Elimination Diet Wrap-Up

I neglected to do a timely overview of the results of my elimination diet experience when I finished it, mainly because life got in the way. But overall I loved doing it because it gave my diet a much-needed injection of clean living with vegetables and protein sources. I only ended up losing a few pounds as a side effect, but I'll take it! :-)

About the results. I was expecting a gluten sensitivity. But I could not detect one. My naturopath thinks that if I still have thyroid antibodies, I might try to go gluten-free again for a while. But that's going to require time and testing. I'm up to the challenge though!

I am not surprised that I have a little sensitivity to chili peppers. I think we all probably do to some extent. It's kind of like a necessary evil living in Mexico. It's one that will have to be consumed in moderation though.

The big surprise from this diet was that I discovered that I have a sensitivity to eggs and potatoes. Both give me gastrointestinal symptoms, but I'll spare you the details. I even tried challenging them a few times afterwards, but it's really true. No more french fries, mashed potatoes, and omelets. I almost feel like I should be crying as a type this, because these were two totally cherished components of my regular diet (I even raise egg-laying chickens!) and I was NOT expecting to be sensitive to them. But I was also not expecting to feel as indifferent as I do about letting those two foods go. I still have small amounts from time to time as they are often ingredients in commonly-served meals (pancakes, for example...). But gone will be the days of having these as my main course. Oh well!

I was also happy that as a result of having done this, I have more empathy for folks who are gluten-free, and I have something to contribute when people talk to me about food issues they have or if they too are considering trying the diet. The coolest thing perhaps was being able to examine my own self without having to go to a lab for tests.

To that end, here is the wrap-up of several go-to recipes I made while I was on the total elimination diet, as well as a few from when I started to challenge. This is by no means a comprehensive list, and I hope to keep coming back and adding to it as time permits. Happy Food Trails!

During the total elimination phase

• Black bean soup
• Raw food chocolate pudding (can be adapted as a superfood smoothie)
• SPRING ROLLS
• Baked figs with cinnamon 
• Red Quinoa and Lentil Pilaf
• Homemade Sesame Rice Crackers
• Homemade Hummus

During initial Challenge Phase (these recipes are not all 100% elimination diet, because they include one or more challenged ingredients):

• Coconut Tapioca Pudding (maple syrup)
• Crunchy Cumin-Chicken-Celery Tacos with Tahini Dressing (corn), a Nicole original ;-)
• Spinach-Walnut Pesto (vinegar or lime) also by yours truly.

Spinach-Walnut Pesto

This is a totally vegan, elimination diet-friendly recipe that is a spin-off of the traditional pesto recipe. I already experiment with alternative pesto recipes in my cookbook The Bajio's Bounty by adding cilantro in with the basil. But this pesto recipe goes even further and only has 8 simple ingredients:

3-4 cups fresh baby spinach
1/2 c. olive oil
1/3 c. walnuts
1 clove raw garlic
1/8- 1/4 c. water
1/2 tsp. vinegar, or 1/2 squeezed lime
black pepper to taste
salt to taste (1/8-1/4 tsp)

It's very easy to make with a blender. You simply place the walnuts, garlic, and olive oil in the blender and blend on medium power until smooth. Then you add 2 of the cups of spinach and 1/8 a cup of water and continue to blend until smooth. How much more spinach, water, salt and pepper depends on your tastebuds and how much of a workhorse your blender is. Once the pesto is blending smooth, you simply open the lid and keep adding a few spinach leaves at a time until it gets too thick to blend well, at that point you can add a bit more water if you still have more spinach to blend. Store in a tightly-closed container and consume within 1 week or freeze.

Experiment with adding basil, cilantro, or other fresh herbs to this recipe, it can only enhance the flavor. Enjoy with pasta, french bread, or as a garnish over dishes.

Elimination Diet: Days 4-7

I DID IT! I made it one week on the elimination diet.

I wasn't sure I was going to make it...especially around Days 4 or 5. I was having a hard time, mainly because I was feeling a little bored with the options and craving sweets. So I tried mixing up meals and ingredients again (reaching further back into the fridge, looking up new recipes). I also took spirulina which helped with the sweets craving.

