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I’m a married 31 year-old who has been diagnosed with fibromylagia for 12 years. I am on a quest to raise awareness and help others by sharing information and staying positive. Read more
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Felicia Fibro - Life with fibromyalgia, EMPOWERED!

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Elimination Diets

Over the past few months that I have been writing about my elimination diet I have received a lot of questions. I hope that this post will address most of these questions and provide further information. My Rheumatologist suggested that I do an elimination diet to see if I had any food sensitivities that could be making by fibromyalgia or IBS worse. These types of diet, sometimes referred to as exclusion diets, can also be done to check for food allergies. After meeting with the Registered Dietitian (RD) who lead my elimination diet, she also wondered if I might have sensitivities that have been contributing to my body having such a hard time loosing weight.

To first part of the elimination diet, detox, is the roughest, as it requires a very strict diet. The purpose is to detox your body from any ingredient that your body may be reacting to. For 2-4 weeks (for me it was 3.5 weeks) you remove foods such as all grains, all dairy, all soy, chicken, beef, pork, citrus fruits, dried fruits, peanuts, corn, nightshade plants (pepper, tomatoes, eggplants & white potatoes), yeast, most condiments, sugars, sweeteners, chocolate and other processed foods. This leaves you eating mostly seafood, lamb, buffalo, turkey, vegetables (except nightshades & corn), fruits (except citrus), seeds, nuts (except peanuts) and beans (except soy). Some people may experience withdrawal symptoms from foods they commonly eat. Luckily, that did not happen to me. Before and after detox I was asked to fill out a form with all sorts of symptoms listed, to see if there had been any areas of change.

The next part is where you start seeing if you react to particular foods. You begin doing food challenges, where a specific serving size of food is eaten three times in one day. Bodies react to some foods more quickly than others, so the amount of time you have to wait between new challenges changes. How long this part takes depends on how much your body reacts, because you have to wait until your body is feeling good before moving to a new challenge. Generally, it takes 3-4 weeks. For each food challenge you fill out a symptom form, like the one done before and after detox. The reactions you test for are wheat, gluten (rye), oats (oatmeal), yeast (bread), beef, pork, chicken, casein (sharp cheddar cheese), lactose (milk), peanuts, nightshade plants, corn, citrus (grapefruit/orange), egg, soy (tofu/edamame), chocolate, sugar, sulfites (dried fruit), caffeine, alcohol. If you complete a specific food challenge and had no negative reactions, you may begin eating that food again. Based on how you respond to all the challenges, your RD will figure out all the specifics about what your body is sensitive to and make recommendations on how you could move forward.

Stay tuned for Fibro Feelings – Elimination Diet for more about my personal experience with this process.

Have you ever done an elimination diet?

food face on plate

Food should make us happy!*

*Image Credit: from www.flickr.com by sun dazed



Comments

Comment from Kathy/FibroDAZE
Time August 29, 2011 at 2:12 pm

My last elimination diet was in 2008. On the advice of a naturopath, I was to eliminate dairy and wheat (or gluten, I forget which now) for 3 weeks to see if it helped my IBS or Fibro symptoms. It helped neither, simply made me more hungry!

[Reply]

Felicia Fibro Reply:

I was really hungry through this whole process too, but that was partially from me getting sick of eating the same foods so often and not loving the foods I was allowed. Thanks for sharing your results!

[Reply]

Comment from karen
Time August 30, 2011 at 7:26 am

Man this sounds BRUTAL! Unfortunately, it also sounds like something I need to do. I have been having lots of GI problems and I think an elimination diet will help with that as well as the fibro. I’ll reluctantly talk with my doc about it next time I go…*sigh* Sometimes the things that are good for us are painful, but ultimately they are for the good.
karen recently posted: FIBRO FRIDAY! – You’re getting VERY sleepy…….

[Reply]

Felicia Fibro Reply:

It was fairly brutal at times, which is why my next post about this will be explaining what it was like for me to do the elimination diet. I’d hate for anybody to go into this thinking it isn’t hard.

Let me know what your doctor says. Even my GI doc had previously mentioned going off gluten/wheat for 3 weeks to see if it helped my IBS.

[Reply]

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