SCD Advice from Marilyn 1

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SCD advice from Marilyn

Hi Listmates,

Marilyn is writing an SCD cookbook as well as a novel.We are very

fortunate to have her help. She makes our journey to SCD fun and

delicious!

Subject: Re: Basics of SCD

>> Saying what is forbidden is pretty depressing. How about a list

>> of what

you can have? Please, someone who knows. <<

,

Why depressing? I suppose if your diet is mainly pasta, rice, and

potatoes, it would be.

It's downright scary to completely rearrange the way you think about

food, and what you consider healthy - especially when what you're asked

to do seems to fly in the face of what you've always been told. Whether

you've been a vegetarian, a consumer of the Standard American Diet

(SAD), or even someone who has tried, really tried to eat healthy,

you're going to be making changes.

Making the changes, giving up foods you may enjoy, or which are part of

your culture, isn't easy. You may worry that people will think you are

strange for going on such a restrictive diet.

Especially threatening is making all these changes if you are

physically, mentally, and emotionally fragile because of the condition

of your health or that of a loved one.

That said, you can have a wide variety of meat, vegetables, greens,

fruits, cheeses, eggs, yogurt, etc. How you COMBINE these to make

wonderful gourmet meals is entirely up to you.

I can state that Harry and I are eating better than we ever have in

almost 27 years of marriage.

I have my parents over once a week for dinner. It is all SCD.

One week, we had grilled catfish, and a shrimp salad with homemade

remoulade dressing, and vanilla ice cream with blue berries.

Another week, I did cheese burgers with steamed mixed veggies and

homemade ranch dressing, and we had lemon cream pie for dessert.

The next week, we had roast chicken and dressing, steamed green beans,

and finished off the lemon cream pie.

Then we had steaks, with mock-potato salad, and mixed green salad with

honey-mustard dressing.

Be aware, also, that when I do these meals, they must also be free of

added sodium because of my mother's congestive heart failure.

Tonight, we're back to roast chicken; meanwhile, I'm hunting a low-

sodium SCD legal cheese so I can do Mexican food for my folks.

Limiting? Not on your life!

SCD has, however, forced me to think out of the box as far as meals are

concerned.

-- Marilyn (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA)

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Subject:SCD does become easier with time

And truth to tell, you'll find the cooking goes easier when you have

gotten your kitchen equipped with all the basics that you need. And as

what is permitted and what is not permitted becomes second nature,

instead of having to stop and think. Even my husband has the legals

and illegals down pat.

And it's amazing what you can do with homemade burgers, chicken breasts

and pork chops! (I consider a Foreman grill to be my best

friend... we had grilled chicken Wednesday night, leftover turkey

Thursday night, grilled burgers Friday night, grilled catfish Sunday

night, and leftover pork chops tonight. And none of those meals took

more than a half hour to prepare.

-- Marilyn (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA)

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Date: Tue Dec 17,

2002 8:50 am Subject: SCD / GFCF

>> But wouldn't the GFCF diet be appropriate for some people with

>> autism,

whereas the SCD would be more appropriate for others? <<

,

Most of what I know about GFCF comes from this list, as I don't have

children. (Had I found SCD twenty years ago, I might have, but

sometimes, that's the way the universe works.)

But based on the the reports from here, and from elsewhere that I've

been reading, GFCF gets rid of milk protein (casein) and grain protein

(gluten -- which, btw, is used as " meat " in some vegetarian diets: I

have a book on my shelves, purchased from curiosity, called HOW TO MAKE

ALL THE MEAT YOU EAT OUT OF WHEAT).

But as the SCD clearly shows, the problem in many cases of gut disorder

isn't the protein fraction of the grain -- it's the STARCH.

Now, ADD and ADHD runs in my family. My mother has it (won't admit it),

my sister has it, my niece and nephew have it, my brother-in-law has it

(won't admit it), and I myself am ADD.

Probably the reason I did as well in school as I did was because all the

while I was growing up, Mom was on a low carb kick, and we had minimal

starches and lots of protein, cheeses, veggies and fruits.

After I got married, my husband was a rice fiend, and I drifted away

from a low carb near-SCD diet... just about the time I probably needed

it the most, as my birth control pills triggered IBS.

Last year, when I went SCD, I never noticed a shift in my behavior

patterns -- but my husband did.

I ended up fixing two parallel Christmas dinners last year, one SCD and

one " normal " less than six weeks after I had gall bladder surgery. (This

after being deathly ill, having turned literally lemon yellow, including

eyeballs from a liver enzyme level which, as the surgeon told me later,

they normally only see in advanced cases of liver cancer.)

There were several cataclysms in the course of the preparation, any one

of which, another year, would have had me in weeping hysterics or a

screaming rage. My response last year: " Dammit, that's not right. OK,

what can I swap out for what didn't work? "

Christmas night, after we had washed up all the dishes, and put away the

food, and our guests had gone, Harry and I were sitting in the computer

room, and he commented on that fact. And then added, " I think I like

SCD. It's nice to have the woman I married back. "

So SCD, and the beginning of the healing of my gut made a major change

in ADULT behavior and mental processes.

I have seen the change in behavior in my dogs and cats when grains were

removed from their diets. In the last two months, I have started having

my parents over for dinner on Tuesday nights -- one hundred per cent

SCD. Interestingly, on Wednesdays, my mother's ADD behaviors are

markedly reduced, even though she refuses to give up her milk and cereal

for breakfast because fixing a smoothie (I've offered to make the yogurt

for her) is too much work.

Now, there are people who are, indeed, highly sensitive to cow

proteins, and who might, therefore, have some benefit from going casein-

free, especially if they don't know to try goat, or sheep as Jenn did

with her Colin.

But I honestly cannot feel that the amount of starch which seems to be

in the average GF/CF diet is good for ANYONE.

Moreover, a gluten-free product is normally a manufactured product, and

personally, I'm trying to cut the manufacturers out of our food chain.

I'm buying as much of our meat, vegetables and dairy from local

producers as I can. I like the idea that my food dollars are going to

the people who actually did the work of raising it. Moreover, the

quality is, on average, much better than I normally get from the

grocery store.

My husband (who has had chronic fatigue for ten years) hasn't gone 100%

SCD: he still eats wheat bread with his sandwich at noon during the

week, and he doesn't say no to rice if it is served when we eat out. But

simply eliminating the bulk of the starches from his diet has resulted

in a husband who is no longer falling down exhausted at 8p in the

evening, even with a nap when he comes home from work. His cholesterol

level dropped fifty points, and the HDL/LDL ratios improved markedly.

So while I believe that one may have to make modifications to the SCD

(such as waiting to introduce yogurt until some healing has taken

place, or using goat yogurt and cheeses instead of cow, but NO changes

to the essential SCIENCE of SCD) for each individual person, I can't

help but feel that SCD is a far healthier diet than one which depends

on manufacturers to remove glutein and casein from otherwise

" ordinary " foods.

-- Marilyn (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA)

****************************************************************-

Subject:SCD does become easier with time

And truth to tell, you'll find the cooking goes easier when you have

gotten your kitchen equipped with all the basics that you need. And as

what is permitted and what is not permitted becomes second nature,

instead of having to stop and think. Even my husband has the legals

and illegals down pat.

And it's amazing what you can do with homemade burgers, chicken breasts

and pork chops! (I consider a Foreman grill to be my best

friend... we had grilled chicken Wednesday night, leftover turkey

Thursday night, grilled burgers Friday night, grilled catfish Sunday

night, and leftover pork chops tonight. And none of those meals took

more than a half hour to prepare.

-- Marilyn (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA)

*************************************************************

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