Kickas.org Forums Treatments, Drugs and Alternatives NSD and diet-related; Worried about my health on this diet. Please help!

I have been doing the NSD for almost a month now (Thursday will be a month) and I have to say I am reacting well to it although I'm kind of worried about my health with this diet. I have Ulcerative Colitis as well as AS and I've been working really hard at trying to listen to my body which has basically led me to figure out the only truely safe foods for me are all white meats (pork, chicken, turkey, and these all natural brats I found with minimal ingredients which suprisingly don't bother me), leafy greens and olive oil. I have found that starch and sugar bother my stomach which milk has sugar and pretty much everything else either has starch or sugar. I even tried soy and almond milk and both seemed to bother me. What I'm worried about now is what is this doing to my health? I know it's healing my gut and hopefully healing my joints (although I haven't noticed this yet I think because I've been experementing so much) which is good but am I losing the fats, vitamins and minerals my body needs to live? The thing that really scared me is when I saw a post that someone said eating all meat and no fat is deadly and he said he ate tons of butter. I haven't tried strait butter yet but probably will now after reading that post. I've never heard of eating all meat being deadly but it definately got me worried. I've tried the recommended supplements (L-Glutamine, calcium, a multivitamin and Natren Healthy Trinity) which really tore up my stomach and gave me a terrible headache all day. My brother said he gets headaches with L-Glutamine so maybe that was what it was. Also it was powder form L-Glutamine (no fillers) and the other supplements were the brands recommended on this site. I'm going to try the calcium again to see if that bothers me but I'm still worried if it is truely deadly eating pretty much all meat. What do you guys think?

Jeff, I understand you are worried that you are damaging your health as well as helping your health! I have been there to.

However, what I have found is, right now I have more energy, I feel better, I look better, my pain is non-existant, even my iritis is getting better. Yes, we do not eat what the 'recommended food guide' tells us to eat! But there are plenty of others who also can not eat what the recommended food guide recommends! My daughter is one of them, it would damage her health to eat all the fruit and veggies that the food guide tells her to eat! [She has cystic fibrosis and what her body needs is animal fat, dairy fat, and more fat!!!! in order to put some meat on her bones! she is 3 years old and weighs about 26 1/2lbs] However, when I tell people what she needs they say 'Oh okay, I understand that' but when I tell people what my body needs they say 'Oh no, that is not healthy for you, you are not eating the right amounts or combinations of food'!!

It is my conclusion that my body will tell me by response what I need to eat. I am able to eat dairy as long as I don't go overboard with it [I stick to cheese, little milk, whipped cream and have just added some Probiotic Yogurt that I found, very tasty: French Vanilla!!]

I have also worried about taking supplements, and have even bought a few! However, I have never been good at remembering to take my vitamins, so needless to say all the bottle are still full!!! I will try to take some of the supplements though, but there is such a long list! Right now I have some GoldSeal Wild Salmon Oil that I am trying to remember to take, and it doesn't seem to bother me.

Have you lost a lot of weight on the NSD? I have lost about 20-25 lbs, and am now weighing about 105 lbs [I am only 5' though so it is not as bad as it sounds!] My husband is monitoring my weight situation as he doesn't want me to get too skinny! and he knows I tend to worry about it!

I hope you get some encouraging replies to your post, Jeff. I say just hang in there, eat the food that your body wants you to eat, and continue to be as pain-free as possible. Don't worry so much about what other people say [especially friends and family] as sometimes when they are worried about you they will want you to go back to how you were before [I hope that makes sense!?] They don't want to see you in pain, and they just want it to go back to before when you didn't know about the AS [does that make better sense?!]

Cheers,
Rita

Hi Jeff, A few things that would be worth looking into.
SCD yogurt, use a yogurt maker, ideally goats milk, natren starter and culture for 24-30hrs. I think its the best tolerated dairy product (don't buy anything commercial the lactose is too high.

Re the fats mono sats, could also try avocado or macadamia. Flax or something like udo for a mix. For butter you can make ghee if you do not tolerate normal butter. Ghee is just the fat, the protein and lactose is removed, you can find out how to make this on the web.

