A Trip to the Naturopath Changes Everything

Let me start out by saying that I have been on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet for 7 months now. I have done so with great willpower and desire to remain on it for my life's entirety. Now I must say that this may very well be my last blog as strictly SCD-compliant.  What happened, you say? A visit to the naturopath doctor, that is what happened.

If you haven't noticed,  I have had my struggles and doubts about being on this diet- I am still loosing a lot of blood, little white marks in my fingernails have come back, I've never had so many cavities ever ever before in my life (and we all know your teeth reflect the health of the rest of your body), I'm still quite tired frequently for no lack of sleep (could be tied to the blood loss), and overall after 7 months I still can't tolerate any foods with skins or seeds or that are raw. I know that SCD takes time- a lot of time. When you really think about the design of the diet it mainly addresses the cause of further damage to the gut, stopping the cycle of bacteria overgrowth and further inflammation. So if you starve those bad bacteria eventually the inflammation that is already present will go away, but as severe as some cases, like mine, are that will take, literally, years. I would be all too willing to wait that length of time in order not to have to take prescriptions forever, but as I listed above, I can tell that for me there is something incomplete about this diet. Hence, I went to a doctor that could actually help me. I got his name from a friend of mine whose mother had severe ulcerative colitis, so bad that she was down to eating only baby food. This same doctor put her on The Maker's Diet, and within a year she was healed. At this point in my journey of having Crohn's Disease I am willing to try just about anything within a realm of safety and legality that will get me better. So I went to this naturopath and right away he tells me that I need to get a hair analysis to figure out the imbalances of elements in my body- he could tell from looking at my eyes there was something wrong. If my grandparents had not done a hair analysis and swear by it's helpfulness I would be more hesitant to do such a thing, but I was leaning toward something of the like anyways. So I will proceed with that in a few weeks, I was using shampoo with zinc in it and that throws off the results- hence I have to wait. This doctor also gave me a few whole food supplements to take, explaining how each one would be helpful to clean out my intestinal tract and eventually get my body to heal itself. I was nervous about these supplements because they include ingredients like maltodextrin which are definitely a no-no on SCD! But, the doctor is very wise and I could tell he knows what he is talking about, so I am going to listen to him. I was also given a food list to eat by, he said what I am doing now is good on the SCD, but there were a few things that differ between what Elaine Gottschall says are ok and what this doctor is recommending. The paper with my food list on it is an excerpt from Dr. Melvin Page's diet (The Page Diet, I am doing Phase II) which I had not heard of before. Here are some differences I noticed right away:

• PD allows for potatoes and sweet potatoes, boiled (SCD potatoes are strictly forbidden)
• PD allows for some corn and popcorn (SCD illegal)
• PD focuses more on combinations of foods, you cannot eat fruit within an hour of eating any vegetable or protein, you cannot combine starchy vegetables with meat, etc. (SCD does not matter when or in what combinations foods are eaten as long as they are legal)
• PD only allows butter in small amounts and only white cheeses, including mozzarella (SCD has specific cheeses which are allowed unlimited in amounts including orange cheeses, and excludes mozzarella as being illegal)
• PD has more vegetables that are o.k. to eat, including some starchy ones that SCD does not allow for
• PD limits the amounts of fruits to eat to only two servings a day, and very few fruits are recommended (SCD unlimited fruits of any kind)
• PD cottage cheese is allowed (that is a no-no on SCD)
• PD allows for NO juices! (SCD allows for diluted juices, not from concentrate)

Today will be my first day following the guidelines of the Page Diet. Knowing as much as I do about why certain foods are SCD-illegal I will probably stay away from those things at least in the beginning to promote healing as much as possible. This is harder than I thought it was going to be because for the last almost-year I have trained my brain to think of so many foods as forbidden and have gotten in a routine of cooking and eating with fruits as much as I want. Now this has to change, I have to have 6 meals a day and a certain amount of protien from meats, fish, and eggs (take body weight divided by 15 = # of ounces of protein) and I have to relearn the system. Once I get my hair analysis done I will know a lot more and I may be able to change things, I will wait on the doctor to say. For the moment though, everything is still cooked, and I am still waiting to see how long it will take for my Crohn's to disappear.