work for IBS but the study was funded by the drug company and the results actually said the slight positive result was actually negligible. I tried a couple drugs including pentasa (which did nothing for me) and a brief steroid treatment that I did notice gave me a ton of energy but the side effects scare me!

I have not found a decent bread recipe yet either! The waffles while not bread do fill the bread desire pretty well. I've found that banana bread and a date bread to be the next best probably because their natural density and moistness is closer to what you get when baking with nuts. A while back I tried a bun recipe that was pretty decent (slightly sweet which was a bit odd with a burger) but then I forgot which recipe I used. I'm going to try http://milkforthemorningcake.blogspot.com/2008/05/bread-and-coffee.html this one next. really tho I think everyone on he SCD just wishes there was a really good sandwich bread out there. One the side of milk for the morning cake blog he has a list of recipes - 90% are SCD and especially when baking I find hers have a great chance of actually tasting good. http://www.elanaspantry.com/  is all recipes & sometimes needs a tweak like honey instead of agave but hers are usually decent too. also www.comfybelly.com , www.nomorecrohns.com , there are a few others I stop into from time to time. Also a lot of TF blogs are SCD friendly recently http://kellythekitchenkop.com/ has been doing a grain free thing. I have more too but I won't overload you with blogs to check out ;) 

[MomOBrien]

Thanks Llyra, she took her last steroid on Christmas day. We did well at 15mgs but when we dropped down to 10mgs things went bad. I'm afraid to start the imuran but I think my back is against the wall. He ankles were so bad yesterday that we started off with crutches and then ended up using a wheelchair to get to the bathroom. I hope today is better. I have to call her doctor today and I know she won't be happy that I didn't start the imuran.

[MomOBrien]

Thanks for the info Farmergirl. My daughter is on pentasa and before that another drug that starts with a p that I can't think of right now. She has lost an awful lot of weight and I think I will have to make some choices today. The diet has helped with the bathroom issues but she can't go on not being able to walk. 

[*farmergirl*]

sorry to hear that. the severity does sound like more than yeast. you can always do diet and meds. it might be the easiest way to get things under control and then work from there. 

[Purplescool]

Hi everyone, I'm new to the forum.  I tried SCD but ended up being paleo.  Lately since the holidays I've cheated a lot, drinking soda, etc. Eating potatoes and chocolate! Bad bad me.  I need to stay focused and it would be nice to have a group of people to commiserate with!  I have celiac disease and after a yr being gluten-free and casein-free(I'm allergic), not much improvement. So I went paleo.  Felt better but still something is amiss and recently I'm starting to have some bloody stools again, which has been happening intermittently for 1 yr.  I already had a colonoscopy last yr, nothing.  Doc wants me to have a CAT scan.  It sounds like I might have colitis too :(. 

Anyway my DD is 3 and I want her to be on it too but she has so many food allergies that I think it's impossible for her to be on SCD, which saddens me because I think she has leaky gut.  She's also drinking Alimentum RTF( the corn-free one) because she was FTT and there's no other thing she can drink plus her diet's so limited.  It's just very frustrating. I rotate her foods and that also will be complicated by the SCD.

Nice to meet everyone!

[remijo]

I am starting this at the beginning of next week.  I have IBS-D and might have more issues - I refuse to go to the dr for these problems which I know is not a good thing. I'm also going to feed my LO with some of these foods - she is almost 13 mo and has been having non-stop diarrhea since I started solids so something is wrong there. I'm going to try SCD friendly / baby friendly foods and see if that helps.  Anyone know if I can give her the yogurt or not? I am very very lactose intolerant so I don't know if I want to try the yogurt or not but I've read everywhere that its so important and doesn't matter if you're lactose intolerant.  So we'll see...

[*farmergirl*]

if you make the yogurt for 24 hrs the lactose is considered to be gone.

[Llyra]

Yeah, by the time the yogurt has incubated for the full 24 hours, the lactose is completely digested by the culture. And yeah, it's GREAT to give to a LO who's 13 months. Although I would think that if baby is having what seems like diarrhea, I'd be looking for medical advice, just in case you're missing something more serious.

[remijo]

I have been to the dr. My husband is military and the pediatricians - ugh- I won't even say how incompetent they are and how mean. I've been scolded for still nursing her, for cosleeping, for delaying her vacs because she was sick. She's had nonstop eczema and the drs tell me I need to be educated and to slather her in heavy steroid cream three times a day. I am watching her carefully for signs of something more serious but so far the drs have been so not helpful.

What kind of yogurt maker do you ladies have?

[*farmergirl*]

I used to have an electric one that used glass cups but now I just use my oven. I have a gas stove so the pilot light is always on and leaves the oven at the perfect temp & there's a ton of room and no condensation.

i also have eczema problems I've found that avoiding most body products and laundry soaps some fabrics and metals like nickel helps as well as dietary changes like grains and lots of lactose containing dairy. If I do get some I use coconut oil generously nd otherwise try not to touch it (which is really hard s it itches like crazy)