Glutamine is thought by many to be a neurotoxin and I certainly felt this. Mind racing, difficult to sleep if you have it late afternoon/evening.

Calcium, - I would concentrate more on magnesium maybe 2:1 ratio if any in my opinion. Citrate may irritate, glycinate chelate well abosrbed and good type.

Multivits/mins have all sorts prob best to just keep it to vit e, vit b's. Vit b's can come from corn and may cause issues, may have to try a few. Don't know if any one else has had issues with vit a but that used to send me into a flare after a few weeks.

Probiotic supplements - some are pro imflammatory. I have heard acidophilus is pro. I have had issues before and use yogurt instead. When you do not have any issues you can then experiment. These are my thoughts based on what I hae gone through and the information I have read in various forums and books.

Phil

Hi Jeff,

If worried, have a complete physical done and check weight, blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar etc... I have these done once a year at work and have had very good numbers with being on this diet for 5 yrs in March.

I emphasize the fruits/veggies/nuts and dried fruits with my diet... so I have a bit more at my disposal than you do since you eliminate sugar.

I would agree can be a bit scarey eliminating entire food group.

Tim

Thanks for the feedback. I can totally relate to you Rita. I also have lost some weight and I am already skinny and don't need to lose any weight. The good thing is I found some fatty foods that I can eat like the brats I mentioned and chicken wings which helped me to gain a little weight (my belt is starting to get a little tighter). I'm also eating a burrito bowl just about every other day at my favorite Mexican restraunt consisting of white rice with cilantro, grilled chicken, romaine lettuce and guacamole with red onions. This bothers me a little but not that bad and I know it's helping me gain weight. I'm going to see if I can find that Probiotic Yogurt you mentioned and give it a try to see if it bothers me. Thanks again

Hey Jeff, you know that rice is super-starchy right? Just checking...

Anyway, your diet should be more healthy than the average person as it should be full of fresh fruit, nuts like almonds & macadamias, raw salad & green leafy vegies, cooked vegies like brocolli, spinach etc, eggs, & meat. Loads of vitamins and minerals in these foods of course (heaps of Vit B and iron in meat) and you should be getting plenty of fat from the meat and things like starch free mayonaise, aioli, olive oil etc. Are some of these things not OK for you due to the UC?

You may want to have a read of this old post:

Eliminating Grains

Keep going, you're doing well It will take a few months to fine tune the diet to your own needs.

PS, be careful with avocado/guacamole as tends to be starchy unless super super ripe avocado. Even then when I've tested with Iodine it still goes black.

Chelsea

Hi Jeff.

The yogurt I found is:

French Vanilla, 3.2% MF, Olympic Organic Probiotic yogurt made with 100% natural ingredients [that is what is says on the front!] There are 160 cals per 175 g [3/4 cup]. And I just iodine tested it right now and it is good.

ingredients: organic milk ingredients, organic sugar, natural and organic vanilla, caramel, annatto, active bacterial culture {streptococcus thermophilus, lactobacillus delbrueckii Subsp. bulgaricus & subsp. lactis, lactobacillus acidophilus, bifidobacteria & lactobacillus paracasei subsp. casei]

Something else I have found that is good to make a sauce, Western Family, Deli Style Dijon Mustard, [really no calories to speak of but it tastes great!]

ingredients: distilled vinegar, water, mustard seed, salt, white wine, spices.

Hellman's Real Mayonnaise, 100 cal per tablespoon [good calories!]

ingredients: canola oil, water, liquid whole egg, vinegar, liquid yolk, salt, sugar, spices [contains soybean oil], concentrated lemon juice and calcium disodium edta.

If you can tolerate the above mustard and mayo, and can tolerate liquid or creamed honey, you can mix them to make a wonderful honey mustard dip, you can keep it thick or add water or little milk to thin it. The sauce is great on anything! chicken, fish, veggie dip!! Even my kids and husband like it!!

