How to Do an Elimination Diet for Discovering Food Intolerances

Elimination diets have become a fairly common practice for healthcare providers, particularly those with a lean toward holistic and natural medicine. Rather than solving every tummy ache and sore back with a pill, it turns out that some changes in what we eat can do a great deal for our well-being. Who’d have guessed?

As with most things health-related, consulting a physician/expert is recommended when doing an elimination diet, but it doesn’t hurt anyone to better understand what it is, why it works, and how to do it. It’s a very simple concept and one that has the potential to truly make a difference in a person’s life.

Best of all, what other diet only requires a few weeks to get real results? Of course, we aren’t talking about a weight-loss diet, but we are talking about one that can provide insights that can improve your health long-term.

So, what does it all mean?

What Is an Elimination Diet?

Source: Wall Street Journal/Youtube

An elimination diet is used to discover if a person has any food intolerances. What the elimination diet does is helps an eater explore how different foods affect him/her/them so that it’s possible to identify if any foods cause unwanted reactions, i.e. intolerances.

A food allergy affects the immune system and tiny amounts of certain foods can trigger it, perhaps to life-threatening degrees. On the other hand, food intolerance is not immune-related. Certain foods can cause discomfort, such as bloating or asthma attacks, but the reactions aren’t nearly as severe.

With an intolerance, it may be possible that a little of the troublesome food is okay, or it could be possible that there are ways to counteract the negative effects. The trick is knowing which foods need special consideration.

Why Choose to Do an Elimination Diet?

About one-fifth of the population has some form of food intolerance. It can cause stomach pain, excess gas, diarrhea, IBS, migraines, and other issues. An elimination diet is a simple, natural way of identifying foods that may cause such discomfort. In other words, if the above maladies are common experiences for you, an elimination diet may be a good choice without having to be probed and prodded in search of answers.

The difficult part of the elimination diet is that it is an undertaking that requires a very disciplined approach. It also presents a short-term risk of nutrient deficiencies due to heavily reduced food options. For this reason, including professional guidance throughout the process is a safer means of doing it.

The benefits are that it can potentially help with ADHD, gastrointestinal issues, autoimmune conditions, and migraines. For those suffering from these ailments, it’s likely a route worth taking.

How to Do an Elimination Diet?

Source: Mark Cooper, MD/Youtube

Doing an elimination diet requires stripping down what we eat and ridding our daily intake of common trigger foods. We have to do this long enough for symptoms to go away. If they do, then we can suspect something we were eating was problematic. This phase can take about a month.

We slowly introduce the potential trigger foods back into our diet one category at a time and monitor how our body reacts. If we feel great, then great. If we feel uncomfortable, then we might have identified a troublesome food. Doctors usually ask that dieters keep a journal accounting for what’s been eaten and what the result was.

• Foods that are typically approved for plant-based eating while on an elimination diet include berries and citrus. Vegetables can vary from leafy greens to cruciferous veggies to root vegetables. For starches, it is more or less everything without wheat: oats, rice, quinoa, barley, amaranth, etc. Fats should be trimmed to extra virgin olive oil, avocado, and flax oils. Seeds are usually okay, but nuts are not.
• The main trigger foods to be aware of are wheat, dairy, tree nuts, soy, corn, sugar, and stuff with caffeine. Nightshade vegetables—peppers, tomatoes, eggplants—are out for a while, as are summer squash, artichokes, asparagus, onions, and garlic. Beans and lentils will be cut for examination. But, remember, this is only temporary for most trigger foods. The idea is to find which ones might be a problem.

ABC: Always Be Cautious

Fad diets are tempting and can seem to provide all the answers to our eating woes. Elimination diets are meant to be long-term plans but illuminating experiments. For those with a history of eating issues, the diets themselves can be triggering. So, be cautious, be healthy, and be kind to yourself.

Related Content:

• People With Diabetes Can Live Longer on Lower Carb, Plant-Based Diet, New Study Finds
• Dangers of Dieting and Calorie Restriction
• How 37-Year-Old Catherine Perez Switches Careers, Got Healthy and Became a Vegan Dietitian
• ‘Keto-like’ Diet May Increase Risk of Heart Disease, According to New Research
• TikTok Tip: The 3 Keys to a Healing Diet [Video]

Easy Ways to Help the Planet:

• Eat Less Meat: Download Food Monster, the largest plant-based Recipe app on the App Store, to help reduce your environmental footprint, save animals and get healthy. You can also buy a hard or soft copy of our favorite vegan cookbooks.
• Reduce Your Fast Fashion Footprint: Take initiative by standing up against fast fashion Pollution and supporting sustainable and circular brands like Tiny Rescue that raise awareness of important issues through recycled zero-waste clothing that is designed to be returned and remade repeatedly.
• Support Independent Media: Being publicly funded gives us a greater chance to continue providing high-quality content. Please consider supporting us by donating!
• Sign a Petition: Your voice matters! Help turn petitions into victories by signing the latest list of must-sign petitions to help people, animals, and the planet.
• Stay Informed: Keep up with the latest news and important stories involving animals, the environment, sustainable living, food, health, and human interest topics by subscribing to our newsletter!
• Do What You Can: Reduce waste, plant trees, eat local, travel responsibly, reuse stuff, say no to single-use plastics, recycle, vote smart, switch to cold water laundry, divest from fossil fuels, save water, shop wisely, Donate if you can, grow your food, volunteer, conserve energy, compost, and don’t forget about the microplastics and microbeads lurking in common household and personal care products!