Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete Zicato
Clod - I could never have considered that diet before the surgery. Because of the narrowing of the small intesting and the big fat bezoar sitting in front of it, I could not pass any vegetable matter. Whatever I ate had to be completely broken down before it got to the end of my small intestine.
So my current diet looks like this:
meat, cheese, clear liquids, anything powdered (like white flour), powdered mash potatoes, white rice. That's it. No fruit. No vegetables. So you can see that I would never be able to skip the carbohydrates.
Since the surgery got the worst of the narrowing, I may be able to broaden my diet once they have the new problems under control. If my diet gets broadened enough that I can get my fill of fruits and vegetables, I may give it a shot. I've been dreaming of chilled plums, garbage salads, and tomato sandwiches anyway. I haven't been able to have any of them in 25 years.
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That's the impression a lot of people get, because they're looking at the "final" diet, the one you are supposed to maintain after you are healed.
It's actually broken down into stages, with the most basic intro diet being nothing but scrambled eggs, plain cooked ground beef (made into hamburger patties,) plain chicken (preferably boiled for hours and eaten with the broth as a plain chicken soup,) very cooked carrots (either boiled for hours along with the chicken broth, or cooked and then pureed into "carrotsauce,") and homemade gelatin made with 100% grape juice.
You stay on that for 2-5 days (no longer, because eventually you might go into ketosis like hardcore Atkin's diet people can,) and then you move to stage 1: everything from before, plus pureed butternut squash, homemade applesauce, cooked/pureed pears, pureed zucchini and other squashes. The introduction of the applesauce and pearsauce is your main source of carbs at this point. Pureed veggies aren't very fun to eat, so most people tend to mix them into the ground meat for meatballs.
From there it moves forward, adding additional very well-cooked and/or pureed veggies and fruits at each stage, until eventually you get all fruits and veggies in all forms. The preparation of the food is the key at first, since making it digestible and easy to pass is critical, as you know. Most people report that the diarrhea improves greatly or subsides completely within the first 3 weeks of intro diet plus stage one. The book says don't move to stage 2 until diarrhea is pretty much gone. They also note that you may feel pretty sick for the first couple of days, because you are literally starving out a very well-entrenched infection.
The only foods that are disallowed completely on the diet are those which break down into disaccharides/polysaccharides instead of monosaccharides, because these can't be absorbed by a damaged intestine, and instead hang around to feed infectious cultures. The theory is it's the infections which cause the vast majority of the damage, just like it was recently proven that stomach ulcers are the result of a particularly pernicious bacterial infection. This includes 1.) all sugars except natural fructose and honey, 2.) grains, and 3.) all starchy vegetables (potatoes, sweet potatoes, jicama, etc.) Tomato juice, for example, is technically allowed, but would be a very advanced food, because tomatoes are a nightshade and surprisingly difficult to digest. More importantly, commercially-made tomato juice wouldn't be allowed because retail products all contain sugars and starches and thickeners, which defeats the purpose of the diet.
Anyway, the book goes very in-depth into the gastrointestinal science behind it, I just know the resulting rules to follow. (And my rules would be a little different from your rules anyway--this isn't an autism diet, it's a Crohn's diet that autism folks have modified for themselves, because their enterocolitis is similar to Crohn's, not the other way around.)
