Steve’s SCD Diet Healing Journal: Week 20 – Celebrating My Birthday SCD Style

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 20 Summary

Okay so my birthday wasn’t last week its actually today, but I did celebrate it with my family this past weekend.  My family overall has been skeptical but supportive of my Specific Carbohydrate Diet experience.  In our family, family meals are of high importance.

Food is a medium through which we can gather to bond, with many meals stretching over 2 hours of table time.  So in the beginning of this diet I did seem to hurt my mom’s feelings because I was excluding myself from the amount of love and time she was putting in kitchen.

Now that I’ve been doing this diet for 5 months and I have added back a pretty decent selection of foods, it has been much easier on her.  Since the beginning she has been making every effort to try and cook special meals that I can eat and the whole family enjoys.  It was always just a bit to hard in the first 3 months or so as I was eating a mixed pureed diet that was pretty basic.

Not anymore, for my birthday this weekend my mom made a wonderful SCD legal breakfast filled with scrambled eggs, sugar free bacon and fruit followed with the Carrot Cake recipe from BTVC.  There was an enormous amount of food on the table and it was cleaned by all (Yes in my experience “normal” people usually prefer SCD food). The carrot cake was extremely moist and delicious, so much so that I don’t think anyone even missed the standard American diet traditions of frosting and ice cream (it does taste even better loaded in butter!).

My diet was steady all week last week, I started taking my supplements again.  I had minimal gas and my BM’s were a mixture of 3’s and 4’s, I would say that’s a pretty solid sign that I’m still in need of some supplemental helpers.  After being urged by my doctor and doing some of my own research, I started Iodine supplementation last week.  I’m going to start slow at 12.5mg a day and build up to a daily dosage of 50mg for something like 4 to 6 months.  The research on Iodine is so absurdly beneficial without any downsides that I’m now urging anyone who will listen to either get tested or talk to some about starting to supplement!

SMELLING UPDATE

So I feel like I’ve made some significant progress in my ability to smell.  But in the past week I’ve seen some regression in my smelling abilities.  I’m guessing it has is related to my horrible allergies right now, and I don’t get into see the allergist till November.  Today when I performed my weekly zinc tally taste test I was surprised to find that I performed worse than last week.   Which means I’m going to continue to supplementing with zinc and I need to go find some copper to make sure i don’t deplete my copper levels.

That being said I do want to make it clear that on most days I’m still smelling significantly better than I was 3 months ago and I’ve made a 180 degree change from 6 months ago.  I don’t think I can contribute it to one specific action I’ve taken but I do feel strongly that a couple specific changes I’ve made have directly influenced my improvement.   I think the biggest improvements have come from following the SCD Diet, Fish oil, Vitamin D3, Netti pot and Zinc.

SPICE OF LIFE RAMBLINGS

As I’ve learned more and more about cooking natural foods and using high quality sauces and spices my eyes have really been opened into a whole new world of flavors and fun.  Before the SCD diet I think I used 4 sauces (hot sauces, sugar laden BBQ sauce, store bought Italian dressing and salsa full of preservatives) and I would have argued with anyone how good they were on any dish.  I was content in my little world of dressings, thinking I knew flavor…ha not so much.

It is not that I look down on people who still use these sauces as they can be delicious, it is just the opposite… I feel bad for them.  The fact that the 95% of people probably use store bought sauces for all their meals really makes me sad as they are missing out on a whole world of amazingness (is that a word?)  My paradigm is rapidly changing from one in which I wish I could be apart of their world (SAD diet) to one in which I feel pity on the fact that they don’t know what they are missing.

Anyways, enough ramblings, I did want to share my current spice mixture that I’ve been playing around with on everything from baked pork tenderloins to grilled chicken breasts.  It consists of a 4 main spices: paprika, cayenne pepper, cinnamon and ginger.  Now, sometimes I put other spices in there such as salt, garlic, and pepper, but the main 4 are constants.  I’m not ready to give any specific ratio yet as I haven’t perfected it, but I will say keep the cinnamon and cayenne pepper at about a 1:2 ratio and the keep the ginger at about the same amount of cayenne, then load on the paprika.  This will get a very decent spicy yet sweet mixture that has been receiving rave reviews from my family and friends.  I use it mainly as a dry rub and it really does work better when everything is measured out rather than winged because it’s easy to overdo any one of the these spices.

Does anyone else have any secret spice rub mixtures they’d like to share?