What is it?

The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried—Stephen McCranie

Elimination diets are not meant to go on forever, though they might seem to do so. The whole point of the diet is trying to figure out what is causing the problem you are experiencing. Whether that be inflammation, allergies, or just an upset stomach, the diet does a remarkably good job in helping you getting rid of the offending food, if you can figure it out. That’s the kicker, isolating the problem is a whole lot harder than you’d think.

As we entered the diet, M and I were exposed to a whole new world of food. Things that had previously been occasional forays were becoming mainstay foods. Things like coconut milk, cassava flour, cooking starches, and meats were replacing our mainstays of lentils, black beans, tofu, and dairy.

Initially this was exciting. M and I had been vegetarian for the last four years, so the addition of meat opened a whole new venue of cuisine. Venison, grass-fed beef, pasture-raised poultry, and wild caught fish all entered our diet. Eating meat opened new possibilities, and more questions.

Dinner went something like this:

M:       This is good.

Me:     Yeah, it has like 25 ingredients.

M:       Tastes good. What’s in it?

Me:     Yeah, it has venison, cumin, coriander, mace, cinnamon, star anise…

For the most part these new ingredients were great replacements. They often substituted for one of the key ingredients in the recipe—starches for gluten and eggs in baking, cassava flour for regular flour, and cinnamon to replace spicy peppers. They complemented the ingredients that we were missing, in some cases giving us nutrients we were lacking like B12 and extra protein. Everything should have been great. But they could also cause problems all on their own. My new favorite saying is ‘Just because it is on the list, doesn’t mean you should eat it.’

When I started using these ingredients, I naively accepted that these were all tried and tested foods, which in a way they were, but just not tried and tested on us. So, it should have dawned on me that I should proceed with caution. But heedless (or headless your choice) I plowed into the list. Immediately starting to incorporate everything I could think of to replicate the familiar or create something totally new.

Bad idea. A typical night during the protocol:

Me:     Your stomach upset?

M:       Not really.

Me:     Oh.

M:       Maybe a little bit?

Me:     Oh.

M:       What do you think it was?

Me:     Well, it could have been the coconut milk, but it didn’t bother me yesterday.

M:       Do you think it was the broccoli?

Me:     Wasn’t the broccoli. Had to be the carrots.

This went on for weeks. One of us would react to something and it would be a game of 20 questions trying to figure it out. But recently we have stopped. I don’t know why we stopped; it was a fun game. Maybe we got bored, or we just stopped caring. Things were working. M was getting better. Why keep questioning that?

The thing is that I’m not willing to remove anything else. We had omitted so many of our favorite foods, it seemed unfair that our small pleasures should be taken away as well.

It just wasn’t fair! developed into a Mantra.

Me:     It just isn’t fair!

M:       You know you can’t eat a full bag,

Me:     I’m not going to give up dates. I’ll just eat two-a-day. They are my substitute for M&Ms.

M:       Gives me the look.

Me:     It just isn’t fair.

M:       The look continues.

Me:     Fine, but I’m not going to give up dried figs.

Slowly, our simple pleasures slipped away. Sometimes it changed everything, like me with dried fruit. The bloating stopped, I usually felt better, and then I would slip and eat 20 in a day. Of course, on the same day I would make something new and rather than knowing what it was, “It must be the dates!”

My point is that we had no idea what we are doing when we started. We dove into this with just enough knowledge to make everything work, all the while putting on a brave face to each other and the world that we were ‘experts’.

We were so far away from being experts in the beginning, and even now we are just touching the surface. But the worse thing is that by about week 3, I was giving advice to people I hardly knew.

Meet someone in the grocery store:

Them: Can you move your cart?

Me:     Oh yeah, doing great. I’m doing this amazing elimination diet; you should totally try it.

Them: Moving away from me with a strange look on their face.

Me:     It will change your life.

Go to the butcher:

Me:     What do you add to your burger patties?

B:        Ummm, ground venison.

Me:     Well, I’m on this great…

B:        That will be £15.30 please.

Sometime in the last week, I realized I had become that annoying person…high maintenance and preachy. (M is laughing at me. Silently, but I can hear her even as far away as London where she is now.) Ridiculous, I know. Yet somewhere in the last 15 weeks I have changed. I’d gone from slightly resenting the protocol to becoming a true believer.   

Of course, we still haven’t isolated all the things that disrupt our ‘amazing diet’. I still probably blame the wrong thing, but if it doesn’t increase M’s inflammation, these things are nuisances as opposed to off-limits. Now it is a choice, an emotional one, but a choice all the same.

Thanks for reading! Please feel free to share this with anyone you think will benefit. Also (due to algorithm considerations) hit like if you did like it. I’d also like to reiterate that this isn’t to be considered medical advice, this is just our individual experience. Some people respond to the diet, some people respond to the medication, and some people respond to both. The idea is that it is YOUR healing journey, I’m just offering up our experiences on our healing journey in the hopes that if you are suffering from anything similar, you’ll take a little bit of inspiration from M as I do on a daily basis.