The amount of meat I was eating on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet was ridiculous. I ate meat at almost every meal—over a pound a day. It was the antithesis of how I’d been eating for years. You’re supposed to Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants, as Michael Pollan says.
When I described the diet to my friend Lia, she looked taken aback. “Katie, that is so much meat!”
I laughed. “I know. But I think of it like, I have an injury. If I had a broken leg, I’d put my leg in a cast, right? A cast isn’t ideal—it makes it hard to exercise—but to heal the bone, you temporarily need the cast. Maybe that’s how it is with my gut right now.”
This was what I told myself: I was temporarily sacrificing my general health while I nursed an injury. Hopefully when my gut healed, maybe in a year or two, I could tone down the meat again and rebalance my diet.
But as my month-long SCD trial continued, Lia’s observation sometimes echoed in my mind. This was a lot of meat. And very few fruits or vegetables. I thought of my dad, who had died of stomach cancer at age sixty-seven. All his life, he had disdained fruits and veggies despite their healthy, anti-inflammatory, anti-cancer properties—fruits and veggies are thought to lower the risk of stomach cancer. Now I was eating more like him. It made me shudder.
Midway through my trial month on the diet, my gut symptoms had much improved. I was down to two or three bowel movements a day, had had no blood in my stools for several days, and had only rare pain or discomfort.
All these changes were very welcome, of course. My colon often felt the best it had felt since diagnosis with colitis three months ago. On good days, it was impossible not to get my hopes up about the SCD working.
And I was beginning to eat actual meals again. I’d continued to cautiously add more ingredients, so by now I could eat:
- Broiled ground beef, turkey, fish, lean pork, and chicken soup;
- Eggs, homemade probiotic yogurt, and dry curd cottage cheese;
- Peeled, cooked, pureed apples, carrots, and squash; and
- Cooked spinach.
In a typical meal, I would sauté spinach, scramble an egg, and dollop applesauce onto my plate with a sprinkling of cinnamon, maybe add a broiled turkey patty, and place a bit of yogurt off to the side of the plate mixed with honey.
It was beautiful to see a whole plateful of healthy, colorful food in front of me. I would savor each ingredient in a way I never had before the diet.
And yet, despite all my progress, the jury was still out for me on the SCD.
I still consistently had diarrhea, and I still hadn’t shaken my fatigue. My symptoms seemed to be reaching a plateau. That had happened with med changes, too. It was maddening to get better, but not all the way better, over and over. After the roller coaster of the last couple months, I wasn’t yet convinced that this diet would fully work, either.
And in the meantime, the diet sometimes made my body feel strange. So strange, and so sick, that I wasn’t always convinced I wanted it to work.
One day I had a decidedly bad day. In the early morning I awoke with a gasp: my right calf had cramped when I’d curled my toes in my sleep. I had never gotten leg cramps before. Eyes wild in the dark, I fought to keep from shouting as I clutched at my foot. Luckily for Ron, who lay asleep beside me, I managed to silently grab my toes and unclench the muscle.
My colon behaved itself all day, but there were other symptoms. From late morning on, I struggled with fatigue, gnawing hunger, and the creeping, “weird” feelings that often came over me on this diet. I still hadn’t figured out how to describe them. For one thing, sometimes I could feel my teeth. They tasted almost metallic. Metallic taste is a common symptom people experience on low-carb diets, but this wasn’t just a metallic taste. It was also the vivid, unsettling feeling that my teeth were rattling around in my gums. They felt dislodged, as though they might fall out at any moment.
Then there were my various aches, which continued all day. I felt twinges of pain in strange places—my forearms, my ribcage. Pain in my left arm left me particularly uneasy. Was there something wrong with my heart??
By late afternoon, I felt tired enough to give up on the walk I’d been looking forward to. It was going to be my first walk in a week, because my energy had improved, but I supposed that with colitis, getting your hopes up was dangerous business.