Also you can make a hollandaise sauce:

Company's Coming: The Egg Book

Blender Hollandaise Sauce

4 egg yolks [large]
2 tbsp lemon juice
cayenne pepper, just a pinch
salt, just a pinch

1 cup butter [not margarine] I would use maybe only 3/4 cup as when I made it with the 1 cup it was very buttery tasty!

Process first 4 infredients in blender for 5 to 7 seconds until smooth.

Melt butter in small saucepan [or microwave]. With blender motor running, slowly pour butter through the hole in the lid, processing until thick and fluffy. Use immediately or keep warm for up to 30 minutes in top of double boiler or medium bowl set on saucepan over simmering water. Makes 1 1/3 cups approx.

2 tbsp. contains 37 calories

This is an excellent sauce! I like with poached eggs, sliced ham [or bacon or sliced up brats if you wish!], sliced tomato [lots], and spinach.

Again it would be good on chicken, fish, veggies, whatever you want! In fact, it is so good you might get FAT!!!

Hope this helps!

Also, maybe you can *try* adding some hard cheeses to your diet, like cheddar, havarti, gouda, parmesan. Grating just a little cheese and adding to anything helps beef up the calories and makes it very tasty! Sometimes I just can't face any more broccoli but if I steam it and add grated parmesan I love it!! I only use a very little bit of cheese at a time and it doesn't seem to bother me. Actually I can pretty much eat any dairy as long as it is only a little at a time.

Oh yeah....have you tried chocolate!? I usually have a bar or two, okay or three! on hand. I like Cadbury, they use only a few ingredients and if I only eat about 3 squares it is good and it doesn't bother my tum [unless I eat like half the bar or something!] I love sweets myself, so it is very hard to give up everything at once! I also found a toblerone bar that tested fine and tasted great! The regular one with honey and nougat, I think.

Hope this helps! if you think of anything else let me know, and if I think of anything else I'll let you know.

Cheers,
Rita

[so.......I wonder does the rice you eat every other day have anything to do with things?????? hehehehe although some NSD'ers can eat white rice, I haven't tried it yet though]

(when you read something like this, we all miss Dragonslayer...)

Okay, let's see if I can make this even more confusing....

Listening to your body is very good,

Only you can figure out what you need to eat. The rest of us can give suggestions, but it is only the individual who knows how he or she is going to react.

Don't be worried about initial weight loss, because after several years on this, you will get enough internal healing going and improved digestion and absorbtion of nutrients that you may well find yourself...gaining weight. If you are a female, who wasn't thin to begin with, this may be slightly disconcerting
But during the shakedown phase, yes, you are going to drop some weight. Trust me, it comes back like a boomerang.

In the phase you are in right now, you need to go very basic again because I suspect you are randomly adding items here and there that may not work for your gut. We all do that sometimes, deliberately or accidently. Typically I will then go to my tried and true safest foods and stick to them for a half day or a day and wait until I have settled down. The important thing when I do this is that I
don't go adding new stuff in to confuse the issue. And just get off your supplements now, just for a few days, until you can get resettled.

Now, let's talk about the meats/fat issue. Unless you are an Artic Explorer in the 1800's, and your canned food has run out, and you absolutely refuse to eat seal blubber, or your sled dogs, and you're stuck on the ice all winter for 8 months eating nothing but dried jerky and reindeer steak, you are not going to die from eating just meat for a month. It takes longer. The meat you are eating probably has fat in it anyway.

Now, about FAT . Fat can come from animal OR vegetable or fruit or nut sources. Yes! Glorius FAT is everywhere! It is a myth you have to eat butter to survive the NSD or I would have croaked by now.
You just have to find the type of fat that is carried by a food you can tolerate. Extra virgin olive oil obviously is a great source of fat. Did you know you can do almost anything with olive oil that you can with mere... butter
Nuts are another wonderful source of fat. Walnuts and almonds are low starch. But the biggest, most useful nut of all is the coconut. Coconuts not only have tasty, easy to digest nutmeat that can be bought in the form of shredded or flour, but it also is a source of coconut oil. This stuff is extremely fattening. They tell people on weight loss diets to avoid it. Heh heh heh.
Coconuts can be made into tasty baked goods like macaroons and muffins. It is even possible to find pre made coconut macaroons in the stores, made of honey, egg white, and coconut. (Jennie's) These things are dangerous, they pack over 200 calories apiece and they're addictive.
You want coconut if you can digest it, and it's a pretty benign thing to digest.

