Steve’s SCD Diet Healing Journal: Week 25 – Fast and Easy SCD Legal Meals

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

Week 25 Summary

I had a big scare last week, after a rather enjoyable 30 seconds on the toilet I got up to see the water stained a dull red!  My heart started racing and my mind started running, my first thought was how could I have caused my fissure to act up?  Upon further examination I ruled this thought out as the blood color was too dark to be what I considered fissure blood.  Now the irrational thoughts started coming at me from every direction, “Was I actually bleeding further up in my digestive tract?” finally, I couldn’t take it so I called Jordan.

I think it is so important to have someone else to talk to who is doing or done the SCD diet, in a matter of seconds with his outside perspective my fears were squashed.  He just asked me what I changed in my diet, I was rather annoyed at first because, duh, I already asked myself that question.  Nothing, was the answer.  I didn’t eat anything different that day.  He pressed me a bit harder and asked what I had changed that week and I told him I added beets within the last 2 days.  That’s when he pretty much smacked me in the forehead and told me calm down that it was most likely just remnants of the beets I ate a day before.

So I gave it 2 days and stopped eating beets and sure enough my red stools disappeared.  I then ate some more just to test out the theory and what do you know, a day after I ate them I had red stools.  To me this is a very important reminder that it is all to easy to draw irrational and wrong conclusions when faced with a challenge that carries huge emotional outcomes like poor digestion does for me.  The basic lesson I learned… it’s important to have support from someone that has no ties to your own emotional outcome.

Other than the different colored stools, my digestion is still rocking along even though I’ve started snacking on some fresh blueberries in my yogurt.  I was pretty excited to learn that my O.D. on fresh fruit at the family party over the weekend wasn’t a digestive set back.  For good or bad I took that as a stepping stone to take a bit more liberty and start working fresh foods back into my diet.  I will continue cooking meats and vegetables, but honestly, I don’t like cooked fruit much and therefore haven’t been eating hardly any.  It is nice to enjoy some fresh fruit again!

SPICE OF LIFE RAMBLINGS

This week I want to talk about SCD diet staples.  Studies have shown that most people eat the same 10-15 foods in a given week.  We all like to think that we eat an extremely diverse diet but it’s simply untrue.  As humans we are actually very predictable creatures in search of easy autonomous habits.  Taking this knowledge to heart can really help simplify the SCD diet.  For instance, two ways in which I embrace my need for stability and habit are having the ingredients on hand to produce my two favorite go-to SCD meals.  One of them takes roughly 20 minutes to make and the other about 5 minutes.

Weekly SCD diet Staple #1

Specific Carbohydrate Slop

The details of this dish vary depending on my fridge and creativity each week but the outline is always the same.  Using 1-3 pounds of

ground beef (venison, chicken, turkey etc.) brown it up in a large pan.  Next, I usually take a 1 pound frozen stir-fry vegetables mixture or a mixture of any other frozen vegetables I have on hand and put them in the microwave for 15 minutes.  As the meat browns make sure to add your favorite spices.  When the meat is cooked and the vegetables are thawed and cooked its time to drain them and combine them with the meat in the pan on the stove.  If your diet can handle tomatoes, now you can take the completely random slop mixture up to another level by adding any tomato mixture you might have on hand.  Combine the meat and veggies with sauce on the stove for just long enough to mix the flavors and evenly heat all parts (5 minutes or so).  In the end, the dish ranges from a chili like dish to a stir-fry like concoction that can be made from frozen ingredients in under 30 minutes and tastes great.  If your dish ends up low on flavor and tomatoes aren’t a part of your diet try some of the following that I use: red-wine vinegar and honey, a can of coconut milk with cayenne pepper or tons of butter and minced garlic.

Emergency SCD Legal Meal

The “Ah Crap I _______________ (forgot X at the grocery store, don’t have time, etc.) meal”

I always like to have a can of SCD legal tuna or chicken in my cupboard.  The first thing I do is reach for it and then take a survey of my fridge.  This dish is the ultimate wing it meal.  I usually keep tuna so that’s what I normally use, but the first step is to put the can of tuna in a bowl.  Now from here there really isn’t a recipe basically just throw in anything or everything you have into a bowl and heat in the microwave.  Some examples of my 5 minute concoctions include:

Tuna, Salt, Pepper, Honey and Cayenne pepper

Tuna, any cheese and spices

Tuna, spinach leaves, cheese, red wine vinegar

Tuna, any SCD legal tomato sauce (paste, salsa, marinara, Campbell’s juice, diced fresh), and anything else always tastes good

After the random combo is chosen, heat in the microwave for 1 to 2 minutes until ingredients are evenly heated.

The take away message that I’ve learned from the recipes above is that cooking SCD style can be quicker and easier than SAD cooking.  When you start with natural healthy foods it is extremely hard to come up with a combination that tastes bad.  There is just something special that happens when you combine a bunch of non-processed ingredients together. Build off my recipe framework above and try and make your own random SCD legal combo, I dare ya!  Post your successes or failures below for people to learn.