Fuzzy-headed, I called Ron and asked thickly if he could swing by the co-op for the groceries I’d planned to buy. I suspected I needed to add more fat to the diet. Online forums said fat could help with fatigue and achiness. I hoped some pork chops and almond butter—my new food for the day—would do the trick.
But all of this, and other days like it, made me question the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. It might be helping my colon…but what was it doing to the rest of me?
It didn’t help the diet’s case that I was rapidly learning about nutrition while I followed it. Andrew Weil’s Eating Well for Optimum Health was filling in gaping holes in my knowledge, teaching me things I wished I’d understood before getting sick. Now that nutrition mattered so much, details were sticking that I could never get to stick in my head before.
I learned that food can be broken down into three nutritional categories called macronutrients: protein, carbohydrates, and fat. These are the basic food components, and most foods have two or more of them. Grains have all three; meats have both protein and fat. We need a certain amount of each macronutrient, although recommendations vary on how much of each we need.
We get our energy almost entirely from glucose, which was another new fact for me. Glucose is found in honey, dried fruit, and other sweet foods, but the body also breaks down other foods into glucose. Noodles are basically just glucose waiting to be digested. Protein can be broken down into glucose, too. I had never before understood the importance of glucose!
We have one alternative source of energy: ketones, which are also found in protein. When we don’t have enough glucose, our body enters a state called ketosis, in which it begins breaking down proteins into ketone energy.
And along with energy, the other thing we need from food is nutrients—not macronutrients like protein, carbs, and fat, but regular nutrients, the vitamins and other molecules our bodies use to function. Different nutrients are found in different foods. The varied colors of fruits and vegetables indicate the wide array of nutrients stored in them, which is why it’s good to eat a colorful diet.
I’d heard the term “empty calories” before, but I’d never understood what it meant. As a naturally skinny person, I’d never had to count calories before or to pay much attention to what I ate. Now I was soaking up information like my life depended on it.
Whenever I’d eaten a plate of noodles and cheese and no veggies—a common snack before my colitis began—I’d gotten calories, and therefore energy, but few nutrients. The noodles and cheese would be broken down into glucose, but they were missing other things. In the long term, that kind of diet would make it harder for my body to function.
Dr. Weil recommends a diet low in meats and high in whole grains, legumes, and vegetables, like the Mediterranean diet. But alas, that kind of diet seemed out of reach for me for now. Both the SCD and my previous diet relied on meat for protein, since legumes are hard to digest. And while my previous diet had included more grains, they’d been refined grains, again for ease of digestion.
Just as I was fretting about the nutritional health of the SCD and other colitis diets, I made a new colitis friend. She would open my eyes to other, healthier diet possibilities in my future.
Her name was Alison. I’d once taken a basic Arabic class from her, and now I bumped into her one evening and we exchanged pleasantries. When I returned home, a vague memory surfaced: a fellow Arabic student had brought food to share with the class one evening, but Alison had declined, saying she was “dealing with some health issues.” On a hunch, I emailed her now and casually mentioned my colitis. She wrote back within an hour: she had the same diagnosis. We had to talk!
She invited me to tea at her apartment. We sat on her balcony overlooking the inner courtyard of her building as warm summer air wafted across our shady spot. Right off the bat, she dispensed with shyness about describing our symptoms. “Let’s be frank, shall we? If we’re talking about this, we’re going to get graphic.” I laughed in surprise.
I told her about my last few months—my diagnosis, my symptoms, and my special SCD diet. She shook her head. “I worry about that diet, Katie.” Alison was in her sixties, tall and beautiful, with thick, shoulder-length black hair, pale skin, and red lipstick. “All that meat is, well, so inflammatory.”
I winced. “I know. I haven’t figured out what to do about that.” I didn’t know what made a food inflammatory, but I knew that inflammation is unhealthy, and that meat is inflammatory.
