Healthy Obsessions The Adventures of a Mild Obsessive Compulsive

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Five Gluten Free Cookbooks (that will make your life a lot easier if you’re a celiac)

A few folks have been asking me which gluten free cookbooks they should get (either for themselves or as gifts for someone else). Here are some of the best gluten free cookbooks I’ve found:

  1. Healthy Gluten-Free Cooking: 150 Recipes for Food Lovers – This one is from the Ballymaloe Cooking School in Ireland, and I stumbled across it when I was searching for an Irish Soda Bread recipe. Every recipe I’ve tried from this book has been a success. The Irish Soda Bread recipe is wonderful.
  2. Gluten-Free Baking Classics – The title says it. This book gives you a great and simple overview of how gluten free flours work, where to find them, and what other things (like, say, xanthan gum) you’ll want to have on hand.
  3. The Gluten-Free Almond Flour Cookbook – Tons of great recipes in here that work not only for celiacs, but also for anyone on a low carb diet. If you sub honey in place of agave nectar, you can adapt many of these recipes for SCD, too. It would also probably work well for paleo diet folks. (The author has recently gone paleo, and she has a website with tons of additional recipes).
  4. The Cake Mix Doctor Bakes Gluten-Free – Confession, I don’t own this one. I own the original gluten-full version, but lordy do I lust after this one. It has great ratings on Amazon (4.5 stars from over 50 reviews). The original was wonderful and it looks like this one will be, too.
  5. Breaking the Vicious Cycle: Intestinal Health Through Diet – This book is the bible of SCD, and it’s a good one. It’s not aimed specifically at celiacs (although the diet was originally developed to treat celiac disease) but it has great recipes. The pizza crust in this one remains my absolute favorite of the various recipes and mixes I’ve tried.
Five great books, and there are dozens more waiting to be discovered or written. But this is a good place to start.

SCD: I’m Doing it Wrong

I know I’m doing SCD wrong. Doing it backwards, really.

You’re supposed to start out with a more limited diet, much like the elimination diet I did back in 08-09. Except more limited than that. This phase lasts 2-5 days. And then you start adding foods in, going in slow stages.

The basic idea (and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this) is that your intestine is damaged and having trouble processing foods. Any food that your body has trouble processing gets to sit around too long in your gut, where it becomes a breeding ground for all sorts of fun internal flora. Step one is to get rid of that excess food sitting around, which in turn should cut down on the various harmful bacteria and yeasts making a home in your intestines.

It makes sense. And the initial stage of the diet would do that. Instead, I’ve jumped on essentially at the last phase of the diet, eating all of the advanced (but allowed) foods. In part, I’m theorizing that my intestines are probably already partially recovered thanks to my gluten free lifestyle (it may even be true). In larger part, I’m reluctant to limit my foods even more than the final stage of SCD. I barely have the time to make enough food to get me through the week even as is.

These are excuses. But, like cliches, there is a truth to them.

And, I am finding, even though I’m only doing the most lax version of the diet, I’m seeing benefits. It became obvious last weekend when I broke diet at a convention and immediately got a bloated, unhappy feeling in my stomach. And the next several days I felt bloated and backed up, in a way I hadn’t since shortly after starting SCD.

This week, I’ve been dealing with congestion, earache, muscle pain and a few other things I’m strangely reluctant to talk about. And I realized today, reading through SCD blogs and sites, that what I’m seeing sounds like die-off. That point when the first round of intestinal beasties die for lack of sustenance. It becomes an issue of toxins suddenly rushing your system as the bacteria die. It makes you feel sick. Either that, or I have a bad cold. I will be very disappointed if it’s just a cold.

I’ve only been doing SCD for two weeks, and that with a break on the weekend. So, even done wrong, the Specific Carbohydrate Diet makes a significant improvement.

Going SCD

I’m sure my father will be thrilled with this one. I’ve decided to go SCD.

The Specific Carbohydrate Diet was initially designed to treat celiac disease, lo these many years ago. It’s very restrictive, and therefore hard to convince patients to stick to. Unless they have extremely good reason to do so – like, say, Crohn’s Disease, or Ulcerative Colitis, or Celiac Disease that is non-responsive to a gluten free diet. Luckily, I have none of these particular conditions (oh, isn’t that just asking for the god of digestive disorders to come down and smite me).

I’ve had friends who benefited from it. In many ways it’s pretty similar to the elimination diet I was on back in 2008. And I remember feeling good then. Having fewer skin irritations, fewer breakouts, a more settled stomach. This is not to say those are currently big problems, they aren’t. But the idea that I could feel *even* better if I just restricted my diet a *little* more… Well. I’ve never been great at moderation. And… I guess eating gluten free has just gotten… easy. And I get bored with easy.

I’ve figured out how to cook the way I want to while being gluten free. I’m curious to see how I handle this particular challenge; it’s a lot harder. Tonight, I made what I’m going to call Halva Cookies, since they remind me just faintly of the Halva I grew up with. They’re not quite what I’d like them to be, but I expect I’ll get them there. The flavor is just too mild at the moment. I’ve also got my first batch of soon-to-be-yogurt cooling on the stove. I need to add the yogurt starter, put it in mason jars, and get the dehydrator going.

If you’re interested in SCD, here’s a link to the book:

SCD Compatible Ice Cream

Yogurt Ice Cream, with Blueberry Sauce

A friend of mine has Crohn’s Disease, which makes celiac look like a visit to Disneyland (assuming you like Disneyland). She’s on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD), which is incredibly limited. Much better than the alternative, though.

Turns out, she hasn’t had ice cream for nearly a year. Possibly longer. She can’t handle the sugar or the lactose in most commercial ice creams, and she can’t handle the agave nectar in the coconut milk ice creams. She does, however, make her own yogurt. And she can have honey.

I know what you’re thinking (well, I probably don’t, but I’m going to pretend). Frozen yogurt is usually pretty meh. Too soft. Bland. The diet version of ice cream. Thanks to Fraiche, I now know frozen yogurt doesn’t have to be that way. And that sparked an idea…

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