I will try to clearly delineate the steps below that we went through. This will a big commitment for you... and I mean COMMITMENT! However, I will focus here on the first ten days as that will give you a good enough picture of how we did it. If you decide to read through my first ten day layout, and then decide that you want to do it this way, you will be well on your way to finishing up on your own.

Please note that this is how we did it, and were successful. However, I have no qualifications at all. So make sure you go to the doctor to verify how you decide to do your elim. diet.

What is typed out below is mostly me, talking to myself. These are the exact things I said to myself, with some notes of hindsight included. If you talk to other people who have done an elim. diet, they may have done it very differently, so ask around.

GOAL (after the elim. diet): To NOT eat anything within four days of itself. For example, if we eat beef on Monday. We try not to eat it again until Thursday. This is the bottom line in most food sensitivity books I've read. It, kind of, falls into place as it follows an elimination diet rather naturally as you expand your food choices. This has fallen apart for us now, but we gave it the old college try for about six months and it did pay off.

Step 1 - Base Knowledge Collection

Pick up a couple of books from the library (you won't be needing them long term).

One I liked was by Dr. Doris Rapp, "Is This Your Child". It's an excellent book for everyone to read. It describes, very well, what symptoms to look for in a reaction. At first these symptoms seem to be too vague or general to pick up on. However, as you go through the process of an elim. diet, these symptoms become quite marked and not as vague as they are when you are eating things that are toxic for your body every day. I have two criticisms though. One, I do not remember it saying to isolate gluten. And two, I strongly believe that milk products should be further broken down into categories.

I also like (SCD), The Specific Carbohydrate Diet - Guide to Intestinal Health, by Elaine Gottschall. I haven't put the title in quotes because I can't remember the exact title but it is something like this. This book explains how complex molecules can really jam up your system. It has useful, basic recipes too. This is one book I would suggest buying because it's nice to fall back on. Having said that, I have yet to go out and buy a copy. I've mostly memorized most of the stuff I really like anyway. And there many websites based on this 'special' diet.

Step 2 - Choose your starting foods.

Adjust your attitude because this is going to take a long time. However, if you adjust your attitude to that of a bull, (yes, I said a 'bull') and focus on only 'this week' (the first ten days), then you can do it! You MUST DO IT RIGHT (or as right as you can) from the start or your results will not be clear or helpful (and you might have to start all over).

Do you know what is safe for you? We weren't sure at all. But you have to start somewhere. We chose chicken, cabbage, carrots, grapes, apples (peel them - I didn't and that was a big mistake - you should PEEL and SEED EVERYTHING), tomatoes (don't pick tomatoes- we had to do another elim. diet based on nightshades because of this mistake.), garlic, salt, pepper, honey and rye flour. Do not allow any grain in this first four day period! I really wish someone had told me that. We did find out in the end, obviously, but it would have saved a lot of time if we had cut out ALL grain and not tried to keep even one. After all, it's only 4 days.

Documentation is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. Just put one blank paper on your fridge for each person so you can write down the time and what is eaten. It doesn't have to be neat, just readable. If you feel funny after (impatient/ depressed/sudden mood swing/ pain/sinus pressure/flushed/heart beating 'funny') write down the time and the symptom on this same paper on the fridge. This way you will be able to isolate what causes what and how long it takes for the symptom to arrive.

Step 3 (Days 1 to 4) - The Four Day Cleanout

Some people like to do a full seven. We found 4 days to be sufficient. The purpose of this EXTREMELY restricted period, is to let your body get rid of all the toxic stuff so that you have a 'clean' starting point.

We ate mostly soup and rye biscuits for four days. A big pot was kept on the stove and whenever someone was hungry, they got some soup. (This seems like a starvation thing, but people in challenged countries survive on less than this for a lifetime. Kind of brings some perspective to our lives, doesn't it?) Note: Rye Biscuits - Gluten products should *not* be in your startup phase. Gluten ended up being a huge issue for us and it is clear to me that the help of a physician would have prevented this mistake and shortened our trial times enormously.

