The Results of our Elimination Diet

This is a follow on from the post on why we decided to do an Elimination Diet 🙂

Being able to eat chicken was amazing, it was weird biting into this white meat and it having a different taste to the fish. If three meals of fish a day is hard work, three meals of chicken was a walk in the park. I was really starting to miss not having peanut butter with breakfast though.  We were both incredibly pleased that after the full two days of eating chicken for each meal neither of us had any side effects.

The next thing we added back was Whey Protein Powder, this meant the b/f didn’t have to eat fish or chicken at morning or afternoon tea any more to fill his protein needs for the day (yep he was essentially having 5 meals a day of the white fish, not surprised he was sick of it!). A very practical choice to add back in, and a tasty one at that. A chocolate shake (made with water) did taste pretty good after not having anything very sweet over the past week (and we don’t have a lot of sweet stuff anyway, only naturally sweetened or Whey).  Thankfully neither of us had any reactions to this either, it was one of the suspect items for the b/f given he has been taking it for a long time and we had read that sometimes intolerances can build up when you have too much of a food over time.

Next we debated over whether or not we should go for eggs or potato, as sick of rice as we were eggs made more practical sense because then one meal a day could be rice free (breakfast, chicken, eggs and vegetables) and we could use kumara instead of potato for when we really felt like we couldn’t face rice. I was actually really enjoying having the rice and chicken to be honest, but did wish I could squirt some lime juice on the rice. The b/f was hanging out for potato! Eggs haven’t appeared to have had any negative effects on us either which is another bonus since we eat eggs pretty much everyday!

Potato was next on the agenda so we introduced them, once again with no noticeable effects – for me, although admittedly I had fallen for Kumara (Sweet Potato) and didn’t actually eat a lot of potato. The BF went nuts on the potato as he was over rice and felt a few ill effects – something for us to keep in mind. We were winning the elimination diet game so far! Although we still haven’t got to the two items which I suspect are the ones we may have issues with – Dairy and Oats.

Next I thought it would be a good idea to get nuts back in to the equation as I was getting sick of having fruit for morning and afternoon tea and not feeling satisfied (I did also go for carrot sticks for a few days which was a nice change). At least with nuts I can make the easiest truffles ever using nuts and dates and have them as a snack. It also meant we got our teaspoon of peanut butter back with breakfast, hurrah! We also decided here that we could have protein bars back since they are mostly whey and nuts and I’ve had no issues with them so far either.

Dairy – I’m not a huge Dairy eater to be honest, never really have been. I don’t like the taste of milk nor am I particularly fond of cheese. The one thing I do like is having milk with my cup of tea or yoghurt on my oats. Neither of us had any noticeable issues with Dairy – winning!

Tea / Coffee – Oh boy I was hanging out for a nice milky cup of tea about as much as I was hanging out for chicken after the 5^th straight day of eating fish. I never even used to drink hot drinks which makes this one a bit surprising for me. Over the past couple of years I have started drinking milky tea and having at least one a day and sometimes 2-3 of them.

Beef – you guessed it – no issues!

Oats – This is one of the things I was a bit wary of, however neither of us had any major issues. I do notice I am more alert in the afternoons on mornings where we have a low carb breakfast but other than that there are no problems!

Flour – We had a couple days near the end of this elimination diet where we had a little bit of bread with no major issues (we did feel a little tired but we had been travelling that day so nothing conclusive or enough to make us stop eating bread on the occasional occurrences when we do have it!) which leaves me relatively confident that neither of us have a gluten intolerance, hurrah!

Anything else not listed above are items we generally don’t eat much of anyway, ie. Sugar so we didn’t specifically add these back in, rather we will take not next time we do eat it and see how we feel. I will do an updated blog post if we find something that does affect us.

Have you ever tried an elimination diet? Is there anything you don’t eat as it affects you?