Valentine's Day (and February's Go ahead honey it's gluten free)

Valentine's Day was lovely. I'm rather cynical about the whole buying roses and chocolates (not that I can eat them now anyway), but it's a great excuse to eat a nice meal, have a glass of wine or two, and relax and enjoy each other's company.

My UC has been playing up a bit lately, so I'm eating fairly carefully, so we decided to have dinner at home.

The evening started with a glass of red and brie. No crackers, because I'm off nuts, and we didn't have any crackers for Ben either, though there was my mum's home made quince paste to go with his cheese.

Then we had steak - a lovely locally grown, hormone and antibiotic free steak - with mushroom sauce, and a side of roast vegies, and another glass of wine, of course.

I've recently got into eating mushrooms - I've never liked them in the past, but a friend of mine told me I had to try this lovely recipe of hers, and I was converted. 

And finally orange yoghurt jelly, topped with candied citrus peel and white chocolate.

Yum.

The mains are staple SCD meals for us, tried and true, but the dessert is something I've been playing with for a little while, and it worked so well this time that I've put to forward for the February Go Ahead Honey its Gluten Free with it's suitably Valentine's theme, love potions and charmed foods.


Missing chocolate is something I'm sure every SCD'er can identify with, and with its rich and creamy, melt-in-your-mouth sweetness (and, of course, traditional Valentine's connection) I couldn't resist a little bit in the dessert.


But more than that, it is about sweet fresh citrus, and thick creamy yoghurt, for a thoroughly indulgent and very healthy dessert.

All of the evening's recipes are below, and head to Naomi's fab blog for all of the GAHIGF recipes later this month, or by 24 Feb to get involved.

Mushroom sauce, two ways

1 tbsp olive oil

1 tbsp butter

1/4 medium onion finely chopped

2 cloves garlic

4 medium cup mushrooms

1/4 cup of yoghurt or 1/8 cup red wine

parsley

Melt the butter, together with the oil, over a medium heat, then add onion and garlic and saute until soft. Add mushrooms and saute until cooked.

Just before serving, add the yoghurt or wine and the parsley, stir through and serve - as a sauce on steak or a side. Don't heat again at this stage if you use the yoghurt as it will seperate.

Roast vegies

Olive oil

2 carrots

1/4 butternut pumpkin

2 zucchinis

1/2 eggplant

1/2 punnet of cherry tomatoes

6 cloves of garlic

1 tbsp finely chopped rosemary

Preheat oven to 200C.

Cut all of the vegetables into chunks about the size of cherry tomatoes. Add a good splosh of olive oil to a roasting pan and toss through the carrots. Roast for about 15 mins.

Add pumpkin and roast for another 5 mins. Add zucchini and eggplant and cook for 10 more minutes. Then add tomatoes and garlic and cook until everything is done (at least another 10 minutes).

5 minutes before it is done, sprinkle overe the rosemary.

Orange Yoghurt Jelly

125g honey

grated rind of 1 orange

120ml cold water

2 tsp gelatine

160mls freshly squeezed orange juice

40mls freshly squeezed lemon juice

370mls yoghurt

Heat the honey, orange rind and 60mls of water and allow to simmer for a minute then remove from heat.

Soak the gelatine in the remaining water while doing this, then add the soaked gelatine to the hot honey mixture and stir until dissolved.

Add the orange and lemon juice and yoghurt and stir thoroughly to combine. Pour into 4 small bowls and refridgerate for at least 4 hours.

Top with a spear of white orange chocolate and candied peel.

Citrus White Chocolate

55gms cocoa butter

1tbsp butter

2tsp creamed honey

Piece of vanilla pod

tbsp of candied peel

 

Melt cocoa butter in a double boiler over medium heat. Add the butter, creamed honey, and seeds scraped from the inside of the vanilla pod. Heat until the butter and honey are melted, pour into glass bowl and put in fridge. 

After about 10 mins, remove from fridge and beat with electric beaters. If mixture separates when left to stand, return to fridge for another 5 mins. Once mixture holds together, mix through candied peel (as much or as little as you like) and pour onto a piece of greeseproof paper. Store in the freezer.

