Stages

[Guest guest]

>> Just wondering how long each of you remained at the various stages? I

would love to begin with some lettuce and salads but am only on SCD for 5

weeks. I do eat small amounts of almond bread. Small amounts of yogurt

(very small). Is there any approximate or average time for each stage?

Thanks for your feedback! <<

Ronnie,

When I started SCD, there wasn't any such thing as " stages " -- this was

created for the predecessor list to Pecan Bread -- the Elaine's Children

List.

<g> I can appreciate the craving for a good tossed salad, especially in

summer, when every thing looks so luscious!

However, at five weeks on SCD, you may not be ready for raw vegetables. For

myself, I ate exactly four items for two months: beef roast, pork roast,

steamed zucchini (sometimes with grated mild cheddar, sometimes with

butter) and soft-boiled eggs. I didn't even have the strength to fix

chicken breasts or a turkey, and my husband, whose cooking skills include

baking bacon, boiling water, and making toasted sandwiches, wasn't up for

it, even with my instructions.

After that two months, I branched out to well-steamed green beans, and

amazingly enough, steamed broccoli and cauliflower. I tolerated those two

just fine -- it was the carrots, nominally on the intro diet, which I

didn't tolerate at all. (They came through in big orange chunks, completely

undigested.)

I think I finally tackled a salad around 6-9 months. I peeled my cucumbers,

partly because SCD calls for peeling veggies, and partly because I prefer

my cukes peeled anyway. I dipped tomatoes in boiling water, and peeled and

seeded them, then re-chilled them. I did not try raw onion bits! I did use

lightly steamed cauliflower and broccoli -- steamed until just

tender-crisp, then re-chilled. I made nifty croutons out of almond bread. I

did not use sliced raw mushrooms for over a year, but then, mushrooms,

cooked or raw, and I have a bad history which goes back to the story of

Babar the Elephant. It seems I had a sensitivity to them as a child, and,

lacking the language to explain to my mother that they made me feel sick, I

latched onto the story of Babar, and how the king elephant ate a BA-AD

mushroom and turned all green and died, for an explanation of why I

wouldn't eat mushrooms. It wasn't until I was an adult that I discovered

that I could tolerate very small amounts of mushrooms occasionally, but if

I tried to eat more, I would have gut cramps, horrible gas, and diarrhea.)

I had been on SCD three years when I tried doing salads on on a daily

basis, and found my system did not yet tolerate that. Then I had diarrhea,

but extremely reduced motility, so I ended up with lots of " accidents "

because I was only squirting a little out at any given time. I determined

then that I could have a salad one day, but needed to have a cooked

vegetable, such as my well-tolerated steamed zucchini the next day.

Currently, after over five years grain-free, I can do salads for 3-4 days,

but then I must have cooked vegetables for a day or two. And, curiously

enough, while I'm just fine with all forms of green lettuce, baby spinach,

and other greens, I don't tolerate the red lettuces at all. They don't

cause me problems, per se, they just end up floating in the toilet, which

startled the heck out of me the first time I saw it.

So, the answer, as with so many things relating to SCD, is that when you

can have salads depends on your particular system, how well you've healed,

and what you tolerate.

This is one of the things which can make SCD seem so very difficult at

first. We're accustomed to people telling us what to eat and when to eat

it, and even as nominal adults, we're not used to making such decisions for

ourselves. As a consequence, we approach a diet expecting everything to be

laid out for us.

What *Breaking the Vicious Cycle* does is lay out the parameters of what we

can eat -- and then it is our responsibility to observe the workings of our

own body in relation to what we consume, and determine what we can and

cannot have. That's scary. For the first time, WE are responsible! (It's

even scarier when you're the one making decisions for a child, and trying

to determine what works and what doesn't, and worrying about nutrition, but

more on that, later, with regards to Balance Over Time.)

Determining what works is where keeping a food diary is critical. You may

think you'll remember what you ate before you had those symptoms, but trust

me, you won't. Been there, tried it without the diary, didn't work.

In any case, if you decide to try a salad, let us know how it goes. <g> And

I have some great salad dressing recipes!

-- Marilyn (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA)

Undiagnosed IBS 25 Years, SCD Five Years

Darn Good SCD Cook

No Human Children

Shadow & Sunny Longhair Dachshund