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So now you have a much clearer idea of what works for your system and what doesn’t.
Where do you go from here?
This is the last for a four part series that shines a light on your old and established dietary habits.
I refer to this last phase as the Maintenance stage.
More than likely, your system received a clear slate when we did the Elimination Diet in Part 2.
Reintroduction in Part 3 helped you establish more precisely and meaningfully how your body responds to certain foods.
Now, it’s up to you to figure out how to make feeling good, at least with regards to the food you select, sustainable.
With the new knowledge you’ve gained from Your Own Experiment, you now know what foods your body reacts to, which you could use more of, should you less of, and/or avoid completely.
Using the Brown Rice Diet as a foundation, distribute the frequency of these foods, as appropriate over a 3, 5 or 7 day outline so that you create a customized rotation diet for yourself. This means that you are not eating the same thing everyday and getting a good variety of foods that are well tolerated by your system. This is a useful and practical structure that makes grocery shopping and meal planning much more efficient.
Put it on your fridge and keep a copy in your wallet or handheld device so that you’ll have a running grocery list for when you are out so you can ensure that you get the essentials to maintain a good working structure for your diet and nutrition.
Having this actually liberates you to have more room for surprises, spontaneity and to be flexible in certain situations because you know that you have a plan to get healthy and on track ready and available to you. And in those situations that you can’t or choose not to stay on your maintenance phase guidelines (probably 15% of the time?) that you have a means of recovering quickly.
Getting to this stage requires some effort but the payoff is having a truly customized and tailored meal plan that is uniquely relevant to you.
How has your attitude and approach to food and your own diet changed from when you started this Experiment?
October 8, 2010
If you’ve gotten to this part of the series, you’ve done the hardest part really…and hopefully are feeling pretty good—shiny and new.
This is the third of a four part series on getting real with your diet and nutrition.
Part 1 helped to establish a baseline.
Part 2 was the Elimination stage.
and Part 3 is the Reintroduction phase. The most interesting and rewarding section because you actually get to experience what is happening when you introduce certain foods back into your diet.
After doing the Elimination diet for a little over a week, ideally you are feeling differently than when you started. Clearer. Lighter.
Remember this feeling. Take notes if necessary. This is what we’re going to measure everything else against for a little while.
At this stage, you’ll be systematically reintroducing foods over a period of 2-4 weeks, the duration depending on the number of foods that you’ll be assessing. Here’s a list: Pt 3 Reintroduction. This provides you an inventory of foods that are categorized from the least likely to cause sensitivity reactions (at the top) to more likely (at the bottom).
Start at the top of the list. You don’t have to test everything on the list, and feel free to evaluate more items according to the general progression of categories provided (ie, introduce a nut that is not listed when you get down to the nuts/seeds section etc…).
After you select a food, take about a serving and a half for breakfast or lunch on day 1.
Then monitor how you feel physically, mentally and emotionally over the next two days.
Two days of assessing the food is necessary because with food there are generally two types of reactions—immediate and delayed type. With some foods you’ll know immediately, within seconds, minutes or within the hour when something doesn’t work for you. By contrast, other foods may effect you quite slowly and you’ll find that your energy levels, sleep, mood, digestion, or other symptoms are feeling off balance a day or two later; it’s best just to wait to make sure.
You are keeping the rest of your diet the same and continuing with the Elimination/Brown Rice Diet as outlined in Part 2.
Though, when you begin to discover foods that are fine for you as you reintroduce them, you can go ahead and add them to your diet.
Continue charting your progress on how you feel and any interesting findings and symptoms as you work your way down the list. This is the fun and interesting part.
What did you find as you re-introduced certain foods into your diet?
October 7, 2010
In this second of four parts of the Diet Lab Series, I am helping you run a controlled experiment on your own diet and nutrition.
After establishing a baseline and getting a better sense of what you’re eating everyday in Part 1 (it’s a little startling, ain’t it?), and hopefully gaining some awareness about how you feel, the next step is to contrast that by making some significant changes to your daily intake.
This is the Elimination section.
And it is crucial.
If you continue eating the same things everyday, it will be impossible to discern clearly how certain foods make you feel.
So…
To start experimenting, you’ll want to take out the things that you eat most often. For most North Americans, this includes wheat, dairy, sugar, alcohol, caffeine, processed and refined foods and red meat.
Depending on how many and how much of these foods are in your diet, you may even want to do a Pre-Elimination period for a week or more, where you begin to reduce the intake of these items in preparation of the full-on Elimination Diet.
In either case, you’re probably wondering what the heck you’re going to eat instead.
If you were being monitored by a professional, any number of alternate diets could be suggested. However, for most reading this, the safest and easiest to implement is the 7-10 Day Brown Rice Macrobiotic Diet. Get the handout: The 7 Day Brown Rice Pg1. This is well advised for a number of reasons: 1) it doesn’t include any of the common North American type foods mentioned above, so your system can have a break from these items, 2) still provides a very nutritious, well balanced, filling and, dare I say—rather tasty—alternative to said items, 3) includes foods that are traditionally the least likely to cause sensitivity and/or allergic type responses in people.
From there, it is as straight forward as it sounds:
1) Use brown rice (organic long grain is my favorite), veggies (lightly steamed or stir fried), and for those who don’t have concerns with organic chicken or fish, these can be used a few times a week along with vegetarian protein sources.
