I almost invariably recommend a patient with a high score from the inventory of symptoms start by trying to identify any food allergies and intolerances. If you have not yet looked at the inventory of symptoms, do so first and see how you score.
This is not to say that everything is a food allergy. But diet adjustments are a great place to start because there is usually some kind of beneficial result and they are relatively easy to do. If you can feel much better just avoiding, say, milk or wheat, that is far easier than battling against multiple environmental shocks and stressors. The reason is simple if you understand the overload principle: avoiding one stressor, especially if it is an important one, may free your body defenses up enough so that it can cope with the rest, without your help!
Even if you feel no better after eliminating certain foods, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have allergies, but it may mean that you have simultaneous non-food or, as we term them, environmental allergies. We’ll explore how to identify food allergies and intolerances in our upcoming blog posts.
Even that may not be the whole story. You may have concomitant vitamin and mineral deficiencies, hormone disorders and disturbed bowel bacteria, but more of that in later posts.
Let’s look at the symptoms suggesting food allergy:
- Bloating and flatulence
- Food binges
- Food cravings
- Overweight, underweight or wildly fluctuating weight (gain a few pounds in a day)
- Symptoms actually come on while eating
- Symptoms after food (falling asleep, chills, sudden rapid heartbeat)
- Feeling unwell without food (food addiction)
- Feeling tired, crabby or very lethargic on waking (usually due to addiction maladaptation)
The last may seem strange: most everybody wakes up feeling bad don’t they? True, but as I revealed in my first book of food allergies, that’s because almost everyone is suffering the addiction effects of allergy (THE FOOD ALLERGY PLAN, Unwins, London, 1985 and CRCS, Reno, 1985).
Think about this: by the time we wake in the morning, we may not have eaten for 10- 14 hours; that’s more than enough time to set up withdrawal symptoms. With breakfast, we get our first “fix” of wheat, sugar, caffeine, or whatever and the symptoms start to clear right away. You don’t believe me? Wait until you have followed the instructions in our upcoming posts and you’ll see the truth of what I say. Even the most incorrigible morning-dummo gets a pleasant surprise.
In our next blog post, I will discuss the secret of food allergy test dieting.
Connect with us: Facebook – Twitter – LinkedIn – Google+ and take a look at our videos!