Diving In

It all started with a baguette. I was supposed to be discussing setting up a bookkeeping system for my friend's new business. In between bites of baguette and cheese, we both kept remarking how exciting it was to eat this forbidden food. You see, in our houses, there are no baguettes. Both of us live with partners who suffer from autoimmune disorders. My partner, Laurel, has both Celiac and Grave's disease, so we follow a strict gluten free diet in our home. So even though we had set out to discuss bookkeeping, we kept coming back to our individual journeys to help heal our partners through food.

We had both tried various diets and food philosophies. My fall back was and had been for several years the anti-inflammatory diet recommended by naturopaths and acupuncturists. Recently we had tried the Abascal Way diet (also anti-inflammatory) and before that, Dropping the Acid to address Laurel's acid reflux problems. At this meeting, my friend and I exchanged recommendations for food blogs and one that she directed me to was comfybelly.com. When I got home I poured over the recipes on this site, finding many of them appealing and safe for Laurel. On the "about page" I read that the author followed the "Specific Carbohydrate Diet" in order to heal her son who had Crohn's disease.

I had stumbled on references to this strange and scientific sounding diet before while checking out recipes and advice on gluten free food blogs late at night, and had wondered what kind of people followed such a diet. Those people must have really serious health problems, I would think to myself. This time, reading about it again after two years of feeling powerless to help and yet terribly impacted by Laurel's intestinal turmoil, dizzy spells, acid reflux, various aches and pains, weakness and fatigue, I was curious. This time, I thought that we might be exactly the kind of people who would follow such a crazy diet.

I went straight to the source, the website of Elaine Gottschall, the woman who created the Specific Carbohydrate Diet many years ago to help her child who was suffering from another intestinal disorder. I checked out the website a little, reading a page on how to make a special kind of fermented yogurt. From what I could tell, the diet seemed restrictive, not hugely different from how we already ate, and like a big commitment. From the statements about the "high success rate" of healing intestinal disorders (such as celiac) I felt a glimmer of hope. I ordered the book. And couldn't wait for it to arrive.