If you're flaring, you wouldn't eat raw fruits and vegetables on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet. Fruits and vegetables would be peeled and well cooked and could even be mashed or pureed for easier digestion. When your colon is healed and you're able to tolerate them, you could then eat raw fruits and vegetables.
If weight loss is a problem, increasing healthy fats usually compensates for the lower carbs. The diet allows nut butters, avacado, fish, flax and olive oils which are all great sources of calories and healthy fats.
Dr. Ron Hoffman had this to say about the SCD:
In my experience, the most significant breakthroughs for my patients with IBD have taken place with the "Specific Carbohydrate Diet" advocated by Elaine Gottschall in her book Breaking the Vicious Cycle (its foreword written by yours truly). Ms. Gottschall formulated the diet based on personal experience with her daughter, who at age 8 was stricken with debilitating ulcerative colitis. Faced with the imminent prospect of surgery to remove her daughter's colon, Gottschall, then a young biochemist, sought out the advice of an elderly physician trained in turn-of-the-century Germany. His approach hearkened back to an early naturopathic tradition that recognized "pathogenic fermentation" as the root cause of gastrointestinal ailments. Gottschall's use of diet cured her daughter's colitis and out of this experience was born the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD).
The basic theory underlying the SCD is that disease-producing bacteria and fungus spread their toxic humors in the intestines when a natural balance has been disrupted. In a "vicious cycle," harmful bugs proliferate, irritate the intestine, disrupt digestion, impair immunity, and foster fermentive degradation of certain hard-to-digest foods. The main dietary culprits: two-sugar and other enzymatically-resistant carbohydrates found in grains, certain starchy vegetables, certain fruits, table sugar, and lactose-rich dairy products.
Gottschall's Specific Carbohydrate Diet is a balanced, varied program consisting of meat, fish, eggs and poultry with most vegetables, nuts, and some fruits and sugars allowed. Lactose-free dairy products are permitted, as are certain ingeniously-formulated grain-free breads, cookies and pastries consisting of nut-meal. Beans are usually able to be reintroduced within three months.
Patients with IBD often note significant improvement in their symptoms within three weeks of starting the Gottschall diet. By twelve weeks, the majority are recovering definitively. One twenty-year-old patient of mine with ulcerative colitis took a full year to become symptom-free. She now maintains her remission with a modified version of the SCD that allows her occasional rice-based grain products. Another patient with ulcerative proctitis affecting the rectum had daily bloody diarrhea despite medications for years until initiating the Gottschall diet. After 18 months, he is completely symptom-free without the aid of medications. Elaine Gottschall herself is a frequent recipient of letters of gratitude from patients relieved of devastating symptoms.