Candied peel

Peel of 2 oranges (or other citrus fruit)

Honey

Cut the peel into small chunks (approx 8mm square). Put peel into small saucepan and cover with water. Simmer peel for about an hour, adding more water as necessary.

Pour honey over the peel to about half way up and return to the heat. Simmer until honey is absorbed, and pour peel onto greaseproof paper. Depending on how sticky you like it and what you want to use it for, you can either bottle it once cool, or dehydrate in a food dehydrator.

SCD and intensive exercise

I have an intense week of karate coming up in a couple of weeks time - a solid 7 days of training 3-4 times a day, with days 2, 3 and 4 starting with a 6am run and training session. This is traditionally followed by a BBQ breakfast and beer.

The seminar is held in Hobart, and I stay at a hotel (with full kitchen facilities) with my husband and usually between 4 and 7 students. It is always a lot of fun, as well as physically and mentally exhausting, and I'm torn between excitement and dread at its impending arrival.

This will be the 9th such seminar I've been to (thankfully it only happens once a year!) and first one at which I've been following SCD. Normally the week involves massive amounts of carbs and sugar - four slices of toast with nutella for first breakfast, bacon eggs and more toast for second breakfast, pasta for lunch, rice for dinner and as much junk food as can be fitted in between without throwing up during training, because we know we're burning off the calories faster than we can eat them.

But this all has to change for me this year. Somehow I have to survive on meat and fruit and vegetables, cheese and yoghurt, and nuts. I'm not up to eating legumes yet, and even nuts aren't completely agreeing with me.

I've been reading a bit about sports nutrition over the last few weeks. All of the information I have found is based around a normal carb content diet, so it isn't particularly easy for me to use, but I've taken some pointers about what to eat and when and started putting together a plan.

The main points of what I've read seem to be to eat carbs (the form of fruit and vegetable is good) and protein a couple of hours before and within a couple of shours after exercising, and eat a snack of something more sugary like an energy bar or a banana or trail mix half an hour before exercise. I've also heard that milk after exercise is a good way to get back some of what you've lost. And of course hydration is really important. I lost almost 4kg the first time I did one of these seminars, and I think it was almost entirely through fluid loss.

So here are the basics of my plan. I'd appreciate any feedback or comments anyone may have to offer.

Breakfast
- pumpkin soup (basically roast butternut pureed with cooked apples, and cinnamon, nutmeg etc) - for carbs
- topped with date and cashew whip (soaked cashews pureed with dates) - for sugar
- also topped with some banana smoothie to thin the soup a little

Followed by training session 1 for the day: either 6am or 10 am

Straight after training session 1
- banana smoothie


Second breakfast (only on the days that start at 6am)
- beef rissole and fried egg - for protein
- ratatouille - for carbs (I would have sworn that I had posted a recipe for this, but I can't find it. Anyway, eggplant, zucchini, tomato, red onion, capsicum, and herbs)

Lunch (after training session 1 on the civilised days, after session 2 on the 6am days)
- salad - carbs
- with chicken/tuna - protein

Afternoon snack (after training session 2 or 3)
- avocado

Afternoon snack 2 (before training session 3 or 4)
- energy bars

Then after the last training session of the day, we take it in turns to cook at the hotel. There are a few people doing things I can eat, like mushroom strogonoff (mine with SCD yoghurt) and Vietnamise salad with rissoles/sausages. I also always cook a huge pot of bolognaise at the start of the week, so I can have that with vegies on the nights when people are cooking food I can't eat.

And finally, I'm taking some supplies for extra snacking (like the chewy macadamia cookies from CCCIBS which is my favourite cookbook, ever, not just SCD) and my mum is making labna and knowing her will probably also me a cake or something too. Something sweet is essential to slip into my bag for our regular strolls to North Hobart for coffee, otherwise the cravings for danish pastries, florentines and blueberry house cakes might kill me.

Plugging what I know I'll be eating into Nutrition Data comes up with 2195 calories a day, and from Free Dieting's calorie calculator I know I need 2630 calories a day (based on daily exercise plus physical job), so once the random snacking is added in, I should be getting an adequate calorie intake.

My carbs:fat:protein ratio is 30:40:30. There's some pretty varied opinion out there about what these ratios should be, from 60:30:10 from the USDA guidelines, to 40:30:30 from the Zone diet, so I really don't know what to make of this one.

