Food Rotation Diet For Food Allergies

If you have multiple food allergies, one of the best ways to help yourself is to rotate your foods, or eat a rotation diet. A rotation diet is a system of .

Food Rotation Diet For Food Allergies

Controlling food allergies by eating biologically related foods on the same day and then waiting at least four days before eating them again. Such a diet can help those with food allergies in several ways.

Rotation diets may help prevent the development of allergies to new foods. Any food, if eaten repetitively, can cause food allergies in allergy-prone individuals or people with leaky guts.

A rotation diet helps you pick out allergies to foods for which you were not tested and may not have suspected were problems.

Benefits of Rotation Diet:

A rotation diet allows you to eat foods to which you have a mild or borderline allergy and which you might not tolerate if you ate them often. Sometimes your reaction to borderline foods may depend on your stress level, other illness or infection, lack of adequate rest, or the season of the year. (For example, grain allergies tend to be more pronounced when the grass is pollinating).

A rotation diet can seem confusing, overwhelming, or confining at first. However, with a little instruction (as in The Ultimate Food Allergy Cookbook and Survival Guide) and practice in using a rotation diet, it will get much easier. Like hearing aids, bifocals, or any other health aid, once you get used to your rotation diet, it will become easier to use and your health will be improved by using it.

The rotation diet in The Ultimate Food Allergy Cookbook and Survival Guide is designed to help you get started on rotation. It is not set in stone and can and should be individualized. Rotation group numbers are listed with each food so you can easily move whole families of foods from one rotation day to another. For example, if you find that you do not have any vegetables that you like or can tolerate on one day of the diet, but have two families of vegetables on a different day, move one of those families to the day on which you do not have vegetables. (Be sure to move ALL of the members of the family or all of the foods with the same rotation group number). Or you might instead choose a vegetable family from the extra foods list and assign it to the day on which you have no vegetables. If your doctor allows, another option is to split a food family, eating some members of it on the day of your cycle for which you have no vegetables, and other members two days later.

The standard (beginning point) rotation diet in The Ultimate Food Allergy Cookbook and Survival Guide contains a long list of extra foods that are not assigned to a specific day. One purpose of the extra foods list is to give you flexibility. For example, the families containing beef, white potatoes, and lettuce are in the extra foods list because it is usually possible to get these foods plain in a restaurant. Thus, you may want to save these foods for when you eat out so you have the flexibility of eating out occasionally when you find it necessary or convenient rather than being restricted to eating out only on potato-and-lettuce day. Other foods, such as seasonings in the mint and onion families, carrots, and celery, are on the extra foods list to allow you more versatility in your cooking. You can use carrots in chicken soup one cycle and in game stew the next, rather than always being stuck with carrots on chicken day. Be sure to write down when you use an extra food on your calendar so you will wait at least four days before using it again.

Foods such as wheat, corn, cows milk, legumes, and citrus fruits are on the extra foods list because they are common allergens. If you have a borderline allergy to them, you may need to rotate them at a longer interval than less allergenic foods. However, if you tolerate them well, you can assign them to any rotation day you choose.

As you plan your rotation diet, the process of moving and shuffling food families between days, remembering to move the whole family or correctly splitting families, etc. can seem daunting. If you need help making the rotation diet in The Ultimate Food Allergy Cookbook and Survival Guide fit your doctors advice and your allergies or if you need to start from scratch on a diet, customized rotation diets may become available from Allergy Adapt sometime in the future. Click here for details about when they become available, price, and ordering information.

When you first start a rotation diet, you may have to modify the diet based on your reactions. If you find that you are reacting to foods that you previously did not suspect to be problems, eliminate these foods from your diet, at least temporarily, and replace their food families with others from the extra foods section. This situation is sometimes called unmasking because on a rotation diet the days off from a certain food allow your level of antibodies to that food to decrease. Then when you eat the food again several days later, there no longer are masking antibodies to camouflage your reaction to the food.

Your health is important to all of the members of your family, so take the time to make some special treats for yourself as well as for other family members. For example, make yourself a large batch of special pizza and freeze some. Then the next time your family or friends decide to order pizza, you will be prepared with a pizza you can eat. Freeze portions of allowable desserts for each day of your rotation cycle. When there is a birthday party or when others are having a treat, pull your dessert out of the freezer and join the celebration.

Variety is important for mental health as well as for nutritional reasons. It is especially important for children. Although they will be eating the same combination of foods every fourth or fifth day, these foods should be in different forms so that they do not get tired of what they are eating. Often, changing a recipe very slightly and calling it by a different name will improve a childs attitude toward that food.

If you eat out or travel, you may find it difficult to stay on rotation. It is better to eat a food to which you are not allergic but which you just had yesterday than to choose a food to which you are allergic. This advice also applies in other situations. For example, in the pizza illustration above, it would be better to eat your special pizza from the freezer even if it is made with the same grain you ate yesterday than to eat the normalpizza.

Occasionally I am asked how much of each food should be eaten on a rotation diet. Assuming you are not eating sugar or foods to which you are allergic, your hunger should be a good indicator of how much food you need. You should not need to weigh portions or count calories because weight tends to normalize when food allergies are controlled and allergic cravings and food addictions are eliminated. If your weight is not beginning to normalize after several months on a rotation diet that eliminates ALL of your problem foods, you should be evaluated for thyroid or other metabolic problems. Individuals with Wilsons disease can exhibit symptoms of hypothyroidism in spite of normal blood tests for thyroid hormones because their thyroid hormones do not have normal activity in their bodies

Although you do not need to count calories or weigh portions, you should try to eat a balanced diet, getting complex carbohydrates, protein, a little fat which includes essential fatty acids, and lots of vitamins and minerals from vegetables and fruits, as tolerated. Those of us with food allergies may not find it reasonable to follow the USDAs food pyramid strictly and eat eleven servings of grains per day. I have talked to more than one person who developed food allergy symptoms when they decided to eat a healthier diet including large quantities of grains. This made their latent grain allergies more pronounced. If you are allergic to a few grains, you may have some degree of allergy to all of them, so do not overeat your safe grains. Let common sense, your body, and your doctor be your guide to how much of any food you should consume on a rotation diet.

Keep yourself from getting too hungry or feeling deprived. This will increase your ability to resist eating your problem foods and thus will improve your health. Plan ahead and have the right foods available before you get hungry. Hunger, combined with the lack of the right foods to satisfy it immediately, causes most of the problems encountered in trying to stay on a rotation diet. Prepare large batches of crackers, breads, and muffins using the same sweetener and oil with each flour each time, freeze them, and you will be prepared when that day of rotation comes around again. If your doctor will allow you to eat foods more than once in each rotation day, start your rotation day at dinnertime, prepare a large portion of the main dish, and eat it for breakfast and lunch the next day.

Remember that your allergy diet hopefully will not remain at its original level of strictness forever. After you have successfully eliminated your allergic foods for the length of time your doctor suggests, you may be able to add them back to your diet in moderation and on a rotated schedule. Treating the root causes of your food allergies can also lead to improvement in your ability to tolerate foods. If you take low dose immunotherapy, you may even be able to get back to a normal diet and forget all about both elimination and rotation.

A rotation diet alone is not the answer to food allergies. You must also get to the root of your problem, pursue appropriate treatment for the underlying causes of your food allergies, and heal your leaky gut. However, a properly used, highly diversified rotation diet will give you the most nutrition for the least amount of allergic reaction. Improved nutrition can only lead to improved health.