The next part of my journey was the most painful and really prompted major change in my thoughts about what I eat. I had a really bad flare up of gastritis. I lost about 20 pounds. I was in a lot of pain. My stomach burned constantly. I had a few things I could eat without pain.
I went back to my gastroenterologist. She prescribed a stomach coating liquid in addition to the proton pump inhibitor and the fiber pills. I didn’t get much relief from the medicines. Next, I went to a naturopath. She gave me a stool test. With this test, I was diagnosed with a fungus in my gut. She prescribed a really powerful probiotic for two weeks and a buteraid supplement. The burning slowly improved over a 3 month period.
I researched diets to treat my gut fungus and leaky gut. I found a web site and diet authored by two guys in Bozeman, MT. SCDLifestyle.com. I’m from Montana, so I decided to check it out. They offered a specific carb diet for mild and hard cases for $99. I purchased it, and printed out the diet and all of the recipes. I created a shopping list for each week. After New Years, I told my family we were going to follow this diet for at least 6 weeks.
I liked the diet because it did not include any foods which caused inflammation in the body. We followed the diet for 6 weeks. I didn’t really notice a change in my burning stomach during the 6 weeks. I continued to make the meals and cut out more foods which affected me when I tried to add them back to my diet. A month later, my pain went away. Two months later, I quit taking the prescribed proton pump inhibitor. That was 3 years ago, and I haven’t had to go back on the proton pump inhibitor since.
I continued to cook much of the scd diet recipes. My energy level, continued to increase. The scd diet used some recipes from Michelle Tam of NomNom Paleo. I purchased her two cookbooks to try more of her recipes. They were wonderful and my family loved the food.
I still felt like my energy was not where it could be. I was now more aware that food was my path to health. I decided to give the Whole 30 diet a try to see where it took me.