End of detox is not a time for a food and alcohol party!
As we enter the final week of detox, we get ready to re-introduce restricted foods and drinks back into our lives. Woohoo!!! PAr-tay!!
Not so fast.
One of the purposes of detox is a very simple food elimination diet.
During the last 3 weeks we have eliminated alcohol, gluten, dairy, sugar, chocolate, coffee, and of course, processed foods.
Now we want to be able re-introduce these foods ONE AT A TIME in order to see how our bodies respond to them.
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Top 3 irritating foods
Dairy
Milk can be considered a healthful food if it is raw.
The process of pasteurization heats milk to a temperature of 161 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 seconds. That is so hot that it kills all the bacteria that may exist in milk.
However, it also destroys all of the healthy proteins that exist in milk.
After this heating process, milk is also often irradiated with UV light to ensure that everything is DEAD.
Now a healthful food has become a dead food. Plus, it burdens the body to process and filter all of the dead proteins out of your body.
Ultra pasteurized milk is heated to 280 degrees Fahrenheit for 2 seconds.
Gluten
Historically, gluten sensitivity was limited to people of northern European ancestry. These were the people who developed Celiac disease.
Now, people from all over the world have gluten sensitivity; people who never had this issue before.
What is happening?
First, gluten is in foods made of wheat, barley and rye. Most common foods is obviously breads and pastries.
There are many theories about why this is happening but I think the most likely answers are:
Foods are using more of what is known as high gluten flour. This is because gluten tends to make bread and pastries more fluffy and chewy, making it more "delicious." High gluten flour just adds much more gluten to the flour to give it more of the qualities people enjoy.
The refining of foods and flour make gluten more concentrated and less of the natural fibers exist in the flour.
Plus. my guess is that we just eat so much more of these foods than we ever did before.
Even populations, such as south Indian people, are suffering from gluten sensitivity. Just. twenty years ago, people of Asian descent were not even on the map for gluten sensitivity.
Beef
Beef has always been known to be inflammatory.
Beef is mostly omega-6 fats and those fats tend to become inflammatory chemicals in your body. Now, omega-6 fats CAN become anti-inflammatory but it needs a little help.
I usually recommend that you add a good Omega-3 fat like avocado with your beef in order to "push" the omega 6 into a more anti-inflammatory pathway.
Also, if the beef is not organic, then they can be full of antibiotics and growth hormones that are also very inflammatory to our bodies.
So choose organic whenever possible.
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Add one at a time
What I recommend is add one food group at a time.
Let's say that you really miss coffee.
Then keep your diet exactly the same as week 3 but add coffee.
And pay attention to how you feel.
What are you looking for?
Anything that makes you feel bad.
Most common reactions:
digestive distress- pain, bloating, diarrhea, gas
headache
fatigue
This is usually true for all the food groups.
Give yourself at least a day to get an accurate accounting of how the food group is affecting you before adding another food.
Best case- no reaction from the food at all.
Then you can safely add that food back into your regular meal cycle.
NOTE: If there is an offending food, stay aware from it for another week and try it again.
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General rule:
"Your future diet should be essentially how you ate in week three."
Cheese
Cheese is a strange exception to the ONE food group AT A TIME rule because you have to treat each cheese as a separate food, not as an entire group.
We have found that because different cheeses involve different bacteria and fermentation processes they have different effects. For example, you may be fine with cheddar but mozarella causes problems.
Cheers to a new you!