I'm tay the Atypical Aspie and I'm here today to talk about elimination diets,
autoimmune disease, autism and how they all go together.
I'm using this as my little fidget toy today. It's my daughter's stackable heart crayons. I was
diagnosed with autism at age 31. That was one year ago. And I also have an autoimmune disease called
alopecia, which sometimes flares up and causes my hair to fall out. My most recent episode with that
was about five years ago. I lost about half of my hair. I was wearing wigs. I was wearing hats
all the time, and just recently I had one new spot that popped up after all of it had grown back. One
of the things that I feel like really helped me get my hair back the first time around when I lost
so much of it was an elimination diet. I also feel like elimination diets can be really helpful
for people on the spectrum. They have to be done with regards to how you handle change.
A lot of people on the spectrum don't do well with change. And so with an elimination diet
you might want to take it one baby step at a time. I do feel that there's a connection between autism
and autoimmune disease. It's mostly based off my own personal experience. Some doctors have kind of
ventured into that territory. We still need a lot more research there. I feel like they're related
because in my experience, people on the spectrum tend to experience a lot of internal stress
because we're over-processing things compared to neurotypical people. We might hear things more
loudly, we might feel touch more viscerally, we might be affected by lights. And so we're
constantly taking in all these stimulI and trying to process it in a way that appears acceptable to
the people that we're talking to. And so I think that can create create a lot of internal stress
which can cause inflammation. And inflammation is one of the contributors to autoimmune disease.
Autoimmune disease is when your body kind of turns on a part of itself and attacks it. Sounds kind of
scary. Alopecia is my body turning on the part of itself that produces hair because my body is
stressed out and has inflammation it's kind of lashing out trying to put the fire out somehow.
It's probably not random... It's probably, you know, in a decade we're going to have science
that pinpoints exactly how your body determines what to attack, but for me it's my hair follicles.
Okay so let's talk inflammation. Inflammation is a key contributor to sickness and aches and
pains. It's all related to our immune system and scientists are now discovering that about
80 percent of our immune system is in our gut... Intestines, stomach, all of that jazz. And our gut
is now being considered by some to be our second brain because it's so intricately connected to
what goes on up here that they function together. So whenever our gut is off balance it affects our
brain. I am really excited about this area of study because I just feel like there are so
many strides forward that we can make here and learning about the mind-body connection.
So here's what I've learned. With inflammation, a lot of times it starts in your gut. You may have
heard of something called leaky gut before. What leaky gut is...your stomach has a stomach wall
and normally nothing gets past it. Your food stays in your stomach. Everything's fine. It digests and
leaves your system, but whenever you're stressed, your body starts working harder than it needs to
and certain parts start wearing down a little bit. Something that might not have given you
trouble before now seems to be a little bit harder to process. Your body is digesting food that may
start giving you trouble in stressful times because of the extra inflammation and stress.
It starts to wear down your stomach lining, so there's this really thick wall that didn't let
anything pass before and now starts to break down and that food that's supposed to stay in your
stomach might now start trickling outside of your stomach wall and into other parts of your body
where it causes more inflammation. And that's a huge problem because that can be a big significant
contributor to autoimmune disease. Because 80 of our immune system is in that area, we want to make
sure that we are taking care of our stomach, we're taking care of our immune system by really being
mindful of what we put in our bodies. That's one thing I'm really grateful for with the elimination
diet. I feel like it's helped me kind of retrain my body for what it needs rather than what we've
trained it to want. Because of all the fast food and salt and carbohydrates and sugar... So we have
inflammation in our body. Eighty percent of our immune system is in our gut. How do we heal it?
