The Elimination Diet

If you’ve been following us on social media, you know we did an elimination diet for the month of March.

Elimination diets are an excellent tool to utilize if you feel like something in your diet is causing some sort of ailment like inflammation, fatigue, anxiety, poor skin, etc… Many of us have food sensitivities whether or not they realize it. We often hear people complain about certain things, but it’s not common to point the blame at the food we’re eating.

We can also utilize elimination diets as a form of reset, which is what our goal was. After the holidays and the stresses of winter, COVID, and other situations we found we had veered off our typical way of eating. While we didn’t revert back to eating sugar and carbs; we were consuming way too many keto treats and snacking all the time.

We were experiencing increased anxiety/depression, weight gain, sleep quality diminished, and our energy levels were down. Rachael’s cycle had become irregular and her monthly migraines were starting to return.

We did our elimination diet for the month of March and we both feel like we’re back on track. The extra weight is coming off, our moods, sleep, and energy levels have dramatically improved.

SUCCESS!

Now here’s how to do an elimination diet

An elimination diet is just 2 parts:

1. The elimination of foods
2. The reintroduction

The safest and most effective elimination diet is to do a carnivore diet.

Going carnivore versus other elimination diets ensures that you still get all the nutrients your body needs. As we’ve mentioned before, all of our essential nutrients come from animals.

1. Choose an amount of time that you want to do the elimination for. The ideal amount of time is 4 weeks; but a shorter amount of time could be beneficial as well. We wouldn’t recommend anything less than 21 days though to make sure there’s enough time to get whatever is bothering you out of your system.
2. Be diligent and stick to the plan – this is key to the success of an elimination diet. It’s 100% in, no dabbling. (Remember – this is temporary! Go all in for the best results.)
3. Track before and after
   1. Track how you feel – why are you doing this?
   2. Take your measurements

Great! You’ve completed your elimination diet and hopefully you’re feeling pretty good in your body, whatever was ailing you before should be relieved! If not, then you may need to keep going on the elimination diet and give your body some more time for healing.

Now onto the next step, Reintroduction…

This step is equally as important as the first. It’s easy to fall into the trap that once the elimination is over with we can go back to the way we were eating previously.

Giving in to this temptation will revert back all the improvements and work that you did during the elimination diet.

What we have to do, is slowly reintroduce food back in.

1. Choose 1 food to reintroduce at a time for at least 3 days and eat a lot of this food.
   1. Choose the least toxic and most nutrient dense foods to introduce first
2. Track any changes in your body
   1. Rashes
   2. Mood changes
   3. Bloating
   4. Change in bowel movement
   5. Headaches
   6. Fatigue
   7. Poor sleep
   8. Etc…
3. If you don’t experience any issues after 3 days then you can safely assume that food is safe and move on to the next food item. If you do experience issues in the first day its recommended to try again and see if the issue you’re experiencing happens again since it could be just a shock to the system as you haven’t had anything like it for long period of time. If you experience it again and again, your body is letting you know that it’s not a fan of it and its better to remove it from your lifestyle.

Yes, this will take time! It’s not a quick process and one you may find that you have to do multiple times throughout your life because our bodies are constantly changing!

Is this the only way to do an elimination diet? Not at all, but if you’re at a loss as to why you feel the way you do and you’ve tried everything to figure it out and can’t. This is an effective way to get you results! This is a challenging way to do this, but as said, it’s also the most effective and the safest (we don’t want any nutritional deficiencies).

If you want help in this process or have questions email us at hello@rewindyournutrition.com and we can get you in action.