How To Start An Elimination Diet -

My first reaction to the word diet is that it is temporary and doesn’t work. However, when it comes to finding out what foods are causing your fibromyalgia symptoms to worsen, then an elimination diet is just what you need. It isn’t easy, but most things that require work aren’t. In 2019 I spent most of the year on and off trying to accomplish the goal of finding the culprits of my ailments. So, I feel ready now to fully explain to you how to start an elimination diet.

What is an elimination diet?

An elimination diet is where you “eliminate” certain foods from your diet for 4 weeks. Then you spend the next 2 to 4 weeks re-introducing them back in one at a time. There are many ways you can do this, but I found following The Whole30 Diet to really help. Plus my Integrative Doctor recommended it as well. So what foods do I need to eliminate you might be wondering?

No Added Sugar Of Any Kind: This one can be tricky because sugar goes by so many names. You will have to read labels and maybe even familiarize yourself with all the sugar names. Friends, remember this includes things like syrup, honey and stevia.

No Alcohol Of Any Kind: This one wasn’t hard for me because I don’t drink. But if you enjoy a glass of beer or wine you might find this a challenge. Sadly, this does include using wine in cooking meals.

No Grains: This will be another area where you will have to read labels. This also means no grain that includes gluten-free pseudo items as well as quinoa and the like.

No Eating Legumes: Legumes is such a wide area so just to be clear this includes all the beans, including peanuts. Sadly friends no eating peanut butter. Another item that you might not think of that is included here is soy. I have found that soy hides in the label. So make sure to read them (no soybean oil or soy lecithin)! Good news – you can eat green beans, snow peas and sugar snap peas. I think the reason is the pod they are in changes them.

No Dairy: This is exactly how it sounds. If it comes from an animal of any kind and is dairy it is off limits. There are two items you can use as a substitute: clarified butter and/or ghee. I found these useful to cook with and add atop foods.

No Carrageenan, MSG or Added Sulfites: These are basically your processed items, but always best to read the labels. I can tell you right off the bat that MSG is in all canned soups so that will be out. My biggest piece of advice here is to just try to eat real, whole foods the majority of the time. It really makes it so much easier to be compliant.

How Do I Re-introduce The Food?

The Whole30 book recommends that you either do a fast track or a slow roll re-introduction. I’m going to give you my advice and what I found to be best. Short version of The Whole30 is that the fast track way you stay on the diet, but on day 31 you start re-introducing one group at a time every 4 days. The Slow Roll process is you stay on Whole30 and introduce items when you have a craving for them. I don’t recommend this as it is more helpful to pinpoint the problem foods right away.

My recommendation is to take one food category per week. An example of this is to re-introduce legumes on Monday and Thursday staying Whole30 compliant in every other way the whole week. Document what you eat and how much and all symptoms you have during that week. Do this week by week until you have gone through all the food categories.

Don’t miss my article on The Surprise I Didn’t Expect From The Whole30 Diet

Tools To Help You Succeed

Having spent a year doing this, I now know what I would do differently. If you only follow one piece of advice let it be the one of documenting the whole experience! This wasn’t easy for me and I fell off a couple times and had to start over to day 1 (yes, if you mess up at any stage you need to go back to day 1)!

Here are my tools in list form:

Document! Some ways to do that can be apps like MyFitnessPal or journals (which I prefer). This year I purchased The Flog Journal to document my journey. I recommend it because of the valuable information and reminders of what to keep track of such as sleep and stool quality etc.

Plan! Whether you sit down and plan out all your meals for the whole month or week by week, do NOT skip this part. Plan everything from meals to snacks. I would go as far as to plan what time of day you are going to eat these items as well. The best way to do this is with a planner that I use for everything from school, blogging, advocating and self-care. I like having my whole life right there in one place. It reminds me of everything I know I will forget.

Get Family Support! I didn’t have family support this last year and boy did that make it even harder. If you can get your family to go along with as much of this as possible it will really be setting yourself up for success. Try explaining to them how this is going to make you feel better and hopefully have more energy to spend on them.

Food Allergy Testing! I recently was gifted a deluxe allergy testing from 5 Strands Affordable Testing. Even though it was a gift from them my opinion is my own regarding the service. It was an easy process. You just pull some hairs from the back of your neck. Then you mail it in and in a few weeks you get a report sent to you via email. This is going to be a game changer for me as now I have more areas to pinpoint. I will go into more detail of this experience in another post. To try it for yourself use my discount code “fibromom10” at checkout for 10% off.

Elimination Diet Support

Having support during this process is key. That is why I have started a Facebook group to help people through this process. Not only that, we stick around for the lifestyle change that will come after. Yes- remember it is a diet, but it is leading you to a healthier lifestyle that you can implement to feel better. This group is new and still in process, but now is a great time to get on board. How To Make Healthy Eating A Lifestyle And Improve Your Health.