Alright, we talked about the stomach wall kind of breaking down. We need to build that back
up. We need to give our body the opportunity to be able to strengthen that wall so that it
can handle anything that we throw at it. Well maybe not anything. We're not going to like
eat four corn dogs and a turkey leg on an elimination diet. The idea is you
take out foods that are commonly inflammatory. Number one: gluten. Why? Because there are so
many different ways that we manufacture, produce, process wheat now...Our bodies used to be
comfortable breaking down wheat, gluten... It was super common. We had it all the time. But now we
figured out how to make wheat withstand pests more easily, we've figured out how to mass produce it,
it's been genetically engineered to be able to add more vitamins or whatever xyz, you pick. But now
when we eat wheat our body says, "this looks kind of like something that I've had before but it's
different." It's going to be a little bit harder for your stomach to digest it because it's not
quite sure what to do with it. And sometimes you might get some wheat or gluten product
that is so far off from the DNA profile that it's used to that it treats it like an invader. And so
that's when you start getting inflammation in the stomach. It wears down the stomach lining and then
that gluten goes outside of the stomach and into other parts of the body where it's not supposed
to be. It creates aches and pains. The most noticeable thing for me when I took gluten out
was brain fog. I'm a baker. I've baked and baked and baked my entire life and I live for chocolate
chip cookies. I will never go back to eating gluten. That's how much it changed my life. So
gluten, number one. Number two is dairy. I live for cheese. I understand that's a really atrocious
thought. Dairy is super inflammatory. Caffeine, alcohol, sugar, soy, corn tortilla chips...
oh my gosh. That's my favorite. Tacos are my favorite, so that's really sad. And then red meat.
Red meat can be really inflammatory. There's other things that you might find that you,
in particular, have a hard time with. There's something called nightshade vegetables that you
can look up. Those can also be inflammatory for some people. Elimination diets can also be really
good for people with Crohn's disease as well. So we've talked about some of the common inflammatory
foods... What do we do with this information? It takes a while for a certain type of food to
get out of your system, so if you stop eating gluten for a day, no big deal. It's not going
to make a change in your life because that stays in your body for a while. You have to take it out
of your diet and let your body remember what it's like to not have that food and when you
re-introduce it again later, you can more closely monitor the effect that it has on your system.
So right now it's gotten so used to whatever it does, it might cause inflammation, it might not,
but it's gotten so used to that process that you don't notice it anymore. It's just like
drinking water. You put it in your body, the same thing happens every time. You may or may not know
what the effect of that is, so we remove it for about 30 days. That's typically the recommended
time frame for an elimination diet. And then you slowly reintroduce that product, so on day 31,
you don't go to Mcdonald's and have like a big mac and chicken nuggets and all of the bread,
okay, because then you're going to be really really sick. But you slowly introduce it and you
just take note of your symptoms. Do you have more brain fog? Do you have more agitation? Do you have
bloating? Do you have more joint pain? There's a lot of resources out there that can kind of guide
you, maybe even give you some journaling questions to answer whenever you start reintroducing foods
back into your diet. So you're going to eliminate something or lots of things from your diet for
30 days or more. I personally have even found that if I can tell myself to go 21 days without
something, that seems a lot more manageable than 30 and by the time I'm at 21 I usually can make it
to 30 because I realize that I'm feeling so much better. When I first did the elimination diet,
my hair was falling out like crazy and I was desperate to do whatever it took to save my hair,
so I eliminated caffeine, sugar, alcohol, gluten, dairy, soy... I think the second day, the second
night I woke up in cold sweats shaking because I wanted sugar so badly. I was so mad. I was sure
that I would not make it through the rest of the elimination challenge. I stuck with it. By the end
of the first week I was feeling so much better. If you can make it like to day four or five,
you will notice the brain fog start to lift. I eliminated all those things at once because,
like I said, I was desperate for change. You want to make sure that you're replacing that with lots
of vegetables, lots of fruits... The thing about eating better, like eating whole foods,
you can pretty much have as much as you want as long as you're listening to your body, as
long as you're not stuffing it. But brown rice was really good for me on the elimination diet. Eggs,
although if you know you have a tendency to respond to eggs in a bad way then that can be
something else that you try eliminating. RX bars were really good for the the challenge. Those have
really minimal ingredients and then now you can find stuff at specialty grocery stores that are