I can definitely say that I feel a difference. At first it felt "edgy," then it felt "clean," and now I feel like I've just plain had more vegetables in the last week than I've had in the last month. I think that's a good thing... :-) I will be curious to see if any weight was lost in the 1st week. To be clear, this is *not* a weight-loss diet, but my doctor said almost everyone who's on it does.

For the 1-2 weeks to come, I am ready to move on to new horizons, like getting some local meat, i.e. lamb. My brother-in-law has sheep, and lamb, a meat I really like, is on my "ok" list. But as for how to get it to my plate... well that will take some investigating. I think it's a bit more than what's involved with butchering and skinning a rabbit, or taking the feathers and gizzard out of a chicken. We shall see if my quest will be fulfilled.

But in the meantime... new highlights from the last few days:

• Black bean soup
• Raw food chocolate pudding (cacao with avocado and banana)
• SPRING ROLLS... YES! By far the most exciting acquisition to the meal plan this week.
• Baked figs with cinnamon (surprisingly delicious)

Stay tuned...

21 Days to a New View of Food | The Elimination/Anti-Inflammatory Diet

From my Facebook wall this past weekend:

"I'm finally taking my naturopathic doctor's advice and going on the full elimination diet for 3 weeks to see if I have any food sensitivities. I got the allergy prick test panel >10 yrs ago and no food allergies other than soy showed up, but I did register mega allergies to pollen and a mild soy allergy. 10 years later, I still have the hayfever, and I also have IBS and reason to suspect that Hashimoto's might be causing my thyroid dysfunction. So I figured it's about time to take a closer look."

So, for the next 21 days, this is the list I'll be following:

WHAT I CAN'T EAT:

Gluten (wheat, barley spelt, rye)
Sugar (sugar/sweetener of any kind)
Dairy (cow sheep goat)
Beef, pork, chicken with skin, eggs (duck ok), shellfish
Peanuts, peanut oil, peanut butter
Canola oil, cottonseed, hydrogenated oils
Juices (veggie or fruit) and oranges & grapefruit
Corn & corn products
Soy & soy products (soy sauce, tofu, tempe, edamame)
Alcohol, coffee, and black teas
Nightshade veggies (eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes)
Processed foods and food additives (flavorings, colorings, what you can’t pronounce)
Allergens or irritants

WHAT I **CAN** EAT:

Organic Vegetables- all colors and lots of them (fresh or frozen)
Organic Fruits (fresh or frozen, NOT dried)
Legumes
Rice, Quinoa, buckwheat, Gluten free oats
Meat hormone free, grass fed, wild: skinless chicken, Lean lamb
Nuts and seeds (especially walnuts and fresh ground flaxseeds)
Fish: salmon (wild Pacific or Alaskan- Not Atlantic), halibut, sardines
Fats: olive oil, flax oil, walnut oil, avocados, coconut
Herbs and spices (especially tumeric, ginger, cumin, garlic
Tea (herbal)
Water

Also from my FB wall: "I love natural foods but am on a tight budget, get stuck in ruts, and I have 2 other people in the house to feed... so I'm looking for the easiest, cheapest, yummiest recipes with ingredients from the 'what I can eat list.' "

I'm really interested to see what will happen or what I will find out about myself as a result of going on this diet. I'm guessing it will be at least a little hard to eat many of the foods I normally eat, and maybe a little harder when I'm at parties or when my husband and daughter are eating something I'm "off of." But it will probably be good to have to mix up my food routines and eat more of food I don't eat as often. Later on, when I introduce foods back in, I might discover some foods I'm sensitive too.

I will be trying to post daily with any new recipes I am creating or trying. Wish me luck and post recipes if you know of any good ones... they need to adhere to the list I'm working with, at least for the first 21 days. In the meantime, I look forward to a new view of the food I eat.