Warning: This can be VERY hard. I was crying by the second day, thinking I would never make four days. I wasn't really hungry, but I was really 'freaked out'. I put on a good face and attitude through the day for the sake of the children, but the moment my husband got home from work and the children were out of the room I started to cry. The third day was more do-able. The fourth day I felt superhuman. It was weird. I have since spoken to quite a few other people, familiar with elim diets, about this phenomenon and almost every person I spoke to knew EXACTLY what I was talking about.

STEP 4 (Day 5) - Starting to add back in.


I chose to add yoghurt in the morning because it is the least offensive of all milk products (if incubated for 24 hours according to SCD- although very sour). Also, I didn't want the children going any longer without the higher calcium intake. Finally, it seemed a good idea to re-colonize the gut, first, right after a 'cleanout' period and before adding anything else.

I chose rice because I felt like we needed some bulk in our food. Although, I am finding now that I don't think rice is 'as necessary' as I thought it was then. So we had chicken and rice for dinner that night. It seemed like heaven. The rice came in about eight hours after the yoghurt and this seemed enough time, so I began adding two things every day, with eight hour intervals in between (one for breakfast, one for dinner).


Step 5 (Day 6)

We added bananas for breakfast and beef for dinner.

Step 6 (Day 7)

We added egg in the morning. Here is when we ran into trouble for the first time. Sinus trouble mostly, so we took eggs back out to retest them again later.

The children and I cheated on this day and went to McDonald's. We felt awful afterward. We just wanted to go home but had a full day of events planned and so had to just work through it. The children's behaviour went right back to what it was before we started the elim. diet. The bonus was that I could now identify this particular behaviour with diet induced fatigue. This is the marker I use now more than anything else with the children. I might consider saying it was a mistake to go to McD's so quickly, but I don't think it was, as the attitude/behaviour changes were SO blatant that I now KNEW what to look for in a child's negative reaction to food. It also proved to me that MOOD and ATTITUDE, of all things is rather heavily dictated to by the food you ingest.

We added fish for dinner (I think it was Haddock).

Step 7 (Day 8)

We added hard cheese (cow) for breakfast and spaghetti with butter/garlic for dinner.

The spaghetti was a mistake because I was left wondering if our impatient/easily frustrated behaviour was carrying over from McDonald's or the wheat flour. So we had to cut out all wheat again and retry later... at least four days away from a McDonald's visit.

Step 8 (Day 9)

Oatmeal for breakfast (My son had a total freak out session after eating this. It was so horrible that I've never been able to bring myself to give it to him again).

Lamb for dinner. None of us like it and dh and I seemed to have food poisoning. Have not eaten lamb again since. Luckily the children didn't eat it because they didn't like it.

Step 9 (Day 10)


We had to go back to soup for a couple of days because we weren't feeling well. But for the children, we added cow milk for breakfast and they just had soup with us for dinner. My daughter had her leg pain back after 8 or 12 oz. of this milk (within about two hours), so we pulled it back out of our diet, I did some research about milk and bone pain and then later we added goat milk in without issue. Months later, I had picked up a bag of milk and she had the bone pain again. I thought, 'Oh no, she can't even have goat milk now - her favourite food!' But my husband noticed I had, in error, picked up cow milk. So she had the cow milk challenge twice, even though we didn't plan the second one.

I would actually suggest adding milk product back in every 'other' day in the following order: SCD yoghurt, hard cheese, soft cheese, milk. The reasoning behind this order will become clear if you read the molecular makeup of milk products in the SCD book (It has to do with the amount of bacteria content and the fact that they will pre-digest the complex sugars in the milk product. The less bacteria, the more complex sugar in the product, the more difficult for your body to break down and this *can* affect your intestinal flora for the worse.).

This about when I decided to do SCD and things went much more smoothly after this... not so many errors and good healing time was finally attained.

Here is a search I did on all the SCD posts I did over a fairly long period of time: http://brain.hastypastry.net/forums/...earchid=816344
__________________
KimS - who only gets to participate occassionally with two hands these days
01/02/2002 Small Amounts of Gluten Cause Relapse in Children (see: docguide.com)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/q...=pubmed_docsum

12/20/2002 The symptomatic response to a gf diet with borderline enteropathy (see: docguide.com)
Last edited by pakisa100 : 01-13-2006 at 08:37 AM.