The purpose of the elimination diet is to ask your body questions about the foods it has to cope with, and give it a chance to tell you which ones make it ill. In order to hear the answers, you need a period of ‘silence’ – that is, a period with no symptoms at all. This is why you must exclude all foods that are likely to be causing problems at the outset. Eliminating different foods one by one rarely works because most people are sensitive to more than one food: they must all be eliminated at once for the symptoms to disappear – to create the ‘silence’ which you need. (The main exception to this rule concerns very small children, who are eating a limited number of foods anyway, and are unlikely to be sensitive to a great many of them. See pp213-8 for details of investigating food problems in babies and toddlers.)
All elimination diets fall into two parts. First you avoid any food that might be causing trouble and see if the symptoms clear up – we will call this the exclusion phase. If the symptoms do disappear, then foods are reintroduced, one at a time, to discover which ones produce the symptoms. This is referred to here as the reintroduction phase.
The elimination diet sounds simple enough, although in practice there can be pitfalls and the results are not always clear-cut. This chapter has been carefully planned to help you avoid as many of those pitfalls as possible, and to give you the clearest possible answers with the least amount of change in your diet. It is very important that you work through it carefully. You should read the whole chapter first, then re-read each section and understand it thoroughly before you begin.
Do not be put off by the constant references to things going wrong. Only a minority of people will encounter problems such as these, but when they do arise, extra advice is needed – which is why the possible pitfalls seem to loom very large in this chapter.
There is no point whatever in doing an elimination diet half-heartedly – it simply won’t work. You cannot have a day off it in the middle, unlike a weight-reducing or health’ diet – it is a diagnostic diet, not a treatment in itself. If you stop for a day – or even for one meal – you will not get a clear result.
It is also a mistake to rush into it because things are more likely to go wrong. You may feel impatient to be well again, but try to think ahead. Imagine how you might feel in six months time, if you are.only partially better, or little improved, because the elimination diet has not worked out properly. If you had taken it more slowly you might have been fully recovered, and even if it had taken an extra few months, this would have been thoroughly worthwhile because it could mean many years of really good health in the future. Doing the diet again is often very difficult. The process itself can change you – in particular, you may acquire new sensitivities to the foods eaten during the exclusion phase, simply because they are eaten more regularly and in greater amounts than before. If you are already sensitive to a wide range of foods, acquiring new sensitivities may prevent you from having a ‘second go’ at the elimination diet – you need a basic set of foods to which you have no reaction, in order for the diet to work. This is an extreme situation, of course, but it is worth bearing in mind that it can happen. The important thing is to get the elimination diet right first time.
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