Discoveries around "The Diet Cure"

I posted a while back about a fascinating book I read, "The Diet Cure" by Julia Ross. Ever since I read this book, I've made a number of discoveries about my health.
Inspired by the book, I was testing out several specific food groups to see if I had any adverse reactions to them. I did a week without refined sugar and white flour products, a week without any gluten products at all, and a week without dairy. At the end of the weeks without the specific foods, I introduced them back into my diet gradually in order to observe if any adverse reactions such as headache, weight gain, bloating, digestive complaints, etc. arose.
The first thing I discovered was that sugary and white flour products did have some slight to moderate reactions for me, including headache and some bloating. I also lost several pounds after the week without them.
Then I went on to "test" for a gluten reaction by eliminating all foods containing gluten (wheat, oats, and rye). At the end of the trial gluten-free week, I was expecting (perhaps dreading) bells and whistles when I re-introduced them (in the form of whole grains) back into my diet. But to my surprise there really were no noticeable symptoms. The same happened with dairy—no problems that I could notice. I was sort of relieved because wheat and dairy are big parts of my diet and I wasn't looking forward to possibly having to eliminate them. My naturopathic doctor isn't 100% convinced of my self-testing results because I did the tests one at a time rather than all together. But for me, it's a good start. I say this because when I first heard about checking for this kind of stuff, I was very closed off to the idea of an elimination diet. In fact, I remember almost laughing at my doctor when he suggested the idea.
Now, however, the few things I discovered about my reactions to refined sugar and white flour/rice products were enough for me to start making an effort to avoid refined sugar when possible and replace white flour products with whole wheat, and white rice with brown rice, etc. I'm happy with the results, and also knowing that I'm getting more fiber into my diet.
I'm also interested in doing a week without corn, to see what happens.
Perhaps the most interesting discoveries were two things I found out about myself around the time of this self-testing. In her book, Ross suggests that once your diet is balanced in favor of proteins and vegetables, with just enough healthy carbs and fats for satiation, the pounds should begin to melt off. The caveat is that this can only happen if you're biochemically stable. And should the initial weight loss peter out (or never occur), you might need to get checked out for imbalances such as low thyroid. I noticed my weight loss occurred when I removed the refined products from my diet, but then tapered off. It didn't bug me too much because I am more in favor of exercising than dieting, but it did catch my attention.
It just so happened that I had decided to get my thyroid levels checked during my yearly checkup, around the time I had finished this elimination diet. When I went to discuss the results with my doctor, he told me I had thyroid dysfunction. I was sort of shocked because I've been getting my thyroid checked for years because both my parents have low thyroid, and I've always tested normal. But according to my doctor, it's often underdiagnosed, and in my case, although my T3 and T4 levels are normal, it's the TSH (thyroid stimulating hormone) that's too high—working harder than it ought to trying to stimulate an underactive thyroid, in his words.
There's more: he ordered a test of my cortisol levels, which apparently are also connected to thyroid function. I just found out that they came back "low," but have yet to discuss the implications of the results with my doctor. Rather than feel upset, I'm actually relieved that there may be some underlying reasons for my sluggish metabolism (and my cold extremities, and possibly even joint pain among other things). I'll have a lot to learn about how all these puzzle pieces fit together: diet, metabolism, hormonal levels, stress. But I'm up to the challenge and grateful to have found a practitioner who seems to be willing to think outside the box and find the root of the problem (finally).

A Closer Look at My Nutrition | My First Few Weeks with "The Diet Cure" by Julia Ross)

It's been an interesting "food month." Last month I read a compelling book called "The Diet Cure" by Julia Ross, MA. director of Recovery Systems in Northern California. It was so compelling that I decided to test if I had a gluten insensitivity and went off gluten for a week. Today I'm reintroducing it to "see what happens." It just happens to coincide with a visit we're getting from our very own private chef—yes, you read right: I won a raffle at a local supermarket and a private chef is coming to our home tonight to prepare food using their special cooking equipment (which they'll of course try to sell us and I'll politely decline...but it'll be fun in any case :-)

About the wheat-free week, as I said on my Facebook page when I first decided to put this book into practice, "I'm not really a "diet" person—I buck the fads in favor of common sense & nutrition. That being said, I do have some "issues" I'd love to improve: extra pounds, joint pain, and occasional depression. The book I'm currently reading has me convinced that there's more than meets the eye to 'everything in moderation.' As a result, yours truly is now investigating her body's relationship with refined sugar & wheat (among a number of other substances)."

