Specific Carbohydrate Diet

Today, I have been on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) for 2 years, 5 months and and 18 days. I started having my first bad symptoms of Crohn's in July 2007. I was diagnosed in September of 2007 when I started SCD, but I jumped right in eating what I wanted. I had missed the part about doing the intro diet. October 30, 2007 I was hospitalized for 5 days because of inflammation and other complications of the disease. I came out on high doses of prednisone, imuran and pentasa. The prednisone was the only thing that seemed to work. As I weaned off of it, my doctor tried me on other combinations of meds that included entocort. In December 2007, she told me that I had very aggressive Crohn's and if I didn't get on Humira or Remicaid, I would be facing surgery within a year. Since that wasn't an option and I really did believe the science behind the SCD, I decided to try again. I restarted January 5, 2008; however, I just jumped right in again. I did get some immediate relieve but I was still on pain meds daily so I could work. I joined a MySpace SCD group where I learned about the intro diet and soon after joined the BTVC-SCD Yahoo group. I started the intro diet on February 5, 2008 and was off pain meds immediately.

My intro diet included chicken broth, a little chicken, gelatin with 3 cups water and 1 cup Tropicana Pure Premium OJ with no pulp, And Welch's grape juice diluted 100%. After I was able to tolerate the veggies in the chicken soup, I added eggs and colby jack cheese. Adding new foods was very slow for me. Usually they caused a tightening in my navel. If that happened, I would not eat the food again for a few weeks. After several months on the diet, I had a pretty varied diet of about 12 foods that I ate for the first year on the diet. Now, I have a nicely varied diet. I know what I can and can't eat. Peanuts cause problems. Tomatoes cause problems. Broccoli causes problems. And so on. The key to the diet working is taking it slow and not eating foods that you know will make your symptoms worse.