Several years ago I wrote that I went gluten free to help with some intestinal issues. Doing that combined with my ulcerative colitis medicine has kept me in check for awhile. Unfortunately things changed earlier this year and my colitis acted up.
When I was fighting my latest flare up, my wife suggested I look at changing my diet again. She is a great wife and did research to see what diets could help people with ulcerative colitis. She found the Specific Carbohydrate Diet and while it seemed quite restrictive, I felt like I didn’t have any other choice. I started this diet about three months ago and have been quite good at closely sticking to it. The basic gist of the diet is to eliminate grains, beans, and complex sugars. Looking at my diet prior to this, I had been eating a lot of grains, beans and definitely a lot of complex sugars!
The hardest part of the diet started out being the sugars as I love sweets. I’ve replaced sugars with lots and lots of fruit as well as nuts. Luckily I live in San Diego and fresh fruit is pretty plentiful all year round. Going to the store is a different experience as I closely look at labels and look for things that really shouldn’t exist in my food such as sugar in the Kirkland Salsa or rice in the crunchy snap peas.
One side effect that is probably pretty obvious is that I lost over 10 pounds on this diet not that I needed to do it.
People have asked me if I feel better because of the diet. I guess the diet and the medication have made me feel normal again. I’ve always had a lot of energy and been pretty fit so that hasn’t changed. I have no plans to get off this diet as it seems to be agreeing with me. Watching what I put in my body is definitely not a bad thing and has made me more closely examine the labels for foods to see what hidden ingredients lie in our processed foods.