The food plan has an estimated glycemic load of 72, below the recommended maximum of 100, and an inflammation factor of 372, well above the recommended minimum of 50. It's a little low on the various B vitamins, but I take a supplement for that fairly regularly anyway. So overall, I'm fairly happy with the plan.

But I'd really appreciate if anyone with some more knowledge and experience of sports nutrition has some pointers for me.

SCD snacks

I've been experimenting with some new snack foods, incorporating dried fruit and nuts, recently, and it has got me thinking about sugar and what I've learned in starting the diet again. I think part of the where I went wrong on the first attempt at the diet was over-consumption of legal but advanced foods, and also fruit more generally. While many fruits aren't listed as advanced, the sugar content is high, which promotes inflammation.

This time through, I've spent more time thinking about snacking and rationing my intake of fruit and nuts. Snacks seem to be the hardest part of the diet for me - breakfast, lunch and dinner are meat and veg, lots of different combinations, which isn't that different to what I used to do. I was never big on sandwiches, and mostly took leftover dinner to work for lunch. But snacks... I would usually bake a cake or biscuits on the weekend to last the week, take a couple of pieces of fruit, occasionally a fun size chocolate bar or a packet of chips.

I carried this pattern into the SCD with me - basically replacing the cake/biscuits and the chocolate bar/chips with SCD legal baked goods, and the fruit stayed too. I also got into the habit of taking a 250ml container of nuts and dried fruit to work to snack on over a couple of days, but it would only ever last a day. So 4-5 fairly high sugar snacks, and 2-3 with a fair bit of fiber etc from the nuts.

So I thought I'd write a post on what I've done differently this time through. (I started this a fair while ago, being quite organised and going through week by week. Then I forgot about it, so I've just added a random bunch of subsequent things since then. And all the recipes are right down the bottom).

Week 1: intro diet - not much to say here, given the limited range of foods. Boiled egg, jelly, and yoghurt (I decided to do dairy from day 3 because it had never given me problems before and given all the prednisone I've been on, I'm a bit paranoid about calcium intake and bone density).

Week 2: as for week 1 (but I couldn't stomach jelly anymore) with the addition of half a mashed ripe banana or some apple sauce with the yoghurt.

Week 3 saw the addition of avocados with macadamia nut oil dressing and small pieces of matured cheddar cheese.

In week 4, I added some sultanas to my apple sauce when cooking it, and stopped pureeing the apples. So sick of eating mush! I also added some cooked strawberries, and also started eating the occasional dried apricot with almond butter.

I got a bit more adventurous with the dried fruit and nuts in week 5 and made black cake (see earlier post for recipe and explanation of the name), and also started playing with energy bars.

It all started with this page, which give a great pictoral guide to the textures you are after at the various stages, and the ratio of fruit and nuts you want. I remembered back in my wheat and sugar days these lovely date and orange wontons, deep fried and dusted with lots of icing sugar, and decided to try to capture that flavour in bar sugar free form. That, and I'd just bought some orange oil I wanted to try out.

What I came up with was so good I've made it about 4 times since then. I used fresh dates, but have been wondering if I could get the same effect with dried dates - much cheaper.

That said, I did some number crunching and even my most expensive creation (cranberry and pistachio) only works out at $1 for a 45g bar.

I've put some of the combinations I've come up with - the good ones - at the bottom on this post.

Another thing I like to snack on is veggie sticks with labna (yoghurt cheese - see below), or just dunked in the macadamia dressing.

And cakes. Cakes are good too. I particularly like this one from Naomi at milk for the morning cake - I've done it a couple of times, one with pear and raspberry, and once with pear and mulberry - cherries never lst long enough in my house to make it into a cake!

If you have any SCD snacks you'd like to share, please add them as comments.