Another form of coconut that is really good is organic coconut milk without sulfites or additives. This not only is really fattening, but tastes really good, and can be used in tea, or for baking puddings with eggs. This coconut pudding stuff is like 10 gazillion calories. Holiday pudding....coconut milk, canned pumpkin, honey, pecans....oh...my.

If you can possibly tolerate eggs, (there's fat again) you can make all sorts of baked goods with almond meal, while still avoiding dairy. I keep a blender on the counter dedicated to grinding almonds, and throw handfuls of them in it after each use for the next batch. The almond meal pancake is extremely fattening, fast, and easy to make, and can double as a flat bread or tortilla type thing if you want to use it that way.

Avocados, which are fruit, are very fattening, obviously. It is easy for us here in the US to get avocados that will actually ripen, but some other parts of the world seem to get stuck with the ones that were picked too green and young and then stored too long.

Soybeans...the only type of soybean thing you should attempt at this point is nice, plain old tofu, the type that comes in water. Do not use the seal foil packages because they can be made with a starch byproduct. If you want a soybean type thick liquid, you can blend soft tofu with a liquid. You have to be extremely cautious with soy milks. Do not ever drink flavored soy milks, because chances are the flavorings can contain wheat glutens in the vanilla or they will wheat byproducts to make caramel coloring agents. If you use vanilla, use organic, real vanilla ONLY. The only kind of soy milk I will use now is very plain, "classic" Soydream without any added flavoring or even calcium, because they changed their formula, and I don't use much of it. I don't trust commercial almond milk AT ALL, either. I've even reacted to commercial almond butter, which probably had some sort of cross contamination.

While we're on accidental wheat, avoid the word "maltodextrin" like the plague, because barley is in the wheat family. Malto dextrin is showing up in everything these days. It's in Splenda. It's in powdered ice tea mixes.

Now, since we've all given you some suggestions on how to sneak enticing forms of fat back into your diet, that gives you meat, and fat. You can already do some vegetables. That's great. Now all you have to do is find some sort of fruit product and you've got all the bases covered. Apples are obviously a good product for some, but you can also try cooking them into applesauce. The other most neutral fruit I can think of is seedless grapes or raisins. Raisin warning I notice a lot of raisins this year are turning up coated with disgusting vegetable oil, even in the bulk bins. You don't know where that oil has been, or what's really in it, so try to avoid coated raisins.

I'm also going to be heretical and suggest you try a very ripe banana sometime and see what happens.

Also melons are very easy to digest.

Chocolate. There are types of dark chocolate that are both fattening and pretty safe, such as Ghirardelli semi sweet baking bars, which don't have dairy in them.

Dairy. If you are going to try adding dairy back in, use organic dairy products and avoid lactose. This means using cheeses aged for 6 months, or being very, very, very carefull with what type of yogurt crosses your lips. Most commercial yogurts will have unfermented milk products added back in to them to thicken them, or some sort of artificial thickening agents, or worse, outright starches, or flavorings that can contain grains.

Some of the baking/cooking recipes you find for almond flours or other non gluten recipes will call for dairy. Either use applesauce, pumpkin, or coconut milk instead, or just skip it overall unless you know you can tolerate it.

recipe:

The non dairy, fast almond meal pancake
this cooks in an 8" cast iron pan on the stove, then the top is cooked under the oven broiler, so you don't have to flip it.

