Elimination Diet
A powerful tool on the journey to healthy eating and living is the elimination diet. This is a diet that resembles a traditional or ancestral diet and the goal is to gain more clarity around what foods your body likes and what foods your body rejects and has a negative response to. The elimination diet creates the opportunity to give the body and digestive system a break from the standard foods and beverages that it is processing which may include things that the body is sensitive or allergic to that unbeknownst to the consumer could be causing an inflammatory response, a bacterial dysbiosis, digestive issues, or other state of imbalance in the body. The elimination diet provides the opportunity to have more of an experiential understanding of what foods are and are not working for you.
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I tried my first elimination diet in 2018. It was strongly recommended as part of a meditation retreat that I was attending and the principle behind the suggestion was to clear the body, mind, and spirit of as much energetic density as possible so as to evoke a depth in the meditation practice. Being the good student that I am, and a stickler for the rules (for things I feel aligned with) I really dedicated myself to the recommended diet. Two weeks leading up to the retreat I only ate fruits, veggies, rice, chicken, and spices, and I only drank water! This was a pretty massive adjustment for me and was very challenging physically, mentally, and surprisingly emotionally. Up to this point I ate a pretty standard American diet and had very few (if any) restrictions on what I ate. I drank a lot of coffee and was working at a brewery as a manager of production so had a lot of beer that I had to try quite often! I would eat fast food in a pinch and would eat out with really no regard to health.
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I learned a lot during that first elimination diet, I really had to white knuckle my way through caffeine, gluten, and sugar withdrawals. I know it wasn’t perfect during those two weeks, but I was darn near it, and was really proud of myself for achieving that personal goal. I remember towards the end of the two weeks my stomach began to feel different and it visibly shrank and felt amazing! I didn’t even know that my stomach didn’t feel good until it did! I didn’t realize that my stomach was constantly distended and in a state of bloat until it wasn’t anymore! This is the magic and the power of an elimination diet. It brings awareness to the states of being that we have normalized, often over the course of our entire lives, and don’t know any better, don’t realize there is another option for how to feel.
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I also became very aware of the ways that I used food and substances as an emotional buffer to avoid feeling my experience, or rather to change my experience. The addiction to caffeine, sugar, and gluten is very real. In fact studies have shown that sugar is more addictive than cocaine, and that gluten actually breaks down into morphine like peptides called gluteomorphins which creates an addictive response. So next time you wonder why food manufacturers randomly put sugar and wheat in so many foods where they seemingly don’t belong…well keep that in mind.
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I am going to create a metaphor for you to better understand the experience I am trying to explain. Have you ever experienced the phenomenon, where you go out in nature at night and look up at the sky, and notice a few stars, and really just take the time to look and enjoy their beauty? Have you ever noticed that the longer you gaze into the night sky the more stars will appear? You may not always see all of the stars at first glance, but with patience and intentionality, the universe begins to present itself…this is because it takes time for our eyes to adjust and become more sensitive and pick up on the nuances of the light that we are perceiving. Well, in my experience this same thing happens in your digestive system during an elimination diet! It creates an opportunity to slow down and listen, it breaks habits…addictions. It gives us the opportunity to see the impact that the things we are consuming without much thought or intention are impacting our entire system, our physical health, mental and emotional health, and our experience of pain, discomfort, or dis-ease in the body.
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An experience like this is so supportive to make lasting changes, mainly because it helps us make the mind-body connections between what we are consuming and the effect that it is having on all of our systems. The elimination diet is not the only way to achieve this kind of experience, but it is what has worked really well for me. Health begins in the gut, what we consume is what gives us fuel, and that fuel can be used to create wellness and harmony in our body, or it can be used to fuel imbalance and disease. The ask here is to get attuned to energies that we are consuming. This takes space, quiet, attention, discipline, and an earnest willingness to learn to develop a relationship with the body and energetic systems. Remember, every single thing we consume is information, and that information is creating a response in the body all day everyday. What is the information that your choices are sending throughout your system?
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I am including some links in case you are interested in reading about some studies on the addictive nature of gluten, sugar, and caffeine.
Gluten Addiction:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5025969/
Sugar Addiction:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1931610/
Caffeine Dependence: