The foods you eat fuel your performance.
When you eat the right foods for you, you’ll look, feel and perform better.
But when you eat foods that aren’t ideal for you, the opposite happens.
Garbage In equals Garbage Out.
To complicate things, we are highly individual and various food sensitivities, intolerances and allergies mean that the right foods for one person can be the wrong person for another.
Unfortunately, a simple at-home blood test for food sensitivites haven’t been proven reliable with research.
The top allergy and immunology experts recommend Elimination Deits as the gold standard for identifying food sensitivities.
This post will provide the basic framework for how to do an elimination diet.
Food Sensitivity / Intolerance vs. Food Allergy
A food sensitivity or food intolerance occurs when a person has difficulty digesting a specific food. To keep things simple, this post will use the term food sensitivity to cover both sensitivities and intolerances. Sensitivites often result in inflammation and / or indigestion.
Food allergies involve the immune system which mistakenly recognizes the triggering food as a threat and releases chemicals that can result in hives, swelling, itching and respiratory problems.
The most common food sensitivities are gluten, dairy, eggs, highly-processed foods, alcohol, caffeine and soy.
Elimination diets work much like a science experiment and can help you identify food sensitivities.
If you’re suffering from brain fog, headaches, inflammation, or indigestion, it’s possible you have a food sensitivity and may want to consider an elimination diet to help identify the cause.
Types of Elimination Diets
There are several different types of elimination diets such as Whole Foods, Single Category, Eliminating 4 Foods, the Full Elimination Diet, and the FODMAP eliminatin diet.
We’re big fans of keeping things simple and prefer the Precision Nutrition Elimination Diet since this offers a middle ground between removing a single food and the more complicated approaches.
Here is a link to the Precision Nutrition Elimination Diet Toolkit which will provide you with resources to help you successfully execute on the strategy outlined in the rest of this post.
Phase One – The Prep Phase
This is the step that people interested in an elimination diet tend to skip. Think of this step as the initial research that will help guide your science project.
You’ll want to keep a food journal for a minimum of one week. Ideally you’ll track what you ate, but how you feel (such as tired, bloated, or achy) in the hours after each meal.
The goal here is to narrow down the list of foods that might be causing you issues.
Suppose you have eggs with cheese for breakfast which leaves you feeling bloated. However, you don’t experience bloating when you eat cheese on a hamburger.
A food journal can help you identify an issue with eggs that you may have mistakenly believed cheese to be the issue.
Phase Two – The Removal Phase
Once you’ve compiled at least a week’s worth of data in your food journal, it’s time to remove specific foods from your diet for at least three weeks.
You can use the resources in the Precision Nutrition Elimination Diet Toolkit to help identify the foods you should eliminate such as nightshade vegetables, corn, soy products, milk and dairy products, caffeine, alcohol, spices, condiments and sweeteners.
If the above list of foods feels like everything you consume, the toolkit also provides a list of recommended foods to continue eating.
Hopefully, you’ll begin to notice how much better you feel and it’s possible to experience more energy, improved sleep and clearer skin.
Phase Three – The Reintroduction Phase
In this phase, you’ll want to strategically reintroduce the foods you’ve eliminated so you can test them to identify your reactions.
When you reintroduce a given food, you’ll want to note your energy levels, sleep duration and quality, digestion and bathroom habits.
To keep things simple, we recommend reintroducing foods one at a time and no more than two foods in a week. Once you reintroduce a food, you’ll discontinue eating this for the next 48 hours to observe.
If you feel great and don’t experience any symptoms, you’re free to reintroduce another food.
If you do experience symptoms, you should wait until the symptoms subside before moving on to another food.
Here’s the schedule we recommend for most people:
Monday: Reintroduce a food
Tuesday and Wednesday: Stop eating the reintroduced food and monitor symptoms
Thursday: Reintroduce another food
Friday, Saturday & Sunday: Stop eating the reintroduced food and monitor symptoms
Depending on the number of foods you’ve removed and would like to reintroduce, you’ll continue to follow this schedule until you’ve addressed each food.
Conclusion
If you read this entire post, you’ve likely recognized two things.
One, elimination diets aren’t exactly easy and require a bit of patience.
Two, this approach can be extremely beneficial in helping you identify the foods that best fuel your performance.
If you decide to try an Elimination Diet, we hope this post serves as a valuable resource to helping you feel your best.
