Adding New Foods (article)

[Guest guest]

Adding New Foods (from SCD Made Easy, a book I'm working

on)

One of the most common complaints is that the introductory diet is

boring. So it is. Its purpose is to give your gut the lowest common

denominator of food, foods which your system can digest, even if it is

badly injured. Just as priming a water pump makes it possible to obtain

water from a well, or putting primer on a wall before painting it makes

the paint last longer, the introductory diet prepares your system for

getting well. If you are sensitive to any of the foods on the intro diet,

especially if you have ever had an anaphylactic shock reaction to any of

them, do not eat them. Instead, substitute plain meat, and basic, plain

cooked, peeled and seeded vegetables.

Many

people want to know if there is a list of foods they should introduce and

if they should introduce them in a particular order.

Unfortunately, the answer is no. (The Pecanbread " stages " can

be helpful, but they are not rigid, and not part of the original SCD.) No

two people are exactly alike, and no two people will tolerate the same

things.

However, based on reports from various SCD lists, some good foods to add

after the introductory diet may include:

ripe banana ripe avocado cooked, seeded, peeled zucchini well-cooked green beans cooked winter squash (such as acorn, butternut, buttercup, pumpkin) steamed asparagus tips cooked, peeled, seeded tomato sautéed baby spinach

Everyone tolerates different things, but these seem to be foods tolerated

by a lot of people early on.

There

are two schools of thought on how to proceed once one has finished the

introductory diet.

Both

schools agree that how quickly you add new foods depends on how quickly

you respond to the diet. There have actually been people who had trophies

after a mere two or three days on Intro, but those lucky folks are,

unfortunately, not the norm.

The

first school of thought holds that you sit down and make a list of what

you ate the week or weeks before you started SCD. Look over it, cross off

any illegals, and write in legal substitutions. For example:

Subway™ turkey sandwich on wheat sliced home-baked

turkey breast. If raw lettuce is tolerated, roll up in a lettuce leaf

with SCD mayonnaise. Potato chips. SCD cheese crisps or commercial pork rinds

(check to be sure they have no starch or flavorings.) Icee™. Whirl crushed ice and legal fruit juice in blender.

Drink. Milkshake. Make a smoothie with SCD yogurt and fruit or yogurt

and legal flavorings. Mashed potatoes. Cheesy mock potatoes made with bean or lentil

paste or steamed mashed cauliflower or boiled, pureed celeriac.

According to this first school of thought, you can then go ahead and

prepare a menu, and resume normal eating patterns.

While

the above works for some people, the majority of individuals who come to

SCD have been sick for many years. Because of this, their systems may

react badly even to legal foods.

Even

keeping a food diary doesn’t help isolate which are the problem foods and

which are the keepers if you introduce too many new things at once. So

your symptoms either don’t improve or get worse. And you look at what you

were eating. Was it the honey mead you had for a wine on Tuesday? Could

it have been the baked celery and onion you seasoned the turkey with, and

decided to eat as a side dish on Wednesday? Or was it the cauliflower

cheesy mock potatoes with the Creole spiced beef roast on Thursday?

You

simply don’t know.

That’s

why, for most people, introducing new foods one at a time works

best.

To do

this, you should introduce a small amount of a single food such as half

of properly ripe banana (freeze the other half for later), then wait two

days (continuing with all the food on the intro diet). Chart all

reactions. On the second day, try the other half of the banana, and chart

reactions for two days. If your system is better, or at least no worse,

then you can add fully ripe bananas to your repertoire.

Then

you can select something else – steamed green beans, for instance, to add

in the same manner. Eventually, you will have a full repertoire of

healthy foods which your system digests well, and which will benefit your

health.

My

intro diet was beef roast, pork roast, steamed zucchini with butter, and

soft boiled eggs with butter -- and I ate it for about six weeks before I

was feeling equal to tackling SCD cooking. Somewhere around week two, I

added shredded cheddar to my zucchini.

The

previously mentioned method of sitting down and making a list of what you

ate the week or weeks before you started SCD is helpful here, as well.

Look over your list, cross off any illegals, and write in legal

substitutions. For example:

BurgerKing Whopper™ for lunch homemade beef burger with

cheddar cheese, legal pickle slices on the side. Microwaved canned asparagus with butter. Steamed fresh

asparagus with butter. Grilled chicken[1]. OK if homemade. Grilled fish. OK if homemade. Microwaved canned green beans. Steamed fresh green beans. I

was actually startled to discover, when I did this, how few foods had

comprised my weekly food patterns. I could still eat all the meats I had

before: burgers, beef roasts, grilled chicken, baked or grilled fish,

baked or grilled pork, lamb occasionally. I introduced cheddar cheese

first because I am a cheddar cheese fiend. I was already able to eat

eggs. Then I started looking at vegetables. As it turned out, I was able

to handle all the ones I had been willing to eat pre-SCD: steamed green

beans, steamed fresh asparagus, steamed broccoli, steamed cauliflower,

steamed spinach, steamed zucchini. The major difference was that I was

now using fresh, or fresh frozen for the green beans and asparagus.

I

discovered very quickly that I did not tolerate carrots, peas, or

Brussels sprouts at all well. (That was OK; I never liked them pre-SCD

anyway.) I also found I had to very strictly ration my consumption of

fruit and honey. (Wail!) Despite the legality of these items, it was

simply too much sugar for my system to absorb, and continuing to eat it

fed the bad bugs because it wasn’t being absorbed. After I had been on

the diet for awhile, I found I tolerated carrots just fine. I have no

ambitions to see what my system now thinks of peas and Brussels sprouts.