1/2 cup almonds, ground up in blender
1 egg, beaten
pinch salt
teaspoon (5 ml) olive oil
half teaspoon honey or molasses
1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of spice to flavor, optional, such as cinnamon or Chinese 5 spice powder
water, enough to make batter consistancy, will be about 2 -3 tablespoons

extra olive oil for pan, preheated
turn on oven broiler and have waiting

Grind almonds. Beat egg, add dry ingredients and extra water, stir to form pancake batter, which should be thick but pourable. Pour batter into pre heated pan on oven. Cook pancake on bottom, watching carefully for bubbles to come up in center of dough. When this happens, take a hot mitt and slide the pan carefully under the broiler, about 4 to 6" away from the top element. Warning do not leave the pan unattended at this point. Watch the top of the pancake carefully, when it browns, which will be sudden, it should be done. Slide out and poke to test for firmness.
Cut into wedges to serve. Makes 1 to 2 servings, or 4 triangles.
Can be served with real maple syrup, fruit, or eaten plain or used as an open sandwich base. (skip the cinnamon, then.)

Hey Chelsea,
Chipotle is very popular here and is known for using very fresh products so maybe that's why their guacamole doesn't really seem to bother me. Also the white rice for some reason doesn't seem to bother me too bad. I've heard quite a few other people that are able to handle rice ok even though it is very high in starch. Very strange. I have tried quite a few different things so far and I'm starting to realize at least for me that I need to separate things into quite a few different groups other then just safe, moderate and not safe. I listed them below:

Sharp pain in stomach almost makes me feel sick then I have to run to the bathroom usually more then once:
apples
pears
raspberries
broccoli
carrots
vanilla ice cream
almond milk
soy milk
green olives
dill pickles
walnuts
pecans
cantaloupe
any juices (haven't found a good one yet)
turkey bacon
hamburger

same reaction as above if I eat a lot of the following:
oranges
strawberries
blueberries
blackberries
red grapes
black olives
almonds
ham (with sugar added. can't find ham without sugar added)
muffins made with coconut flour, honey, eggs, water, coconut oil, vanilla, salt

same reaction as above 1 to 2 hours later:
beer ( 2 hours later )
goat cheese ( 1 hour later )

mild upset stomach half an hour to 2 hours later followed by a controlled trip to the bathroom usually only one trip:
white rice (from Chipotle - 1 hour later)
chicken (from Chipotle - 1 to 2 hours later)
steak (from Chipotle - half an hour later)
certain types of chicken wings (with sauce - varied but usually about an hour later)
eggs (These seemed fine in the beginning but are now starting to bother me a little. I'm going to try to take out the yolks)

No problems:
green grapes (going to try white grape juice)
raisins
celery
any mixed greens
guacamole (from Chipotle)
chicken wings with no sauce
chicken (grilled of course)
brats (all natural boulder sausage brand)
turkey
turkey burger
grilled fish with olive oil
olive oil
pork chops
tried asparagus once without problems (need to verify this one)

I tried gouda and cheddar cheese in the beginning of this diet but had mixed reactions so I'm going to try this again tonight. It kind of sucks trying these foods out because when I get a bad one I feel miserable for as long as it takes for the food to get out of my system. I did sign up for a membership at my local rock climbing gym and that seems to have helped some with my back and neck pain as I stretch a lot when I climb. Also some of these tests turn out to be wrong as sometimes I think a food is bad just to find out later that the food I had before (which I thought was safe) was actually the culprate. Some things I have on my list to try are below:

gouda cheese
cheddar cheese
parmesan cheese
milk
sugar
egg whites (to see if the yolks were what bothered me before)
corn
green beans
macadamia nuts
steak (plain)

I'm definitely learning a lot about what I can and can't eat. It's very difficult to pinpoint the problem foods but I'm slowly getting better at it and starting to learn how to read my bodies reaction to certain foods. It's a process and not something I learned overnight. In fact Thursday will be a month on this diet and I think I am just starting to get a handle on how my body reacts.

Hey Squeaky,
I just tried that exact yogurt and wondering if it would test positive or neg...wasn't sure of the annatto or what the heck it was. But it is soooo good!
Thanks so much for posting the results!