The Elimination Diet

What is the elimination diet?

This diet is called Elimination Diet because it eliminates all foods that may be the cause of any of your symptoms, including food allergies and sensitivities or foods that may cause any digestive disturbances. For example, you may just have a mild food sensitivity that has never been diagnosed but it’s enough to wreck your digestive system.

The underlying principle used to develop this diet defends that instead of allowing your body to use energy to generate toxins and then having to eliminate them, it would be better to divert this energy to repairing our metabolism if needed or simply to maintain high energy and strength. In other words, this diet allows your body to re-tune its metabolism and improves the way it deals with any unwanted substances, such as food allergens of toxins.

If you’re going to attempt this diet you should know that, although the first few days may seem very harsh, once that initial fear is overcome, you will experience a multitude of benefits. The first phase is harder the more it deviates from your normal diet and it can be very difficult as your body adjusts to the different foods. Dizziness, headaches and disturbed sleep have all been reported and even alterations in the digestive system in more extreme cases. These symptoms are to be expected and should die out within a few days. Eventually, patients report higher energy levels and mental stimulation, and even a decrease in some painful symptoms, such as muscle pain. The best piece of advice is to try to eat a balanced diet from the allowed list of foods, and although there is no need to count calories, common sense will tell you not to over-eat.

Why this diet?

When you hear about a new diet, you probably think of the latest fad diet to lose weight quickly. This diet, however, has not been designed to lose weight, but to overall improve your health and well-being. It’s been shown that undiagnosed food sensitivities and allergies may be a major contributing factor to a variety of conditions, including:

Fatigue	Anxiety	Depression
Insomnia	food cravings	obesity
colds and other infections	chronic nasal congestion and postnasal drip	fluid in the ears
Meniere’s syndrome	irritable bowel syndrome	constipation
diarrhoea	abdominal pain	ulcerative colitis
Crohn’s disease	gallbladder disease	high blood pressure
arrhythmia	angina	acne
eczema	psoriasis	canker sores
hives	muscle aches	osteoarthritis
rheumatoid arthritis	migraines and other headaches	numbness
asthma	frequent urination	teeth grinding
bedwetting	infantile colic

If you experience any of the above conditions on a regular basis and, after many tests, your doctor hasn’t been able to completely explain your condition; your diet may be at blame.

Of course, these conditions may have various different causes, but your doctor may be interested in exploring the possibility of food sensitivities. Furthermore, it’s is universally accepted that a varied diet is much more likely to be balanced, in contrast to a diet restricted to a few different foods, which has a much higher probability of creating food sensitivities.

History

This diet was initially developed in 1926 by Dr Albert Rowe, who eventually published his work in 1941 in a book entitled “Elimination diets and the patient’s allergies”. In 1978, Australian doctors continued this work, and developed what is known today as the elimination diet.