Diet and Health FAQ

Tagged As: Ulcerative Colitis Crohn�s

Question:
I want to post this message to anyone new with Ulcerative Colitis or Crohns disease who may not be aware of The Specific Carbohydrate Diet, a diet that keeps U.C. and Crohns disease in remission for many, many people. I have been on this diet for 10 years now completely medication free, I am still in remission and I am very healthy. �The webpage to go to read more about it is www.scdiet.org. The reason I am posting this message is because someone did the same thing for me at one point in my life when I was very very ill with ulcerative colitis. �It changed my life. I hope to help even just one person by posting this message and passing on what I've learned.

Answer:
I was just thinking of asking if anyone here had tried the Specific Carbohydrate diet.�I haven't looked that deeply into it, it seems basically like what we used to call a macrobiotic diet, but at this point I am ready (pretty ready) to address this illness from another perspective. I find it an amazing coincidence how I have been reading about this diet for 3 hours now and then I saw these postings. �I have decided I am going to buy the book tomorrow and start right away. The way I reason it is that I know certain foods will make me extremely sick but I am also a little sick all the time, so maybe I am always eating something that is causing this problem. �I have nothing to lose anyways as the diet itself seems to be a healthy balance. I have decided to give it a try for at least 1 month. �Right now I am not on any medication, so if there is a drastic improvement it will most likely be the diet. I bought the book about 5 years ago and tried the diet. Being vegetarian I found it very restrictive and very difficult to stay on for any length of time, therefore I don't know how beneficial it was. I looked at the website yesterday via your link, and they seem to have gone some way to address the problem vegetarians have with the diet by including more vegetarian recipe suggestions. I might give it another try. Going to hospital next Monday for my polypectomy and keeping my fingers crossed. This months CCFA newsletter mailed out has a large section dedicated to talking about this diet, both the pros and cons of it for IBD.�I think you can probably see the article on the CCFA site at www.ccfa.org I'm mostly vegetarian, too, and that's one reason I am not so excited about being on a high protein, low carb diet. �Plus nuts seem to exacerbate my problems, and beans, well, just forget about it. I really should read the book, though, because I am just not that familiar with the details. I'm sure this diet works for many people, but for me it did not. �I faithfully followed it for about 4 months. �Home-made yogurt, no sugar, no wheat, farmer cheese, etc... You can see how people lose weight on high protein, low carb diets. �I lost a tremendous amount of weight. �Unfortunately I was already underweight to start with, suffering from UC. �After finally breaking the diet I looked like I came out of a concentration camp. �To me the diet was also very unpalatable because of how restricted it was, though pleasure of taste would not be important to me if the diet worked, but for me it did not improve my UC flare-up. Would a person always lose weight? I just read the book tonight and wanted to give it a try, however I am also underweight and cannot afford to lose anything else (I just lost 4 LBS in 2 weeks). Not meaning to put a downer on things, but many of these diets cause more harm than good, you will find that people posting messages on these groups are salespeople, either for the products or the books that tell you what to eat. Please don't all go believing everything you read. I could make up some diet tomorrow and post it on here and people would start using it if I sounded convincing enough. If you are going to change your diet to try and help your CD or Colitis please speak to your doctor first to discuss the implications. Many of these salespeople prey on the desperate, and when CD/UC sufferers have been ill for many years without any remission, they do become desperate. Please just be careful and remember that most of these are not what they seem. I can assure you that I am not a sales person, although you are right, we should not believe everything that we read on the internet. The bottom line is, it works for some and not for others. I personally would rather try a simple diet for two weeks if it meant I didn't have to be on prednisone for the rest of my life. There is no harm in that.�And by the way, I gained weight on this diet. I was 105, and now I'm a healthy 125. � I also thought I'd mention that I do eat TONS of carbs on the SCD. It�s not a low carb diet, its a specific carbs diet. �On the SCD I eat carbohydrates in the form of honey (which is healthier then refined white sugar anyway) fruits, vegetables, etc. And also, there is no purchase necessary to begin the SCD, because the book can be checked out from the library.