You've heard about elimination diets like Paleo Diet or the Whole30 Diet but how do
you use them properly to get results with your health?
In today's video, I'm going to show you how to do this so that you can move your case
forward.
I am Amanda Malachesky, Certified Functional Health Coach and Digestive and Allergy Detective.
If you could use some help understanding why you have digestive symptoms and what you can
do about it, subscribe to my channel and make sure to hit the bell to be notified when I
post a new video every Monday.
Elimination diets are a really essential tool in my toolbox and they should be for you too
no matter what signs, symptoms or diagnosis that you're struggling with.
In today's video, I'm going to show you how to properly use an elimination diet, to learn
about which foods you should and shouldn't be eating.
Using this technique, I helped my client, Andrea, figure out some of the triggers for
her lifelong anxiety, bloating, and other digestive challenges.
You can too so let's get started.
The first thing to know is that not all elimination diets are created equal.
You really want to choose one that's sort of in the right township and range of the
condition that you're trying to address.
For example, if you have high cholesterol or are diabetic or are trying to lose weight,
you might start with maybe a Keto template or a very low carb template.
While if you are struggling with an autoimmune condition like Crohn's disease or Hashimoto's
thyroiditis, you might want to start with the Autoimmune Paleo Diet.
Likewise, if you are struggling with IBS or colitis or some of these really digestively
focused issues, you might want to start with a low FODMAP Diet or a diet that specifically
is working on digestion.
The key thing to note here is that each of these are just a template which means that
they're a starting place for you to get some ideas about where to start looking for your
triggers but they are not meant to be taken to the letter of the law.
Each one of these needs to be customized specifically for you.
By that I mean, you probably already are aware of some of your sensitivities so you already
are going to leave those things out.
Likewise, these lists are sometimes really lengthy and you don't want to just remove
a million things from your diet, that's not necessarily useful.
You want to really only take away what's really necessary to take away because we want to
keep healthy foods in your diet.
If you need a little bit more help with this you can check out my blog post called Choosing
the Right Elimination Diet for your Symptoms.
It's over on my blog, I've left a link for that below in the comments.
Once you choose your diet template, the next step is to remove some foods from your diet
to see how that improves your symptoms.
The list is going to be different depending on which template you're choosing but you're
going to take out your likely trigger foods for your symptoms and leave them out of your
diet for about three weeks.
No cheating, this is really important.
The more you cheat the longer it's going to take to get to the answers you're hoping to
find.
I do have two earlier videos, one is about histamine intolerance and the other one is
about the low FODMAP Diet for IBS.
Those two videos can help you access my resources for a low histamine list and a low FODMAP
Diet list.
Have you ever tried one of these therapeutic diets like the Paleo or the Whole30 or the
Autoimmune Paleo or Low FODMAP or Low Histamine Diet or Low-Oxalate Diet or any of these?
Comment below with which one you've tried.
Next step is doing re-introductions and for this you're going to want to grab a copy of
my food symptom diary.
There's a link for that below in the comments or you can use any other food list and symptom
tracking tool that you may already have.
This step is the place where a lot of people get things wrong so this is really, really
important.
The key thing with re-introductions is to only introduce one new food at a time.
I talked about this last week but here's what this looks like.
You take one serving of a food that you want to trial.
Say, for example, you want to try gluten.
You're going to eat a piece of toast for breakfast.
Maybe you would eat another serving at lunch and then you're going to stop and you're not
going to eat that food at all again for three to four more days.
During that time, you're going to use your food tracking tool to note down what you ate
and your symptoms, and how your stool is affected as well as any other symptoms.
Then you can kind of look back and see what's happening.
The three to four days is because sometimes certain kinds of food sensitivities can cause
a delayed reaction.
If you muddy that picture up by just continuing to eat all the things that you had taken out,
you won't know which one's causing the symptom flare.
Did you see an effect from the food that you tried?
If you think you did, you can try it again, test your theory again and see.
If you didn't, then you can move on to trialing the next food.
If you did see a reaction, it's probably best to keep that food out of your diet for the
next little while, while you try and sort out the other issues that are going on.
Step Four is to repeat this process until you've made your way through the entire list
of foods that you have removed and want to test.
By the end of this process, you should have a very clear list of the foods that are okay
and the foods that are aggravating your systems that you need to back off from for a while.
A word of caution about some of the specialty diets that remove a lot of foods.
This is a common mistake I see sometimes people making where they actually take one basic
elimination diet and then they pile all these other ones on top of it.
If you have a ton of food sensitivities that span a lot of categories, you want to start
looking deeper right away into some of the possible root causes which can have to do
with gut dysbiosis and other causes.
The reason for this is, we don't want to remove too many healthy foods.
I've seen people get down to three foods they can eat; rice, and chicken, and one other
food, and that's just no way to live.
You're going to set yourself up for some pretty profound nutrient deficiencies and your body's
not going to be able to do the healing it needs to do.
This is why it's really important to methodically and carefully work through this process and
only remove the foods that you really see some kind of verifiable reaction to.
Now that you're eating a nonreactive diet for your unique body, you can turn your attention
to deeper underlying factors and investigate those.
I have three free options for you to work a little deeper with me.
If you need to talk to someone who can investigate and troubleshoot your situation, I want to
invite you to schedule a free 30 minute assessment session with me.
I offer these free over on my website.
You can head over there to confluencenutrition.com/contact and schedule your free 30 minute assessment
session with me.
In that session, I try and help you figure out where you're at, where you need to go
next, and if I can't help you I will do my best to refer you to a practitioner or other
resource that can help you.
An elimination diet is only one piece of the larger puzzle to solve your chronic symptoms.
I've mapped out the road to feeling better and the roadmap to recovery.
You can grab your free copy of Roadmap to Recovery by heading to confluencenutrition.com/roadmap,
I've left that link for you below.
I also have a private Facebook group called Hope for Healing Chronic Illness where you
can ask questions of me and our community so come check us out.
If you liked this video, please let me know by liking below and subscribe and share it
with your fellow digestively challenged friends or family.
Comment below with helpful if this video helped you.
See you next time.