She explained her own history and diet. She’d been diagnosed thirteen years ago with proctitis—“That’s what I have!” I squealed—and had worked, like me, to find healing strategies apart from medicine. Like me, she wanted to get to the bottom of why she was sick, and to use her body’s natural healing systems, not just zap the disease with medicine and hope it went away.
But she’d landed on a different diet. She talked about a slew of doctors that advocate plant-based diets. Joel Fuhrman. John McDougall. Michael Klaper. She stuck rigorously to a vegan diet—not even honey was allowed because it’s processed by animals. No other processed sugar was allowed, either, for gut and body health.
She was also into fasting. She periodically traveled to a spa-like facility in Santa Rosa, California to undergo a supervised water fast, meaning that for days on end she took in nothing but water. Supervision was necessary because water fasting can be dangerous. “But these people are very good,” she assured me. “They’ve seen something like eight or ten thousand people through this process, and they’ve never had a fatality.” (That wasn’t entirely reassuring.)
She frowned at me, looking me up and down from across the table. “I would worry about you, though. You’re already so skinny.”
I nodded. “I’m not sure fasting would be good for me.”
Through her fasting and her plant-based diet, Alison had held her proctitis at bay for the last thirteen years. She hadn’t cured it—she still had some diarrhea and blood, which had become normal for her. But aside from those minor symptoms, she felt otherwise healthy and needed no medicine at all. She had normal energy and no pain. Even her conventional doctor had become impressed with her progress and was urging her to stick with her current system, since it worked so well for her.
And it worked for all of her.
Alison had other inflammatory conditions, such as psoriasis, which came and went as rashes around her knees. Her diet helped keep all her inflammation down. Intrigued, I mentioned my own skin condition: I had seborrheic dermatitis, small white flakes that had first appeared around my nose and chin and forehead a few years earlier. I also perpetually had one or two zits on my chin.
“If you think about it,” Alison said, “your skin and your colon are connected.” I mulled that statement over, startled at its mind-bending implications. The skin of the face is connected to the lips, which are connected to the inside of the mouth, which leads to the esophagus, the stomach, the intestines, the colon, the rectum, the anus, and finally back to the outer skin of the body.
Looking at it this way, the digestive tract is like an internal version of the skin. Like the skin, it’s covered in bacteria and absorbs nutrients and toxins, interacting constantly with the outer world through the food we eat. Was a morsel of food really even inside my body, I mused, if it was in my intestines but not my bloodstream? Or was it just passing through the middle of me without yet being in me, as if I was a very long, very complicated doughnut with a hole passing through my center?
If the “skin” of my colon was inflamed, then of course that might relate to the strange rash on my face. I hadn’t thought of this before. Conventional medicine had addressed only my colon, with gastroenterologists giving me meds that targeted that part of me specifically. They had no interest in the rest of me, and they seemed to feel that my disease was confined to my rectum, as though that part of me could be siloed off from everything else. Because my sigmoidoscopy had shown the rest of my colon to look perfectly healthy, with a smooth, pink lining and tidy red veins, they assumed nothing else was happening outside of the rectum’s inflamed little pouch. I could often feel twinges elsewhere, but they insisted the rectum was the only area affected, since it was the only place where they’d seen visible inflammation.
Even the SCD paid little attention to my general health—it was all about healing the digestive tract—but the way Alison thought about it, the whole body was connected. Inflammation in one area related to inflammation in another.
Before I left her apartment, Alison piled my arms with DVDs, information sheets, and brochures about her vegan diet. “I admit there’s something cultish about this,” she said, smiling. “But I do feel really strongly about it.”
I went home not a convert, but very interested. I’d known other diets existed that might help me, but I’d felt wary and weary of moving from diet to diet without guidance. Here was someone, a real, in-the-flesh person, who had found a diet that worked and was good for her.
I decided to ride out the SCD for the rest of the month, finishing my experiment and keeping an open mind about it. But in the meantime, I would also research vegan diets like Alison’s. I hoped I could find something that was good for all of me.