(I think it is a sign of how well I'm feeling that I had to check my diary to see how many days since restarting SCD... 83 days and counting)

Macadamia nut oil dressing

½ cup macadamia oil

1 tbsp honey

1 tsp Dijon mustard

½ tsp grated orange rind (don't add this in early on in the diet)

1 tbsp lemon juice

2 tbsp apple cider vinegar

dash of cayenne pepper

dash of salt
Energy bars
follow the method here for the following combinations:

Christmas pudding:

1/8 cup raisins
1/8 cup currants

1/4 cup sultanas

1/8 tsp spice blend (cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, cloves 45:45:5:5)

Date, orange and walnut:
1/4 cup chopped dates
1/4 cup sultanas
1/3 cup whole walnuts
A drop of orange oil


Cranberry and pistachio:
1/4 cup chopped dates
1/4 cup cranberries
1/6 cup walnuts
1/6 cup pistachios
1/4 tsp cinnamon, and a splash of rose water

Labna (yoghurt cheese)
1.5L SCD yoghurt
a few cloves of garlic (or a few more, to taste)
salt and pepper
chopped fresh herbs (or dried)
good quality olive oil

Either crush your garlic raw, or roast it and mash it, depending on whether you like the tang of raw garlic. Or leave it out if you aren't a fan of garlic at all. Add the garlic and salt and pepper to your yoghurt and drip it for around 8 hours. You want it to be really thick because the next step is to take spoonfuls of it and shape them into little balls and roll them in the fresh herbs.

A combination of oregano, rosemary and parsley is really good, but you can do any combination you want, or have spare.

Place the balls into a jar and fill with olive oil. Having done it with cheap olive oil a few times, I can verify that the oil makes a big difference.

As well as a great dip, this makes a lovely spread. I used to eat it on crispy white toast with these lovely sweet chillies (marinated in massive amounts of sugar I'm sure, and stored in sugar syrup). When I have some chillies again, I'm going to have a go at making something similar with honey...

Perfect evening out

It's been a while since I've posted, not for any particular reason, just getting caught up in the rush that is pre-Christmas shopping and socialising. But I had to find time to post about dinner on Ben’s birthday. It was his 30th last Friday. 

After banana and orange hotcakes for breakfast and present opening, we drove to Sydney and met up with Taylor (Ben's sister) and Dave (her fiancée) who live in Canada. The Sydney trip has been planned for a while. I'd booked tickets to see the Australian Ballet perform the Nutcracker early in the year but meeting Taylor and Dave was a pleasantly unexpected late edition, as was getting a table at Tetsuya’s. I tried to book for the 4 of us about 8 weeks earlier, with no success; but about a week ago, got a call offering us a table.

For those of you outside the southern hemisphere, Tetsuya’s is one of the most famous and arguably the best restaurant in Australia. They serve a 9-10 course degustation set menu, which I had thought would be a problem being on SCD, but the chef's were wonderfully accommodating. I'd expected never to eat dessert at a restaurant again, but I got to eat all three courses of dessert! Yum!

The food was amazing. I wish we'd had a camera to take photos of every dish. The presentation in itself was very special too, so I'm a bit sad not to have captured it more exactly than with my imperfect memory. Also, it got a little blurry in the middle and I can't exactly remember what I ate. I'm blaming it on the many dishes and the long day, but the wines may have had a little something to do with it! Fortunately Ben and I decided to share the set wines - because neither of us would have been able to walk if we'd had one each.

The first course was a chilled cucumber soup, bright green and served in a martini glass. It was slightly vinegary and served with 6 individual drops of unidentified oil (it tasted slightly nutty, possibly walnut) on top. The others had a small dollop of sheep's milk ice cream on top.

Next, everyone other than me had kingfish sashimi with soy sauce, and a glass of chilled sake. It was served on a very rustic looking glazed stoneware plate. I had a cherry tomato salad, with the earliest tomatoes from Tetsuya’s garden. It was swimming in a delightfully fresh salad dressing, garnished with pretty little flowers, including a cucumber from the garden.