And it's true: I'm not really a diet person. But I have struggled with being anywhere from slightly to moderately overweight for a good part of my life. And many of my relatives have suffered from obesity and obesity-related illnesses such as diabetes or low thyroid on both sides of my family. So although I'm not attracted to fad diets, or crash dieting, I am very aware of what I put into my body and am a big health advocate. Most of my friends know that I'm an amateur herbalist and swear by my Nutritional Healing book for being able to get rid of ailments, like nixing colds with Vitamin C and garlic.

So it wasn't too much of a stretch for me to be convinced by Ross that there are eight basic nutritional imbalances that individuals can have which can affect their health—both physical and mental.  She asserts that by answering a series of questionnaires you can start to detemine which imbalances might be affecting you.

What were most interesting to me were arguments that sugar and refined grain products like white flour can be addictive. Ross discusses the brain's chemical reactions to certain food substances and why we can become "addicted" to foods that are actually adverse to our health—in a very similar way as we do to substances like drugs or alcohol. The chapter about re-regulating naturally mood enhancing brain chemicals through healthy eating (NOT undereating the right foods or overeating the wrong foods) was most fascinating to me. She also went on to talk about other imbalances that often go undetected, such as thyroid imbalances or systemic yeast overgrowth, which are harder to diagnose but that plague people all the same until they undergo comprehensive testing.

In my case, I decided to first cut out extra sugar—it seemed the easiest, fastest, and most important thing to try. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be, and I think it'll still be okay to consume it in moderation, just with more awareness. Toward the end of the first week, I cut out refined grains products—white flour and white rice—also, not as hard as I expected. The reason why it wasn't so hard was because I was making sure to consume a lot of protein, vegetables, fruit, and healthy fats. Ross believes that undereating/malnutrition is more common than we think and leads to a depressed metabolism. This is a tactic I never quite understood, or at least couldn't get to work for me, but I think it's because I wasn't eating enough nutrient rich foods.

I wasn't doing this for the weight loss effect, just for the health-enhancing effect—Ross believes that gastrointestinal upset and joint pain, two things I often complain of, can be caused by certain foods. But I didn't mind when, two weeks later, I checked the scale and saw that I'd lost 5 pounds.

This next week, I go off dairy, again, "to see what happens." I've gotten a skin allergy test before for hayfever allergens, and it came up negative for most major food groups, except a slight allergy to soy. But Ross explains that some internal adverse reactions to foods go undetected by the skin tests, which is why they promote the elimination diet approach. I like this approach in that it's learning a little more about my body, and I'm only doing one food at a time, not all at once. I especially like the unexpected effect it's had on my cooking—having to go a week without bread, pasta, or crackers meant I had to obtain a few more interesting grains for my kitchen like amaranth flour and make garbanzo flour patties. I made my own mayonnaise with a fresh egg from our chickens and olive oil, great because regular mayo is made out of soybean oil (and even better for how delicious homemade mayo is!). I also made Thai food for the first time in years to go over brown rice. Any excuse to spice up the action in my kitchen is welcome around here, and if it has the pleasant side effect of losing a few kilos in the process, all the better!

I'm a little nervous about the upcoming week without cow's milk because I am quite beholden to my dairy products—yogurt, cheese, kefir, etc—I love probiotics. But I got some goat cheeses to hold me over, and if the wheat-free week was any indication that depriving yourself of one food can lead to embracing several others, then I should be excited about what the week ahead has in store.

Irony, Missed Celebrations, and Appendix Surgery

Just when I thought I was going to be happiest, celebrating, and relishing a rare opportunity for pure enjoyment, I got shot down. Not literally, but figuratively, by appendicitis.

