Well this is a mighty fine and incredibly challenging way to discover foods that work for your body and which ones don’t. When my MD/ND told I have done nearly everything possible to lower my blood pressure and get off the meds, he said there was still one thing I could try: The Elimination Diet by Tom Malterre and Alissa Segersten.
Five months ago when he told me about it I thought he was crazy. “You want me to what?” First you go on a two day fast, then you suffer through 21 days of giving up commonly allergenic foods like:
Citrus
Dairy
Nuts
Gluten
Soy
Shell fish
Corn
Wheat
Nightshade vegetables
and scariest of all . . . SUGAR
From here on out it’s all about non-allergenic vegetables.
Next, you re-introduce them into your diet, one by one, and monitor how your body reacts. “There could be some foods that raise your blood pressure,” he told me. It’s entirely possible that an eggplant may get my numbers up. Go figure! It took me a while to buy into it, but now here I am. I joined the Elimination Diet Support Group, which is making a huge difference in my enthusiasm for this huge change in our eating habits. Tom and Alissa are incredibly knowledgable about food, diet and nutrition.
So as I sit here on the last day of our liquid diet / fast with a rumbling belly and a screaming headache seeping through my brain, I’m both excited and terrified of what I might discover over the next several weeks. But thankfully my loving husband is right there with me, on the same diet to try to discover what foods are messing with his cholesterol. I’m a lucky gal.