The last entree was the most intriguing of the evening. Taylor and I were served a 'carpaccio' but told that it was not meat. It was garnished with some small green leaves and lots of little flowers, and we were told we had to guess what it was. It was reddish pink, rather chewy and slightly difficult to cut through. It also had a bit of crunch to it, like apple sliced very thinly. We sat and ate it thoughtfully in tiny little bites, and jealously shared a small amount each with Ben and Dave (they were eating scampi tails in an avocado soup topped with caviar). We ended up guessing tomato or capsicum with much trepidation; I didn't really think it was either, but could think of anything else it might be either. The waiter gave us a hint that it was a fruit, and which point Dave came out with ‘watermelon’, which turned out to be correct. It is skinned; frozen; shaved; smoked; and dehydrated. I wished that I had a bite left to be able to taste it again knowing what it was, but it was not to be. Maybe next time…my 30th in a bit over a year... (hint hint)

I lost track of the wines well before I lost track of the food, but I recall drinking something cold and white and fruity with this.

I recall that there were two more fish dishes to start the mains, though I’m not sure of the order in which they arrived. We all had something with a crisply fried skin, served with a little blob of something like homemade mayonnaise, which was just lovely. I had a piece of yellowtail kingfish, much softer and more delicate, while the others ate Tetsuya’s signature dish: confit of ocean trout.

Next was a slice of lightly cooked duck with a baby leek curled in the bottom of the bowl, which was served with a glass of Pinot Noir (of course).

The mains came to an end with a nice strong glass of Shiraz with crispy pigs tail, something lobster-like the name of which I didn't catch, and prosciutto. It was pleasingly salty, which matched the rich Shiraz quite nicely.

Dessert started with a pallet-cleansing blood orange and black pepper sorbet for the others and stevia granita for me, served in a double shot glass. It was served with a stevia leaf, of which we all ate a piece: very sweet and slightly herby tasting. It also came with various different berry concoctions. Mine was berries with raspberry puree, I think the others had jelly and/or ice cream with theirs (by this time the wine was really kicking in, and I have no idea what they had next). We had two different dessert wines, which I smelled at greedily, and allowed a little drop to touch my lips.

The second dessert course (multiple dessert courses is just a wonderful idea) was yellow peaches, with zabaglione and ameretti. The combination was lovely, the peaches were a little tart and slightly crisp, the zabaglione was sweet and the ameretti was pleasantly crunchy.

And finally, I had an almond pudding, extruded into a long thin oblong swirled across my plate, with fresh figs and honey meringue, which seemed to have been blow torched into a sweet crispness on top. Ben was brought out something quite chocolaty-looking, with a little candle on top, which was a lovely touch. With this, we all had decaf short blacks, served in cute little glazed terracotta cups, deliciously fragrant and perfect with the sweet meringue.

We wandered back to the hotel, pleasantly full and just a little drunk, bringing Ben’s 30^th birthday to a perfect close.

Another relish day (zucchini relish)

I've been pondering the food related traditions that run in my family for the 'family traditions' December Go Ahead Honey, it's gluten free. Tastes have changed over the years, and I have fond childhood memories of foods that haven't been cooked in years, and that I couldn't eat anymore even if they were.

I've realised that there is a trait passed down the female line of both sides of my family - a squirrel-like addiction to food hoarding. Being in the southern hemisphere, we start getting wonderful crops of fruit and vegetables around this time of year, and I love giving homemade things for Christmas. I remember from my early years my paternal grandmother's pickled onions, lined up in rows in the shed behind the garage - somehow both incredibly sweet and painfully sour at the same time. The smell of rosemary still always makes me think of their garden. The pickled onion recipe is lost as far as I know, and my one attempt at SCD pickled onions didn't yield fantastic results - I mustn't have sterilised everything properly as they developed an interesting fluorescent yellow mould after a few weeks. 

Later, my maternal grandparents used to live on a little farm, with some cows and chickens, and lots of fruit trees and a vegetable garden. Nan would make wonderful jams and jellies, and fruit preserved in syrup, and my brother and I would gorge ourselves on cherries and blackberries whenever we visited at the right time of year, and mum would make summer pudding. (Some time soon I'll have to think about an SCD bread that would work for that… maybe if the cherries are out when I'm in Tassie in January.)

I have made another attempt at modifying Mum's zucchini relish for SCD, which I may submit. While the recipe itself isn't very traditional (Mum kind of made it up from a very bland zucchini relish recipe a few years ago), it goes with the family tradition of hoarding food in pantries and sheds and anywhere else it fits!

