I was nearing the end of my month-long experiment with the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, and my symptoms had plateaued. While my pain and fatigue were still largely gone and I now only had around two bowel movements a day, they were still always urgent, explosive, and bloody. My colon was still inflamed.
And over the past two weeks, nothing had changed. It was a familiar pattern. It felt as though I was hitting the same wall I’d hit several times, with each of my med regimes.
When I first noticed this new plateau, I wondered if I’d progressed in the diet too fast. You’re supposed to add a new food every few days, but I’d been adding one every day. Had I added spinach and squash too quickly? I backpedaled, taking them out again. My symptoms remained the same.
Slowly, I was beginning to sense that this might be as good as things would ever get on the SCD. It was livable…but it was not remission.
I’d given the SCD a full month’s trial, because Breaking the Vicious Cycle states that you need a month to know if it will work for you. If it works, your symptoms will improve. If they don’t, it’s time to try something else. My symptoms had improved—but then they’d stopped improving.
My new colitis buddy Alison had opened my eyes to healthier, plant-based diets that might work better than the SCD and be better for my whole body. As I realized that I was stuck in Phase 1 of the SCD, unable to add any new foods because my symptoms were not improving, a big part of me felt relief. I’d given the diet a fair trial, but now I could justify going off it.
I looked forward to ending the unsettling symptoms that accompanied this meat-rich, carb-poor diet. Those symptoms were still around, at least every couple days. The sudden energy crashes where I went from strong and vigorous to shaky and weak. The sudden, ravenous hunger, as if my body had no reserves at all and when hunger hit, it hit with a dangerous urgency. The unnerving metallic taste in my mouth.
My husband Ron had briefly joined me on the diet in solidarity, but when he, too, began experiencing these symptoms, he quickly got off it. He didn’t want to damage his own health.
If this diet wasn’t healthy enough for Ron, it certainly wasn’t healthy enough for me while carrying a baby. With every week that passed, I was growing more anxious about my goal of getting pregnant, and this was another source of relief in going off the diet. The SCD takes up to two years to fully work for colitis. In two years, I’d be almost thirty-eight. With all due respect to the older mothers out there, that was older than I wanted to be when I first tried to get pregnant.
For all these reasons, a big part of me was glad to realize the diet wasn’t fully working.
And yet…
One day near the end of the month, Ron and I canoed across Lake Monona. We lived right on the lakeshore, and the water was smooth as we slid the boat off the beach and dipped our paddles in. It was a warm, humid day; we disembarked at Olin Park and hiked through the cool woods. After we canoed back home, I still had the energy to go for a slow jog through our neighborhood.
Weeks ago, this kind of sustained exertion would have been unfathomable. This was the real me. The me that had been absent all spring. The SCD had given me my life back.
I would go off the SCD. But as I groped my way forward, uncertain if I would ever find anything better, I looked back over my last two weeks with longing. I had gotten a taste of my old life, my life before falling ill. I hoped that taste would not recede into memory again—that I could somehow get back to how I had once lived.
