Dina’s Food Journal: Allergy Elimination Diet

The last time I came to you I was eating cookie dough. Quite a bit of it. With chocolate chips and peanut butter M&Ms in it. What am I eating this time around? Brown rice. With a few pieces of mango, ¼ cup of blueberries, and ¼ of an apple. I know. Crazy, crazy stuff.

Even crazier? This has been my breakfast pretty much every day for the last week. I hope you’re tempted to ask, “why?” If a friend of mine was eating brown rice for breakfast I know I would… just before I staged an intervention that included Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch.

Aimee Gallo, another one Athleta’s 2010 Featured Athletes and the founder of Vibrance Nutrition, is helping me get a handle on my relationship with food. She’s not helping me drop 10 pounds so I look even better in my new Waimea suit (how much do you love that the top can be worn two ways??), but rather helping me be healthy: Why is it I often find myself eating out of boredom? Why do I feel like if I don’t workout for a day I’ll gain five pounds? Is it possible some of the foods I’m eating are hurting my health?

Before Aimee took me under her wing, I discovered eggs were my kryptonite. My body’s relationship with food is different from most women’s because I have Multiple Sclerosis. There are numerous theories about inflammatory foods and allergens worsening the symptoms of the disease. But inflammatory foods aren’t just bad for people with MS or similar diseases. People without MS but for whom eggs, or gluten, or dairy, or caffeine are inflammatory might not find themselves experiencing a horrible loss of balance and extreme muscle weakness when they consume them, but might find themselves overly gassy, lethargic, in a bad mood, or any number of other symptoms.

Within a few weeks of abandoning my breakfast of two hard-boiled eggs, my MS symptoms began to disappear. I’m now pretty much back to normal, or as close as I can be.

Because I had prior success identifying (via a food sensitivity blood test, which is only about 50-percent accurate) one of my inflammatory foods, Aimee thought it’d be good to check and see if there were any other foods that were hurting me. Enter – drum roll, please – the allergy elimination diet.

I’m well into the elimination phase and am slowly starting to reintroduce the foods I haven’t been eating for the last one to two weeks.

And like I said — and I’m just repeating Aimee’s words here — this isn’t only for people with MS. More of us than not have food sensitivities. Maybe that crash in energy you experience in the afternoon isn’t because you’ve been at work for five hours, but because of that giant baguette you ate for lunch. Or maybe you feel fat because you’re bloated from the yogurt you ate at breakfast, which doesn’t agree with your body.

So the allergy elimination diet. Before you call it crazy, I’m proof you can survive 7 to 10 days without all the stuff I’m about to list. I won’t lie, some days were difficult — especially days when I had long bike rides and my usual fuel of Snickers, GU, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups weren’t allowed — but I survived.

The list of what not to eat for 7-10 days:

• Caffeine
• Wheat
• Rye
• Barley
• Oats
• Spelt
• Dairy in all forms: cheese, yogurt, milk, whey, butter
• Eggs
• Nightshades: tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers, tobacco, eggplant
• Corn
• Soy and soy based products (soy sauce, tempeh, soy protein, tofu, soymilk)
• Peanuts
• Beef
• Crustaceans
• Citrus (see exemptions below)
• Refined Sugars
• Processed oils (vegetable oils, refined oils, restaurant oils)
• Alcohol
• Vinegar

Really, don’t freak out. If I can do it, anyone can.

On day 7, 8, 9 or 10, reintroduce one — and only one! — of the above items. Lots. Like eat it three times that day. The next day, pull it back out and really start paying attention to your body — everything from how your stomach feels to your moods and energy levels. If you don’t feel anything or notice anything by the afternoon of the second day after you started eating that food again, most likely your body  likes it just fine and you’re good to keep eating and enjoying it. Now it’s time to reintroduce food #2. Do the whole thing again. Eat it three times the day you reintroduce it and then pull it back out for 1.5 days, paying attention to your body.

Mostly through the process, I’ve only found one food my body has (indisputably) objected to: beef. It sucks. I might have been a vegetarian for nearly 10 years during high school, college and young adulthood, but now I love a great steak or burger (assuming the beef is grass fed) much more than the next girl. In fact, just as I was supposed to start the elimination diet, I got a writing assignment to pen a piece about the best burgers in the state of Wyoming. The first thing I do when I pull into any town is seek out its best burger. No longer.

How did my body tell me beef wasn’t what it wanted? Um, very literally. Parts of it began speaking — sometimes so loudly as to scare my two cats — almost immediately after I consumed beef. Truthfully, I can’t see myself giving up beef for the rest of my life (especially since my husband and I bought half of a grass-fed cow from a local ranch in early May). I’ll eat much less of it now though and know, when I do, to not have any plans to go out into public afterwards.

If you — like me — are looking at the list of what you’re supposed to cut out for a week and wondering what you can eat, here’s Aimee’s  list of what you can eat. It’s much longer:

• Brown Rice
• Rice based pasta (read the label!) Tinkyada brand of gluten-free rice pasta rocks.
• Quinoa
• Millet
• Amaranth
• Buckwheat groats (aka kasha)
• Acceptable protein sources: chicken, turkey, rabbit, lamb, duck, salmon, halibut – choose those which are less frequently used in the diet (i.e. – halibut over chicken). Choose wild-caught and organic sources of animal foods only.
• Vegetarian sources of protein – lentils and any bean but soy.
• Consume only raw nuts and seeds – avoid any nut that you consume those more than three times a week. (i.e. – almonds)
• Sweeteners – Stevia, agave syrup and 100% maple syrup only.
• Seaweeds
• Coconut Milk (unsweetened)
• Fruit – no added sugars!
• Extra virgin olive, coconut, flax, and fish oils
• Vegetables: Yams/sweet potatoes, seasonal spring veggies (favor these for your cleanse), asparagus, watercress, celery, spinach, onion, zucchini, carrots, chard, butternut squash, kale, Jerusalem artichoke, broccoli*, cauliflower*

*Avoid these if you have thyroid concerns

Consume no foods after dinner; ideally dinner will be eaten as close to 6pm as possible to allow maximum time for the body to detoxify.

If you find yourself hungry in the evening have a cup of broth or tea and a wedge of lemon. Many find the taste of lemon to dull the evening appetite.

Dining out? Try Vietnamese or Thai food. Make sure they keep the meal soy free. I’m not usually in favor of dishonesty, but if you tell them you are allergic to soy they will make sure it stays out of your food. You can also find a good meal at American restaurants. Choose steamed fish or chicken, NO SAUCE, and steamed veggies. If you want a salad, use lemon juice as a dressing.

DINA MISHEV is a randonee skier, cyclist and hiker who, in February 2009, set the world record for the most vertical feet skied uphill by a woman in 24 hours. She is a category-3 road cyclist who consistently places top 5 in the longest single-day road race in the country… {more »}