The Limited Elimination Diet

The least strict approach is the Limited Elimination Diet, in which you eliminate just a few of the most commonly reactive foods, plus any food that you eat virtually every day.

The three most commonly reactive foods are wheat, milk, and sugar.

Wheat and milk are notoriously reactive foods, for two apparent reasons. One reason is that both of these foods were introduced into the human diet at a relatively late stage of our evolution. People didn’t eat wheat and milk until after the advent of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago. During the 2.6 million years prior to that, as the human body gradually evolved, people lived mostly on wild fruits, vegetables, nuts, and game meat, like rabbit and woolly mammoth. According to many nutritional researchers, humans are best suited to a diet that excludes the relatively new food sources of cultivated grains and dairy products. This non-grain, non-dairy diet is sometimes called the Paleolithic diet, or hunter-gatherer diet.

The other reason that wheat and milk are hard to digest may be because we eat them too often and exhaust our body’s ability to digest them adequately. As I’ve mentioned, the more often you eat any one food, the more difficult it can be to digest that food.

Whatever the reason, an extraordinary number of people are reactive to wheat or milk or both. Most of my food reaction patients are reactive to at least one of them.

Sugar is another reactive food. It causes far fewer classic food allergies than either wheat or milk, but it is still often very disruptive to the metabolism. It wreaks havoc with insulin levels and often triggers hypoglycemia. Therefore, I usually recommend that people avoid it as much as possible, especially during the first weeks of their diets.

When you eliminate these commonly reactive foods, you also have to eliminate the many processed foods that contain them. If you’re reactive to milk, you should also eliminate cheese, butter, cream, ice cream, and yogurt. You should also check food labels for casein, lactalbumin, and whey, and avoid them, too.

If you’re reactive to milk, you might also be reactive to eggs, because both eggs and milk contain similar proteins. The ovalbumin protein in eggs is quite similar to the lactalbumin protein in milk.

If you’re reactive to wheat, you should check food labels for wheat germ, bran, couscous, durum, graham flour, farina, and semolina, and avoid them. Furthermore, if you’re reactive to wheat, you might also be reactive to barley, rye, or oats, because these grains all contain a highly reactive substance called gluten. Gluten may be the substance in wheat that causes your reaction. Gluten is the cohesive, high-protein, sticky element — the glue that helps hold grain together.

If you avoid all of these forms of wheat and milk, it will mean passing up most processed foods. For a complete list of the common processed foods that contain wheat and milk, see the food lists in Part Three. As you’ll note, milk is hidden in a great many foods, including doughnuts, biscuits, waffles, and souffles. Wheat is also hidden in many processed foods, such as creamed soups, bologna, sweets and chocolate bars, and gravies.

Besides wheat, milk, and sugar, you should also avoid any food you eat virtually every day, You should especially avoid foods you eat several times each day. For most people, this means avoiding one or more of the Sensitive Seven most commonly reactive foods: wheat, dairy, sugar, eggs, corn, soya, and peanuts. People often eat one or more of these foods many times each day in various forms. For example, even if you don’t eat whole corn on a given day, you might still consume corn syrup or corn oil in a dozen different foods, including ketchup, margarine, salad dressing, sweets and chocolate, jam, grape juice, bread, fizzy drinks, and peanut butter.

Therefore, it’s important for you to become an ardent reader of labels. You cannot gain power over food if you don’t know what you’re eating.

Not all of the foods that people eat every day, however, are among the Sensitive Seven foods. A great many people have their own unique, frequently eaten foods. One of my patients with severe food reactions, for example, recently received the results of her food reaction test from a medical lab and discovered that the only food she was highly reactive to was mustard. Most people don’t eat mustard very often, don’t really love it, and don’t react to it. This patient, however, loved mustard and ate it several times each day, on everything from French fries to pizza.

It was hard for her to quit eating mustard, but once she began to overcome her food reaction symptoms — weight gain and nightly insomnia — it became much easier, because the sacrifice was well worth the multiple rewards. Also, once she had the chemicals from mustard out of her system, she lost her intense craving for it.

If you use the Limited Elimination Diet, you should avoid your suspected reactive foods for at least one week. Then eat one of them and wait at least a day for symptoms to appear. If no symptoms appear, you are probably not reactive to that food. If you suspect that you are not reactive, you may begin to eat the food again, but you should remain alert for reactions.

When you’re monitoring yourself for reactions, don’t take antihistamines or any other allergy medications. They can mask symptoms and ruin the accuracy of your elimination diet and food challenges.

As you monitor yourself for symptoms, remember that a wide range of symptoms may occur — anything from bloating and swelling to headaches, congestion, itchiness and hives, and insomnia.

Some patients keep a simple diary of what they eat and how they react physically and mentally to foods. This basic list can be a very helpful tool.

The Limited Elimination Diet is relatively simple, but it can sometimes be misleading, because it leaves so many foods in the diet. To make it work, you have to be a good detective. For example, if you eliminate just sugar, wheat, and dairy but are actually reactive to only eggs and oats, you might spend several extra weeks doing medical detective work. As you search for the real culprits, you may become confused by the recurring symptoms that you suffer from eating eggs and oats.

Therefore, it’s often actually easier to eliminate a wider range of foods. This will increase your chances of eliminating the foods you react to and will ultimately make your detective work simpler.

If you are reluctant to eliminate a wider variety of foods because you’re afraid of going hungry, remember that you can eat practically as much of your remaining foods as you want. This phase of the diet is not the time to worry about losing adipose tissue. It’s the time to determine your reactive foods. After you’ve figured them out, then you can focus your efforts on fat loss. But if you fail to accurately identify your reactive foods, you may never lose fat.

Remember, too, that during the first few days of your elimination diet, you’ll probably lose a significant amount of false fat. Be satisfied with that slimming process, and don’t push yourself to lower your caloric intake markedly.

Don’t forget that you will be on this eating plan for the long haul, and that you’ll need to find ways to stay comfortable and full. Don’t go hungry. This is not a crash diet. It’s an eating strategy. If you’re patient and smart, you can use this strategy to gain a power over food that will last for the rest of your life.

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