Steve’s SCD Diet Healing Journal: Week 4 – Learning how to make goat’s milk yogurt

Steve Wright, Co-Founder of SCD Lifestyle, has finally broken down and started his path to intestinal healing. After many years of undiagnosed digestive warfare in his body, this series of weekly posts will take you through his experiences, thoughts, and struggles on the SCD diet. Check back and follow his progress:

Week 4 Summary

This is a big week for me because I get to celebrate my 30th day on the SCD diet. I am 1/3 of the way through my 90-day commitment to this diet! I needed to return home for some family business in the middle of the week, which forced me out of my normal routine. This cut out most of my weightlifting sessions and forced me to spend a bunch of time doing extreme batch cooking early in the week in preparation. I did manage to introduce some new phase 1 foods, along with SCD legal yogurt.

Mental and Body Changes

My mental and physical symptoms seem to be staying pretty constant. Physically, I had more bowel movements this week than last, which is a good sign. I believe it is probably related to the introduction of the yogurt, because as the week went on I was slowly increasing the amount of yogurt I was eating and I also recorded a rise in the number of trips to the bathroom. I think this is a great trend. And as I slowly get up to a ½ cup to a full cup of yogurt a day hopefully it will really help my gut to continue healing itself and relieve any lingering constipation issues. Mentally, I didn’t notice any changes probably due to not being in a set schedule all week.

Fitness Goals

Since I traveled home for half of the week, I only made it to the gym a for a couple of weightlifting sessions. I will check my measurements and weight this up coming week and update everyone.

Diet Details

This week, I made my first batch of homemade goat’s milk yogurt. I swear I was slowly heating the milk, but the Super Bowl was starting and I figured a couple more notches on the stove dial wouldn’t hurt anything. Man was I wrong! I scorched up the goat’s milk pretty bad with plenty of it burned to the bottom of the pan I was using. Once I figured out what I had done, I freaked out and tried to find some info about burning the milk while making yogurt.  My online search was unproductive so I did what any man short on time would do and devised a way to strain the scorched milk chunks out before I put it in the yogurt maker. I thought I was the smartest person in the world, until I tasted my fresh yogurt a day later. The taste of the yogurt started off like any other unflavored yogurt I’ve had, but finished with a very distinct burned taste. In retrospect, I should have started over with fresh milk! So let my error be a lesson for anyone else trying to make goat’s milk yogurt, heat up the milk very, very slowly and if you do manage to burn it…throw it out!

I also tried some sautéed spinach this week. It was a great change of pace from the very starchy carrots and squashes I’ve been eating over the last few weeks. As the weeks have started adding up, I’ve gotten very sick of eating plain or spiced up eggs in the morning. So, I went searching for a phase 1 alternative breakfast. I stumbled across this great recipe for SCD legal banana pancakes (original recipe link broken).

The first batch I whipped up, I tried not to use any oil in the pan. But after several experiments I will say it is possible to execute the recipe without oil. However, I got fed up with crumbled banana pancake balls and added some olive oil to my pan. The oil made all the difference when it comes to creating an actual flip-able pancake. I wasn’t planning on adding any olive oil into my diet just yet, but I was so frustrated in the moment that it just sort of happened. Luckily, I didn’t react to the oil or pancakes, so I think I’m going to leave the oil in my diet for now. This will allow me to progress further with my meat cooking and start sautéing meat on the stovetop, instead of broiling everything. I think this is a good next step as baring any setbacks I’m going to start adding some phase 2 foods to my diet.

One Line Thoughts on the SCD Diet

• Heat your milk for the yogurt slowly! And if you burn any of it dump it out!
• The past 30 days have gone extremely quick, it seems like just yesterday I was making the intro diet soup! I can’t wait to see how my body has changed at 60 days!
• For people with genetically gifted digestive systems that haven’t met a food they couldn’t properly process, trying to explain the SCD diet is like talking in foreign language. They just don’t understand the concept that a food may taste good, but it will make you feel sooo bad!
• I didn’t experience any “die-off” from introducing the SCD legal yogurt. However, I think it is really helping move food through my system.

Does anyone else have a good story about the first time they made yogurt or am I the only one who managed to mess it up? Thanks for reading, see you next week.

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