My first attempt at the relish a couple of weeks ago was okay - the flavour was excellent as always (how can you go wrong with turmeric and cumin, coriander and mustard), but I cut the vegetables a bit too chunky, and didn't add enough gelatine to achieve the 'finely cut pieces in a viscous sauce' that cornflour creates. I've had some assistance on the chopping front this time - my best friend Maddi, a former chef and a master of knife skills, was visiting; so I thought I'd take the opportunity to exploit those skills for my own gain. (She did get to take some relish home, too!)

Two things about the recipe that I cannot emphasise enough:
- chop the vegies really small, 3-4mm cubes; and
- leave the zucchini and onion in the salt for as long as you can, at least 8 hours, but preferably more like 12.

Zucchini relish

2.5 cups finely chopped zucchini (a combination of green and yellow is nice if you can find them)
1 cup finely chopped onions  

1 tbsp salt

Combine zucchini, onion and salt in a bowl and leave overnight. Don’t be tempted to skimp on this step or your zucchini will end up mushy.

 

1 red capsicum, finely chopped (if I’m making double quantity, I use a red and a yellow capsicum)
70g honey

1 tsp turmeric

½ tsp mustard seeds
½ tsp coriander seeds
½ tsp cumin seeds

½ tsp gelatine

150mls apple cider vinegar

The next day, add the gelatine to some of the vinegar and leave to sit while you do the next step.

Rinse the zucchini and onion. Place in a pan with the remaining ingredients. Bring to boil and simmer until the zucchini is cooked but still firm – about 20 minutes. You still want all of the vegetables to have some bite.

Add the gelatine mixture and stir until the gelatine is thoroughly dissolved. Test that the consistency is correct by pouring some of the liquid onto a frozen plate. Soak and add some more gelatine if it is too runny. (You want it to be thickened, not set).

Place in sterile jars and seal with sterilised lids. Makes 2 medium jars, which lasts us a few weeks. This time, I tripled the quantity!

Black cake (fruit cake)

I don't usually like fruit cake all that much - it tends to be a bit dry or too rich - but this is really moist, almost pudding-like. Very more-ish. This will be my first Christmas on SCD and, although I eat this cake all year round, I think it will make a pretty good Christmas cake. You could even ice it with SCD-legal marzipan, but I can't think of any replacement for royal icing (not that I really want to - too sweet for my taste).

 

The recipe has been played around with a fair bit, derived from a non-SCD legal recipe my mum came across about when I was starting SCD. The first time mum made it, it was a bit over cooked (still tasty though) and didn't have a name, so Ben christened it black cake and the name stuck, even though it usually turns out a nice golden brown.

 

Black cake

 

2.75 cups of mixed dried fruit (I usually just use sultanas and currants, but raisins are good too and I'm sure some homemade candied peel would work perfectly)

grated rind of 1 orange

1 cup orange juice

up to 1/2 tbsp of honey (I don't usually use any as the dried fruit is sweet already)

1 tsp bicarb soda

1 cup cooked carrot/pumpkin, pureed (about 3-4 large raw carrots)

1.5 cups of almond meal

2 eggs, lightly beaten

2 tsp mixed spice (I used 3/4 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp ginger, 1/4 tsp ground cloves, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, 1/4 tsp ground cardamom last time, which was a good combination)

 

Combine the fruit, orange rind and juice and honey in a saucepan and bring to a simmer for a few minutes until the fruit is swollen and most of the liquid has been absorbed.

 

Take off the heat and allow to cool for a few minutes. Add the bicarb, then the carrot/pumpkin and eggs and mix thoroughly. Then add the almond meal and spice and mix until combined.

 

Pour into a 6 inch square cake tin lined with baking paper and bake at 160C until the top of the cake is firm to the touch.

Having UC

Okay, I’m finally going to write the story of my ulcerative colitis. It’s not something I’ve wanted to talk about, but I’m ready to start coming to terms with the fact that I have a chronic disease, and I think that a part of that is letting people know. A lot of my friends live interstate and I don’t see them often, and others that I see mostly at karate just know I disappeared for weeks at a time, had been in hospital and lost a lot of weight. So I’ll start from the very beginning.(Mum, please don't read this - you know the whole story and I don't think you need to go through it all again).

