Steve’s SCD Diet Healing Journal: Week 19 – Camping on the SCD diet

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 19 Summary

Last week was an adventure, in more ways than one…stool tests, no pills and camping, Oh My!  I stopped taking any pills last Sunday in order to properly perform the Genova Diagnostics Stool Test.  Pretty much all the digestive helpers I take would skew the test results and even though I could have continued taking my multivitamin, fish oil and vitamin D3 I figured why not give my whole body a week’s rest.  I’m a firm believer in only taking the essentials and always keeping your body on its toes so I figured my body wouldn’t mind a bit of a break.  I can’t wait for the day when I’m down to a few simple vitamins a day instead of the mountains of pills I take each week while I’m healing!

Because you have to be supplement free for 3 days prior to taking the test and then the test lasts 3 days I figured I would just stretch it out until I was back into my normal routine on Tuesday.  I’ve been on many of these supplements for over 4 months and I had a decent amount of anxiety wrapped up in quitting them.  I honestly thought that 8 days without probiotics and digestive enzymes and I might be back where I started last year.  Lucky for me that wasn’t the case.

The first couple days of the week I had quite a bit of noise and movement in my stomach after eating, none of which were painful, only slightly annoying.  As the days dragged on the noise and digestive uneasiness subsided by about day 5.  I really didn’t have any other big problems, my BM’s all week were about 80% 2’s.  Which isn’t exactly ideal but was way better than 1’s or 7’s I thought I was in for.  I was never constipated and had at least one bowel movement each day and couple of doubles (Score!).  I did only eat yogurt for the first 3 of those days as I really didn’t want there to be anything that could mess up this test.

Camping On the SCD Diet

Last weekend was Memorial weekend here in the United States and first off I would like to thank all the current members of our armed services and all of our veterans.  Without their sacrifices none of us would even have the time to work on our “health” as we would be most likely too busy dodging bullets or working in the fields.

In honor of the fact that I got a 3 day weekend, some friends and I went camping for the weekend.  For the record none of these friends are fellow SCD’ers and several I just meet recently.  In order for it to be a successful SCD weekend for me, especially on zero digestive helpers, I knew I was going to have to plan everything to a T.  In fact, after it was all said and done it was relatively easy and I had no problems at all having enough food and keeping my food separate from everyone else’s (Brought my own cooler).

I prepared a bunch of food last Thursday including chopped chicken breasts and cooked carrots for me to eat and I chopped up some lettuce and some other fresh veggies for the rest of the group that I knew I could fall back on if needed (SCD legal just more advanced in their raw form).  I also pulled out a batch of almond muffins from my freezer that I made last week.  I stocked up on plenty of bananas and avocados.  Lastly, I picked up a couple Lara bars if anything were to go horribly wrong, but it didn’t and I ended up bringing them back home with me.

For breakfast each day I ate 2 muffins and a banana, for lunch I ate my chopped grilled chicken cold with some cold carrots.  For dinner each night I ate burgers which everyone else at as well but I was using my own grill and I did the cooking so I controlled all the variables.  I did use some chopped up lettuce as “buns” for my burgers and used some of my Eden’s mustard for flavoring.  I know I’m not supposed to have uncooked lettuce just yet (its a more advanced food in the phases) but I gambled a bit in the name of camping and burgers.  I also ate raw avocado whenever I was hungry in between meals, sometimes in the morning or afternoon.

Digestively I fared pretty well, I continued having my one to two bowel movements each day with mixture of 2 and 3 on the quality scale all weekend.  My stomach was never upset and I was able to enjoy the time I had at the beach and being outdoors.  Camping while on the SCD diet ended up being much easier for me than several other social gatherings I have participated in (bachelor parties, family parties, bars etc…) and I would highly recommend people who are doing the SCD diet to look into it for a summer vacations.

Did anyone else go on vacation this past weekend?