Your Own Experiment: The Food Lab Series
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.
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