[The symptoms of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) are all a bit gross, and not really things people want to hear or talk about. If you’ve never heard of UC, here’s a rough explanation of the symptoms. I’ll use the common online UC abbreviations, explained here for those of you who don’t spend a lot of time reading about IBD: D = Diarrhea, B = Blood, BM = bowel motion.]

The colitis began pretty slowly. I started having symptoms in June 2009, but didn’t think much of it to start with. It was just a stomach ache every week or so and the occasional odd BM. But the frequency and intensity started to increase, and soon I was in the bathroom 5 or 6 times a day.

I saw my GP who sent me for blood tests (which were inconclusive), an ultrasound (which showed nothing) and a course of antibiotics (which I took, but didn’t want to because there was no reason to think it was an infection). I finally got referred to a gastroenterologist and a month or so later (Nov 2009) had a colonoscopy and a diagnosis of mild left sided ulcerative colitis.

At this stage, I was really optimistic: I knew what it was; there were drugs to treat it; sure it was chronic, but I was going to get into remission and everything was going to be fine. How wrong could I possibly be?

The first meds (salofalk enemas) caused me more pain than I was already in, and after 2 weeks I stopped taking them. My gastro was overseas and I stupidly didn’t go to see my GP. I just stopped the meds.

I went untreated for about 3 weeks, by which time I was in almost constant pain. I could hardly eat because of the nausea, and when I did, nothing stayed down. And I couldn’t sleep because of the pain. One evening in tears, Ben decided that I had to go to the doctor. I went to an after hours clinic and was put on prednisone. Man was that great – almost instant relief – I thought I was cured!

I saw my mum for the first time in 6 weeks a couple of days later, and her mouth dropped open when she picked me up at the airport. I looked so sick! She bullied me onto the scales and I discovered I’d gone from weighing 63kg to 50kg in about 6 weeks. But the prednisone was great – I could eat again and I wasn’t in pain. I was really weak and tired all the time though. I just thought I needed to recover from the weight loss and everything would be okay.

The lack of sleep and constant pain really messed with my mind. I hadn’t seen that I had lost weight. I wasn’t weighing myself because I wasn’t well enough to go to the gym. I didn’t realise that I wasn’t eating enough, even though I was only eating a couple of scrambled eggs a day and maybe some potato chips. When mum finally made me look at myself in the mirror, I looked like the walking dead. Somehow it crept up on me and I didn’t see it happening.

About a week before Christmas 2009, I fainted on the escalator at work. I cracked the side of my head and scraped all up my back. Fortunately, someone stopped the escalator before my hair got caught in the moving parts… Someone called an ambulance and I was carted off to hospital.

I spent 5 days and 4 nights in hospital, and started on salofalk granules as well as methylprednisolone. It was good for the first few days, and made me acknowledge that I was really sick and had to start taking it all a bit more seriously. By day 3, I was feeling better and was so ready to go home. Hospitals are places to be when you are so sick you can’t move – home is the place to go to get well.

I missed Ben’s birthday, but at least I was out in time to fly home to Hobart to spend Christmas with family.

But I still wasn’t well, and whenever I started reducing the prednisone, things got worse. Also, the meds were making me sleep badly, and I was so hungry all the time (probably not a bad thing) and I started growing facial hair and felt dizzy and tired all the time. Fortunately the hair went away when I stopped the meds.

I started on the maximum dose of an immunosuppressant (Imuran/azathioprine) in mid January, which takes about 3 months to start being effective. In the first of many fortnightly blood tests, it was discovered that I was anaemic and started on iron supplements, which at least helped with the tiredness and dizziness.

I asked my doctor repeatedly whether there were foods I should or shouldn’t be eating, but he has persistently said that food has nothing to do with it. I found this a bit unconvincing – how can food have nothing to do with the inflammation of a good portion of my digestive system – but he’s the doctor, right?

I gradually came off the prednisone over January and February 2010, but was back on it by the start of March. When it became obvious I was going to have to be on cortisone for a while, I moved from taking prednisone to entocort (budesonide). At $200 for one month supply, it was pretty hefty, but was meant to be as good as prednisone but with less nasty side effects (like bone density loss and affecting thyroid function).

It did nothing for me. And I mean nothing at all.