It crept up on me unexpectedly, as I suppose it does for anyone who gets it. On Halloween night, Margo was working late, and I was still getting over what I thought was a 24-hr bug over the weekend. So we'd opted to replace going out trick-or-treating with the baby on Halloween for going out two nights later (Weds) to see the Dia de los Muertos altars downtown. I was also excited to celebrate receiving my Mexican naturalization that same day. So Margo came home early, and got himself and the baby ready, but I was still languishing on the couch.

What's wrong, he asked. I complained that my belly was so swollen, and I couldn't figure out what was going on with me. I looked up a few things online, and started to wonder if maybe I was presenting symptoms from an old Giardia infection I'd found out I had when I was 9 months pregnant. At the time, I couldn't take the medicine because of its potential danger to the baby, but since I wasn't showing symptoms, it seemed like a non-issue. Maybe it was still in my system. After the pain got worse, I finally accepted the fact that we weren't going out that night, except to get some medicine. The bumps of the road were intolerable, enough to make me wonder if it wasn't a mistake to not go to the ER. Back home, it got bad enough that I called my mother and mentioned it to a friend who knows a pediatrician, and both of them worried that it might be appendicitis.

Now worried myself, I called my gastroenterologist's clinic, the one who's seen me before for other issues (Mexico, unfortunately, has a rather unpleasant characteristic of causing plentiful GI problems). When I described it over the phone, relayed through the secretary, I was told to take a painkiller and wait until the morning. When I checked the compatability with breastfeeding, I discovered that the meds had been discontinued in the U.S and were not OK for lactation, so I toughed it out that night. There were a few intensely painful moments, but not worse than any pain I'd felt before in my life, so I was still optimistic that I'd be better by morning.

When I went in Thursday morning and the doctor checked me, he said he was pretty sure it was appendicitis, but he wanted to run tests to be sure, and put me in observation. I stayed at the clinic in a private room watching TV most of the day, and when he came in to check me again that afternoon, the clinical signs convinced him that it was appendicits. Even though appendicitis is technically a medical emergency because of the risk of rupture and infectious complications, and although my abdomen was quite swollen, the weird thing was, it didn't hurt as terribly as it had the night before but that was probably because I hadn't eaten anything in almost 24 hours. But he explained that some cases develop more gradually than others. The sign for him that clinched the diagnosis was localized pain upon pressure in my lower right abdomen, and more, severe pain upon letting go of the pressure, or Blumberg's sign, which indicated onset of peritonitis. I was in the OR less than half an hour later.

There was some initial confusion about whether I'd stay and be operated on at that clinic, or whether I'd seek surgery at the public hospital where I have free state insurance (Seguro Popular). But since I'd already waited so long and the doctor indicated it was urgent (if I went to the public hospital I'd likely have to wait again), and since it was my first surgery, which scared me, and I really wanted to be able to room in with my family (at the public clinics they separate you from your family), I decided to have it done at the clinic.

On the operating table, I got upset that it'd somehow been my fault. Hindsight is 20/20, but this view was still obscure. Even so, I wished there'd have been some way to prevent this, and felt something akin to failure. The nerves of being put under also crept in and I started to cry, blubbering that I ate well and I'd gotten this far in life without ever having been operated on, so why did this have to happen? But the assisting physician was a woman who spoke English, and she whispered, "It's going to be OK, it wasn't your fault. It could have been some seeds you ate!" At least partly, she was right—I did end up OK. As for what caused this, I may never know, and I may just have to leave that answer to the gods.

The practical moral of the story for me is that I may have to get more regular checkups (even for the rest of my family) to make sure sure we don't have any lingering or unknown infections. I also might have to trust more in the public medical facilities, for a variety of reasons, although I have an equal number of reasons why I'm still hesitant to do that.

As for getting over missing out on my celebrations and starting swim lessons, something I (with great difficulty) had recently carved out for myself (ironically, to improve my overall health) but won't be able to do until I heal, I can only chalk it up as an initiation rite of becoming a Mexican citizen. Oh yeah, and just to be safe, I better get my Day of the Dead altar up on time next year...don't want to take any more chances that I've pissed off any espiritus!