Steve’s SCD Diet Healing Journal: Week 17 – What’s in Your Medicine Cabinent?

Co-Founder of SCD Lifestyle Steve Wright has finally broken down and started his path to intestinal healing.  After many years of undiagnosed digestive warfare in his body, these series of weekly posts will take you through his experiences, thoughts, and struggles on the SCD diet.  Check back and follow his progress:

Week 17 Summary

When thinking about writing this weeks post, the first thing that comes up is the fact that I’m about to finally see the doctor I’ve been waiting months to get into.  Based on the fact that I’ve been self diagnosing/medicating for the last several months, I’m pretty nervous to go in and hear what he has to say.  I’m making a big talking list so that hopefully I get all the tests I would like and bring up any problems I can think of.

I don’t have any earth shattering news to report other than I baked my first SCD cheesecake this week (I’m impressed with myself).  As a matter of fact, overall in the last three weeks I’ve seen small signs of improvements in all areas of my digestion but nothing groundbreaking.

Over the last couple weeks my gas got extremely bad and then slowly it has headed back towards normal.  That trend continued last week and now I’m back to what I would consider relatively normal (a couple small farts a day that don’t smell too bad and no cramping associated with the gas).  My stools have been going back and forth between 2’s,3’s,4’s and 5’s.  I do get some stomach noise and movement (not painful) about 50% of the time after a meal.  Energy and clarity are stable and tend to correlate with the amount of sleep I get (little sleep = not good for health).

I am back to eating goat’s milk yogurt, but I sure do miss the texture and taste of the cow’s milk yogurt I was making.  The next batch I make I’m going to try dripping the yogurt to see how that tastes.  I haven’t been adding anything to my diet lately mostly because I’m comfortable where I’m at and I’ve been messing with the supplements and yogurt so much that I didn’t want to change a bunch of things at once.  Next week I’m going to take a big step forward and test my baking skills using some almond flour, it should be interesting!

I SMELL AN UPDATE

Okay, so if you’ve been following along I’ve been supplementing with zinc in order to try and help my ability to smell.  I’m happy to report that it seems to be working, maybe its a placebo effect, but I know that my allergies have been acting up and my ability to breathe through my nose is much worse than what it was a month ago (the neti pot everyone morning reminds me).  However my smelling has been around a 5 or 6 most days and up to a 8 or 9 on occasion!

I re-performed the zinc tally taste test this morning and my results have dramatically changed in the past 2 weeks.  Two weeks ago I started supplementing with 50mg of zinc gluconate a day and for the last week I’ve been taking 100mg a day.  When I performed the test this morning, as soon as I put the solution in my mouth I noticed it tasted slightly sweet, then after 5-7 sec it started to change tastes to a metallic like taste (like if you put a penny in your mouth).  Now from what I understand about the test the metallic taste should have continued to evolve up until the 30 second mark either intensifying or changing flavors.  This unfortunately was not the case.

What this does tell me is my intracellular levels of zinc are much higher than what they were several weeks ago and I’m probably now around a level 2 on the zinc deficiency scale.  I’m going to continue supplementing at 100mg through the end of the week and retest my levels early next week.  I’m anticipating that I will be able to stop zinc supplementation sometime next week, but I will base this on the results of next weeks zinc tally test.

CURRENT SUPPLEMENT REGIME

As I’m going to see the doc this week I’m guessing my supplementation is going to change based his recommendations so I figured I would give an update to everyone.  If your are doing the SCD diet and are in any way restricted (have food intolerance/allergy or are in the early phases of the diet) I think it is extremely important for you to be supplementing to make sure you are getting all your needed vitamins and minerals as well as replacing your good bacteria and enzymes.  This is not intended in any way to be a list for everyone, this is what I take and it is put together solely based on what I am finding that I am deficient in.  Always talk things over with your doctor to make sure that they support your supplementation.  If they don’t support the SCD diet… find a new doctor!

Taken before each main meal (anything over 500 calories)

1 GI Pro Health Scdophilus 10+ (1 serving)

4 Freeda Betaine HCL (4 servings)

Taken during meals split throughout the day

6 GI Pro Health SCD Complete Multivitamin (1 serving)

1 Freeda B-Complex (1 serving)

5 Freeda Calcium Complete (1 serving)

5 drops of New Beginnings Nutritionals Methyl-Mate Sublingual B12 (1 serving)

1 GI Pro Health Vitamin D3 5000mg (1 serving)

6 GI Pro Health Omega Max (6 servings)

2 GI Pro Health Prozymes (1 Serving)

2 NOW Zinc Gluconate 50mg (2 Servings)

Split between meals

8 Thorne Research SF722 (2.5 servings)

4 Thorne Research Berbercap (2 servings)

Before Bed

2 Vital Nutrients Melatonin 3mg (2 servings)

Now that’s quite a pharmacy list of bottles, I’m honestly a bit shocked at how many different pills I take.  Someday I hope to have this list squeezed down to the bare essentials but for now each of the above supplements is needed while I heal.  Once I’m able to get a vitamin/mineral blood panel done I may be able to reduce or eliminate several but until then I’m not going to change what has been giving me great results.  In the near future I will most likely be dropping the zinc and all the Thorne products (the goal with them was to eliminate yeasts).

All you SCD’ers out there what do your supplement/medicine cabinets look like?  Hopefully there not worse than mine!