2) For breakfast, I advise people to use brown rice or some form of wheat free cereal or toast, with some fruit, and enjoy the brown rice, veggies and protein for lunch and/or dinner.
Variations of the above are fine as long as the main list of foods to exclude are adhered to.
3) Simple seasonings like lemon, sea salt, olive oil, tamari (wheat free soy sauce) are fine.
4) Include at least 6 × 8-10oz glasses of water a day—keeping things moving is crucial.
5) Although fruits and vegetables are fine for most people, when there are sensitivity reactions they tend to be with fruits: bananas and oranges and vegetables: the nightshade family – tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants, peppers. If you suspect that you might be sensitive to these, or tend to eat these on a regular basis it’s a good idea to exclude them during this phase.
6) If there are any other foods you are suspicious of, the rule of thumb here is when in doubt, leave it out—it’s 7-10 days, you’ll live, really—and afterwards, you can reintroduce it in Part 3 and see what happens.
7) If the Elimination diet is interrupted by an event, special occasion, travel or inadvertent oversight, my suggestion is to simply continue on once you are able and tack on a few extra days at the end to make up for those missed day(s).
And although this part can be seen as boring, the payoff typically comes around 3-5 days after it starts (when the common initial detox symptoms like headaches, fatigue, an increase in the number of bowel movements etc…begin to dissipate). This is when when you start feeling more vital, mentally clear and emotionally composed.
In fact, some people like it so much they don’t want to come off of it.
But no people, that is not the point.
Food is to nourish the body and is to be enjoyed by the soul, and the purpose of this exercise is to gain awareness and appreciation for the effect that food has on us so that more conscious choices can be made.
But I don’t want you to take my word for it. I want you to try it and see how you feel.
You may find that when you do re-introduce your old familiar foods and beverages in Step 3, that your old stomach cramps/headaches/rashes/fatigue/mental fogginess/and miscellaneous other nagging symptom re-emerge.
Armed with this new information, you’ll then you get to decide.
After having experienced the cause-effect of introducing the food under fairly controlled conditions, will you choose to eat this, or forego?
But I won’t get ahead of myself. This particular stage is about the elimination of the most common trigger foods. When you’re doing this, take some time to notice the effect on your body, and mind and mood.
For many, the Elimination diet is a great kick start to establishing new habits, including eating more regularly and actually cooking real food for yourself again. It can also serve as the reset button for a lot of bad habits and the occasional seasonal food transgressions. Most powerfully, it serves as a clean slate for you to gain clarity on the connection between what you eat and how you feel.
How did you feel when you did the Elimination Diet?
October 6, 2010
Are you in a rut with your diet and nutrition?
Do you have a few tried and true favorites in your repertoire and call it a day?
Are you ready to shake it up?
If you want to get real about what you’re eating and really figure out if it is working for you, there are a few options.
You could get some blood or EDS (electrodermal screening) testing done. Which gets you a lot of data quickly, but can be expensive and the results aren’t always useful or meaningful.
It can be impressive—often it’s a list of hundreds of foods with an indication of your level of sensitivity. But for me and my clients, we’re not always sure how to apply all that. Some of the foods you may never even heard of, but if something is flagged, what does that really mean? Do you avoid? Eliminate? Only on special occasions? Twice a week?
The more obvious issue to me is that it doesn’t indicate how I am actually going to feel when I take that food. I still don’t know if that food is going to work for me. Will I get a rash? Hives? Grow hair in places I don’t want? The testing could be a good guideline and starting point—especially if you’re suspecting something that may not be an obvious trigger—but state of the art in this area is pretty old school—the good old Elimination and Challenge.
This is where you get to design your own experiment. This is where you can actually systematically determine what foods your system reacts and responds to and what happens when you do.
Is it more work than usual? Require more effort and attention? Absolutely.
But so worth it.
You get to get conscious about your food. Dare I say, empowered about your food. You get to figure out how you feel with and without it, and if and how well (or not) it actually works for you.
In the next series of four posts, I am going to lead you through some of the simple steps and intricacies of the process.
To Get Started: In the meantime, start to notice your diet now and begin to ask yourself how you feel at key points in the day—before, during, after meals, on waking, mid-afternoon and before bed. Here’s a pdf: Food Diary (7 days) if you want a chart, though you can easily make your own.
Set the baseline. Take a few days and—without changing anything—start to write down what you eat. The trick with this is the detachment/brutal honesty. Nobody needs to see this but you. But it’s a good reality check so you can be more aware of what’s happening now, so you can see the changes more clearly when you start your own experiment.
Let me know what you notice.
October 5, 2010
Today is this site’s birthday.
Happy Birthday.
It has been a special day. I saw who I consider my primary yoga teacher today. After many years of doing other forms of yoga and cultivating my home practice. I was at the studio and he was there, even though he’s often away on a retreat or something. He just came up to me and said, “hey”.
For me, it was deeply meaningful.
He appears in my life at pivotal moments. When I am about to make some big life change. Maybe he’s there to metaphysically steady the boat, to cosmically give me a wink, or just because. All I know is that nearly burst into tears right there—in a good way—so I felt like it was a good thing whatever it was.
This site is a big deal for me. It’s about sharing myself in a whole new way. And as it turns out, it has become increasingly obviously that I have a lot to say—who knew?
I am nervous, I am excited, and I feel like I am right where I am supposed to be.
Thanks for coming along for the ride.
October 4, 2010
