I am the local Total Elimination Diet advocate.
The reason: because usually people with damaged guts are sensitive to more than one issue.
Example: my son also reacted to all grain, nightshades and the lily family... and until we did a total elimination diet, he did not heal as quickly as he should have. Five years later, he now consumes these items in limited quanitities and is doing quite well. We can generally tell by behaviour if he goes over his 'amount'.
So, I will refer you to this thread as we use the chicken soup fast to also cut our 'cold and virus time' down to 3 days (tops):
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/sh...t=chicken+soup
Using this method, you should notice a difference within 4 days... some people have taken as long as two weeks but that seems unusually long.