While a food sensitivity elimination diet is the most accurate way to determine your food sensitivities, successfully doing one can be a real pain and can drive you nuts. It can be even more of a pain if it is a child who needs to do a food sensitivity elimination diet. Here are the steps I recommend following in order to survive in one piece and keep your sanity.
1. Identify your reasons for doing one. Why are you doing an elimination diet? Did your doctor or another health care professional recommend it? Have you heard about it or researched it online or from books and decided to do it? or do you just think it is a good idea? It is a must that you know why you are doing one as well as what you hope to accomplish by doing a food sensitivity elimination diet before you start one.
2. Prepare yourself to do the diet. This includes getting a food journal so that you can track what you are eating, the symptoms you experience or if doing it for your child the food and drink he or she eats and the symptoms he or she has. You can google food journal and find one to use, or you can try one of many apps that are available, or you can schedule a wellness consultation with me and I will give you a free copy of the one I created. You also need to develop a plan. This should include things such as the timeframe for the diet- When will you start? When will you finish? How will you deal with social situations? If it is for your child, how will you deal with school? With church? With birthday parties? With a spouse or other parent? With other children in your family? and so on. It is a must that you think this through and are well prepared or the diet will not be a success.
3. What foods will you eliminate? While it might seem obvious to do gluten and dairy, you may also want to consider, corn, nuts, shellfish, and maybe even anything else you think may be causing a problem.
4. The first few weeks of the diet are the most difficult. Be prepared for the fact that there may be some detoxing and therefore some discomfort that may occur. If you are working with a child I only recommend eliminating 1 food at a time. Adults can sometimes do 2-3 but I don’t recommend more than that.
5. The next few weeks will require you to continue to practice patience and to resist the temptation to eat even just a little bit of a given food. It is a must that you avoid the food or foods 100% or the food sensitivity elimination diet will not work. I recommend you avoid all eating out or situations where you did not prepare the food that therefore do not know for sure what is in it during the time that you are doing the elimination diet.
6. What did you learn from the diet?- This is when it’s time to analyze your results and determine what you learned. Did it help? Did you discover what foods are a problem for you? Are there maybe other foods you need to eliminate as well?
Successfully doing an elimination diet on your own is very hard. This is one thing I can help you with when you hire me as your coach. You also may want to consider the ALCAT test in order to speed up the process.
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