If you want to get rid of your annoying food intolerance symptoms, the first step is to see a registered dietitian and/or try a food intolerance test. Food intolerance tests can tell you which foods may be causing you distress. While these results are helpful, they may not be 100% accurate when applied to your real-life intolerance symptoms.
Per your test results, you may think that you have to avoid all these foods for the rest of your life. Luckily, that’s not the case. You actually may be able to reintroduce some of these foods back into the diet.
If you want a direct method to eliminating your food intolerance symptoms, we’ve got the information for you. Use our guide below to help relieve your food intolerance symptoms.
The Easy Elimination Diet: How to Recover from a Food Intolerance
It’s important to remember that in order to relieve yourself of food intolerance symptoms, it is imperative that you make dietary changes. Easier said than done. No change in diet means no change in symptoms! Food intolerance symptoms will continue as long as you continue to consume problematic foods.
If you’re fed up with distressful symptoms like fatigue, bloating, constipation, headache, runny nose and skin irritation, take the leap and start our easy elimination diet. This diet is used to identify and assess food intolerances.
- Step 1: Identify foods to which you are intolerant. This is done via a food intolerance test or by working with a registered dietitian.
- Step 2: Eliminate all possibly problematic foods. If you got your results from a food intolerance test, eliminate the foods that are problematic according to your results. If you are working with a dietitian, they will tell you which foods to eliminate. Remember to eliminate all of the problematic foods.
- Step 3: Elimination phase. Set a date where you will eliminate all of the potentially distressing food and stick to it. Continue on this elimination diet for 4 to 8 weeks. This elimination phase gives the body a “clean slate.” Record how your food intolerance symptoms change during this time frame. You may see drastic improvements in your symptoms since all of the distressing foods have been removed.
- Step 4: Reintroduction phase. Relief of your symptoms in the previous phase only tells you that you eliminated problematic foods from the diet, but it doesn’t tell you what those foods are. To discover which specific foods you are intolerant to, you will need to slowly reintroduce these foods back into the diet. Choose 1 problematic food to add back into the diet. Record the date it was added and associated symptoms from that addition. Consume the food a few times within 1 to 2 weeks and monitor the symptoms. If the food gives you symptoms, it should be avoided in the future. If the food does not give you symptoms, move on to the next food.
- Step 5: Progression through the reintroduction phase. Continue to reintroduce other problematic foods back into the diet. Make sure to only add 1 food in at a time and consume that food for 1 to 2 weeks before assessing. After each 1 to 2-week cycle is complete and the food is assessed, move on to the next food. Depending on how many foods were eliminated initially, the reintroduction phase could take several weeks or months.
- Step 6: Complete the elimination diet. Once you have reintroduced all of the foods, you will have lots of written data detailing which foods gave you symptoms and which did not. If a food gave you symptoms, try to avoid that food in the future. Food that did not give you symptoms can be consumed in the diet.
An elimination diet needs strict adherence initially in order to be effective. Otherwise, you may have to start over and retry. Contact a registered dietitian to help you through the process.
