A temporary elimination diet is a tool to identify food sensitivities that may be causing you not to feel your best. Prioritizing foods you have a high IgG reactivity to is a great place to start. Although we recommend seeking guidance from a physician to supervise your elimination diet, many people successfully identify food triggers following the general principles listed below.
Step 1
Use your Food Sensitivity (IgG) Test results as a road map by starting with the most common foods you suspect may be causing your symptoms. Temporarily remove up to 4 of these foods at a time. After 21 days of avoiding certain foods, you should start feeling better if you hit on your trigger.
Step 2
Next, you add these “suspect” foods back to your diet, one at a time every 4 days, and watch for the appearance of symptoms.
If the reintroduction of a food does not cause a new symptom, then continue eating it as a normal part of your diet. If you add back all the eliminated foods and have no symptoms, temporarily take out up to 4 new foods from your diet and repeat step 2.
Conversely, if you get symptoms after adding an ingredient back to your diet, then you’ve likely identified a food sensitivity. You can stop the temporary elimination diet at that point or continue if you suspect more than one food is at fault.
Tips
- Start by cutting out the foods with the highest reactivity level you consume most. Then move on to less common ones with lower reactivity levels to help you figure out your culprit faster.
- Read food labels to see if packaged goods contain any ingredients you’re temporarily avoiding. When eating out, ask the restaurant staff what’s in the foods you order. Forms of gluten, dairy, and other triggers can hide in more places than you might think!
- Recent research has found you can deprive yourself of nutrients if you cut out too many foods at once. Physicians do not advise eliminating more than 3 or 4 foods from your diet at any time without professional guidance.