On 1 April, I went to emergency at the hospital and was admitted for another 5 day stay, and then again on 14 April. (The second time, I discovered that the way to get a bed in emergency immediately is to say that your pain on a scale of 1 – 10 is 8). I did get to spend my birthday in between my two hospital visits with my family in Tasmania.

Over April and May I took most of my remaining 5 weeks of sick leave. One of the things the public service has going for it is generous and accruing sick leave entitlements. When I first started working almost 6 years ago, I remember wondering how you could possibly use 17 days of sick leave in a year…

At the same time, my gastro suggested that I start on infliximab, an IV immunosuppressant. It was the last thing he had to suggest that I hadn’t tried already. It also isn’t covered by the PBS for treating UC, so approx $7,000 for 3 doses. Fortunately, the Calvary Hospital was willing to cover the cost for me.

By this time, I was really over it. I’d always thought that I’d get sick, then get better. It is what had always happened before. That there was a pill to fix everything. But the doctors seemed to have no idea what to do for me. I’d been reading everything I could find on the internet about UC and I’d come across a lot of references to the specific carbohydrate diet – I’d even bought the book ‘Breaking the Vicious Cycle’ earlier in the year, but things were going so well on the prednisone that I hadn’t really looked at it. So I finally decided it was worth a try.

It’s a pretty big change, eliminating grains and sugar and milk were the really big things for me. But I figured I was willing to try anything that had a semblance of a grain of truth to it.

I decided I’d go ahead with the infliximab as well, a dose at the start of May, another 2 weeks later and another 4 weeks after that.

It was a pretty bizarre experience the first time. I turned up to the cancer clinic at Calvary Hospital in Canberra, where it is administered. The nurses were great: getting the cannular in first try (I was so over being stabbed with needles); keeping up the cheerful banter. I was amazed how happy a cancer clinic could be.

By the end of the 3 doses, I had also weened off the prednisone altogether and was feeling great. No more B or D or pain.

I was sticking to the SCD as well, but rushed into eating advanced foods like nuts and dried fruit and tasty baked things because they are convenient to take to work, and yummy, and filled the gap left by losing home made biscuits and breakfast cereal and bread.

It seemed like everything was fantastic and I was cured. When am I going to stop thinking that?!?

About 6 weeks ago, everything started falling apart again. It started around the time of a lunch out with work colleagues. Mediterranean looked pretty promising as a cuisine choice for a restaurant – just pick a dish with meat and vegies. Well, every grain free dish had their homemade tomato sauce, which contained ‘just a tiny bit of sugar’. So I bit the bullet and had the roasted eggplant, capsicum and red onions in tomato sauce, which was really, really good. 

I don’t know if it was related – it was also about 12 weeks since my last dose of infliximab – but I started having stomach pain again, and then D and occasional B.

I waited a week and it just got worse.

In the meantime, I was reading more about SCD. It sounds like it is pretty common to have flares around the 6-month mark, and this was almost 6 months to the day since I started the diet. But I also came across a lot more information on starting the diet, and how to introduce foods gradually to give the lining of the intestine time to heal and to work out what your trigger foods are. Just because they are legal on the diet, does not mean everyone can tolerate them.

So I restarted the diet, and decided I’d wait a week, and if there was no improvement, I’d make an appointment with my gastro.

But here I am, 37 days later: no visit to the doctor, no new drugs. The symptoms mostly cleared up in a couple of days, and after a solid week of a massive headache, I’ve been feeling pretty good. I found some great new resources like scdlifestylebook.com (their free chapter and podcasts are fantastic) and wrote a post on ihaveuc.com, and realised that I am finally ready to talk about what I’ve been through.

That said, I started writing this post well over a week ago. I’ve played around with it a lot: it’s difficult to work out what to put in and what to leave out, and even once I was pretty happy with the content, I had a hard time hitting the post button. I’ve told bits and pieces of this story to different people, but haven’t put it all together in one go before.

It sounds really depressing, and I guess it has been. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone and I understand why UC used to be thought to be a psychological condition – I have thought I was going mad at times. But I’m getting used to the idea that this is something I am going to have to live with. I’m not going to let it be depressing. Most days, I feel pretty good.

37 days and counting…