The Elimination Diet
What is the elimination diet?
This diet is called Elimination Diet because it eliminates all foods that may be the cause of any of your symptoms, including food allergies and sensitivities or foods that may cause any digestive disturbances. For example, you may just have a mild food sensitivity that has never been diagnosed but it’s enough to wreck your digestive system.
The underlying principle used to develop this diet
defends that instead of allowing your body to use energy to generate
toxins and then having to eliminate them, it would be better to divert
this energy to repairing our metabolism if needed or simply to maintain
high energy and strength. In other words, this diet allows your body to
re-tune its metabolism and improves the way it deals with any unwanted
substances, such as food allergens of toxins.
If you’re going to attempt this diet you should know
that, although the first few days may seem very harsh, once that initial
fear is overcome, you will experience a multitude of benefits. The
first phase is harder the more it deviates from your normal diet and it
can be very difficult as your body adjusts to the different foods.
Dizziness, headaches and disturbed sleep have all been reported and even
alterations in the digestive system in more extreme cases. These
symptoms are to be expected and should die out within a few days.
Eventually, patients report higher energy levels and mental stimulation,
and even a decrease in some painful symptoms, such as muscle pain.
The best piece of advice is to try to eat a balanced diet from the
allowed list of foods, and although there is no need to count calories,
common sense will tell you not to over-eat.
Why this diet?
When you hear about a new diet, you probably think of
the latest fad diet to lose weight quickly. This diet, however, has not
been designed to lose weight, but to overall improve your health and
well-being. It’s been shown that undiagnosed food sensitivities and
allergies may be a major contributing factor to a variety of conditions,
including:
Fatigue | Anxiety | Depression |
Insomnia | food cravings | obesity |
colds and other infections | chronic nasal congestion and postnasal drip | fluid in the ears |
Meniere’s syndrome | irritable bowel syndrome | constipation |
diarrhoea | abdominal pain | ulcerative colitis |
Crohn’s disease | gallbladder disease | high blood pressure |
arrhythmia | angina | acne |
eczema | psoriasis | canker sores |
hives | muscle aches | osteoarthritis |
rheumatoid arthritis | migraines and other headaches | numbness |
asthma | frequent urination | teeth grinding |
bedwetting | infantile colic |
If you experience any of the above conditions on a
regular basis and, after many tests, your doctor hasn’t been able to
completely explain your condition; your diet may be at blame.
Of course, these conditions may have various
different causes, but your doctor may be interested in exploring the
possibility of food sensitivities. Furthermore, it’s is
universally accepted that a varied diet is much more likely to be
balanced, in contrast to a diet restricted to a few different foods,
which has a much higher probability of creating food sensitivities.
History
This diet was initially developed in 1926 by Dr
Albert Rowe, who eventually published his work in 1941 in a book
entitled “Elimination diets and the patient’s allergies”. In 1978,
Australian doctors continued this work, and developed what is known
today as the elimination diet.
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