<grin>

One

common mistake people make is to introduce the nut flour goodies much too

soon. They want bread, they crave the comfort of having cookies to

munch.

As

delicious as the nut flour goodies are, experience indicates that you may

have to wait several weeks, or even months before your system is ready

for them. Personally, I had no trouble introducing them at about six

weeks. However, members of the listservs report two months, six months,

sometimes longer before badly injured guts are ready to digest these

wonderful, nutritious foods. Yet some of the people who cannot handle nut

flours also report that nut butters – made strictly from nuts, with no

added ingredients – can be substituted in recipes and are often tolerated

well. Apparently the fact that in nut butters, the nuts are ground even

finer than in the nut flours, makes them more easily digested than simply

finely ground nuts.

Another common mistake people make is eating too much of a newly

introduced food. Munching down on an entire batch of Cinnamon Cookies or

Basic Muffins, or a whole recipe of Honey Toffee, delicious as they are,

is a good way to send your system in a whirl.

For my

first foray into nut flour cooking, I made the cheese bread from

Breaking the Vicious Cycle and forcibly limited myself to

one very thin slice the three times I ate it. When I

introduced steamed, chopped spinach, it was really tough. I am quite

capable of eating 10 ounces of steamed spinach with butter by myself.

(No, my other name isn’t Popeyena the Sailorwoman! Besides, canned

veggies are illegal!) I carefully weighed out 2 ounces (about ¼ cup) of

steamed spinach and gave the rest to my husband. Who stared at me. For

the wonderful rich, creamy SCD yogurt, I had to measure out ½ cup

of yogurt and one-half teaspoon vanilla extract and two tablespoons

honey.

Mind

you, after decades of weight-loss diets, I hate weighing and measuring

food. But by doing it this way, I learned to within a hairs’ breadth what

I could tolerate and what I couldn’t. And I could note down on my

calendar to re-try favorite foods in a couple of months.

After

the introductory diet, one of the first foods recommended by Dr. Haas was

very ripe banana. Most people tolerate this very well. Then introduce

tender, well cooked vegetables. Elaine recommended string beans, petite

peas (frozen are fine), and spinach. Spaghetti squash, although delicious

with homemade meat sauce on it, may have too much fiber for the first few

weeks after the intro diet. Baked butternut squash, and baked acorn

squash is also good to start with. As indicated, I found steamed

zucchini delicious and soothing, although I made sure to remove any large

seeds.

How

quickly you are able to add foods depends on your system alone. What is

tolerated by one person may not be tolerated by you, and vice versa. In

the early days on the listserv, I used to read all the wonderful yogurt

smoothie recipes people were having for breakfast or snacks and whimper…

because I simply could not tolerate that much fruit and honey, and I

hated the taste of saccharin. On the other hand, when I posted my

beef-and-broccoli quiche recipe, there were people saying, “Oh, how

delicious that sounds… but I can’t go anywhere near broccoli!”

Take

things one day at a time, keeping in mind Dr. Gee’s statement: “We

must never forget that what the patient takes beyond his ability to

digest does harm.”

Don’t

force yourself.

And

one day, you may wake up to the realization that you had a full night’s

sleep, that you are no longer spotting every public toilet enroute to all

your favorite places, and that you are eating more foods than you ever

thought possible – including some which, only weeks before, might send

you catapulting into the necessary.

[1] Newcomers frequently ask if they can't continue

to eat at fast food restaurants if they just get “plain meat” or a “plain

salad and dressing” and eliminate the obvious offenders like the

grain-based breads and the potato products. For links to various national

fast food chains, check

http://members.shaw.ca/allergies/restaurants.html. From the Arby’s

Roast Beef™ page: “Roast Chicken Breast: Chicken breast, chicken broth,

seasoning (salt, sugar, onion powder, garlic powder,

deheated mustard, autolyzed yeast extract, corn syrup solids,

soy sauce [fermented soybeans, wheat, salt], paprika,

dextrin, natural flavors, spice, partially

hydrogenated soybean oil), sodium lactate, soybean oil, seasoning

(modified food starch, carrageenan, methylcellulose

gum, salt, flavor), sodium phosphates.” And from the ’s™ page:

“Grilled Chicken Sandwich: Chicken Breast with Rib Meat, Water, Seasoning

(Salt, Dextrose, Sodium Tripolyphosphate, Maltodextrin,

Grill Flavor [from Partially Hydrogenated Cottonseed and Soybean Oil],

Garlic, Corn Starch Modified, Onion, Beef Flavor

[beef Stock, Maltodextrin, Salt, Flavor, Colored with

Caramel, Disodium Inosinate and Guanylate (flavor enhancers),

Lactic Acid], Polysorbate 80 (stabilizer), Colored

with Caramel, Natural Flavor), Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and/or

Cottonseed Oil.

Commercial onion powder, commercial garlic powder, yeast products, corn

syrup solids, soy sauce, modified food starch, carrageenan,

methylcellulose gum, “flavors”, “natural flavors”, commercial chicken

broth (you wouldn’t believe the ingredients in so-called broths!),

dextrose (technically legal, but what is used as dextrose is not pure

dextrose but a mix of di- and polysaccharides), maltodextrin, modified

corn starch, and caramel (often derived from sugar or flour) are

all illegal. And all this in what is supposed to be a “plain” grilled or

baked piece of chicken!

—

Marilyn

New

Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Undiagnosed IBS since 1976, SCD since 2001

Darn Good SCD Cook

No Human Children

Shadow & Sunny Longhair Dachshund

[Guest guest]

Marilyn,

THanks so much for the preview of your book. I know we are all

looking forward to it!