packaged foods that fit like the Whole 30 diet, which is a pretty good indicator for elimination
diet. There's some chips that are sweet potatoes, coconut oil and salt that got me through so many
hard nights. And then one of my other favorite go-to's is... you take coconut milk... a can
of coconut milk and it has to be the full fat version. Put it in the fridge, in the back of
the fridge where it gets really cold. And at night when you have that sweet tooth come out and really
want something, take that coconut cream, put it in the mixer, whip it up for a long time until it
gets fluffy and foamy. Now sprinkle in some cocoa powder, a little bit of honey and top it with
strawberries and some sliced almonds and it is so good. There are so many resources now out there
you can just google "elimination diet recipes." There's a great book by Dr. Amy Myers called
The Autoimmune Solution that got me through this challenge. Wonderful recipes. There's a chicken
curry recipe in there that's amazing. You want to make sure that you're replacing what you're taking
out with really good stuff. Okay, if you replace it with crap then you're going to feel worse,
so it's a really great opportunity to kind of train your body how to eat healthier things. It's
really really hard at first but I promise it gets easier. So I'm doing the elimination diet a second
time and it's so much easier this time around because I've learned how to adapt these type of
eating habits into my life and it feels much less daunting. So I just want to encourage you again,
if anybody loves sugar, it's me! I have actually made a career out of sugar because I had an
at-home bakery at one point in my life. But when I'm not on an elimination diet,
I'll eat it occasionally and I really enjoy it but I do have much less of that in my life.
I keep gluten out 100% of the time now because I feel so much better and I do try to limit my dairy
because that's the other thing that really seems to affect me. Just to recap, I know we covered a
lot of material. We want to give our stomach wall the opportunity to heal and strengthen so that it
is able to process all of our food correctly. And the way we do that is by simplifying our diet,
removing the common allergens for at least 30 days. You can eliminate one of them or all of
them. I would recommend starting with one or two if you've never done anything like this before.
After that, there's the reintroduction phase where you're going to slowly add in one of those food
groups at a time and make sure that you're taking note of what happens when you reintroduce this
into your life. Those symptoms might not come up for 24 hours after you reintroduce it, just make
sure you're paying attention to headaches, brain fog, irritability, stomach issues, sleep, all
those things will be great indicators for how the food is actually affecting you. Overall I think
you'll be really pleasantly surprised with what happens. once you see this through. It's one of
the best gifts that you can give yourself in terms of health and I think you'll start to realize,
as I did, just how important it is what we put into our body. The last thing I would recommend
is that when you embark on this, surround yourself by other people who are doing this.
You're like, "how do I do that?" Online. There's so many great podcasts... Whole30 stuff is really
close to elimination diet in a lot of regards. Check out books from the library, read articles
online. If you're filling your mind with stories of other people who have done this and the results
that they've had, it's so much easier. I almost feel like this should be a requirement if you're
going to do the elimination diet. You have to be taking in stories and information and recipes
from other people who have done this successfully already. So with that, I truly believe that this
elimination diet can help you bring health and life and vitality back to your body. It can reduce
brain fog and irritability. It can help you sleep better and I can't believe I forgot to mention:
make sure that you're drinking a ton of water on the elimination diet. As a general rule of thumb,
you want to try to drink half of your body weight in ounces of water every single day. And that is
one of the best things that you can do when you're on the elimination diet because it helps flush all
the toxins out of your body. Okay, one more tip: At night when you get the munchies and you really
want to eat something, sip on tea. How could that ever replace what I actually want to eat? A lot of
times the motion of just bringing something to our mouth, that routine, that ritual is really calming
and soothing. And again, if you're not getting enough calories and you feel really hungry,
as long as you're eating pretty clean you can eat as much as you want. Try to stop eating by
8 pm every evening and that will really help with digestion and sleep as well.
That's kind of a shotgun blast of all my favorite tips and tricks with elimination diets. Let me
know in the comments if you've done one before or what is holding you back, because like I said,
I think this is one of the best gifts that you can give yourself and I'm really excited to hear about
y'all's experiences in the comments. And let me know if you have any tips or favorite recipes.
I would love to be able to make those as well. Love yourself, invest in your health. It's one of
the best things you can do for yourself and your loved ones. And I hope everybody has a great day!