ok, so I couldn’t handle a full three weeks on the elimination diet. No man can eat that much turkey without going a little mad. I did, however, get to the root of the foods I was consuming every day that were causing me issues. These were:
-whey protein
-hot sauce
I thought I could handle whey again after I did my SIBO protocol (details of which can be found a few pages back) but it appears I cannot. I have a theory as to why it appeared that I could for a while but ultimately cannot, which is that if you have a food intolerance, cutting out that food for 6 months sometimes allows your body to do a sort of reset and you can add them back in again. I hadn’t attempted to consume whey for about a year prior to my SIBO protocol, so that meant my body could handle it at first, but daily use soon meant the intolerance came back. Oh well.
I know whey is causing me problems as I had no bloating or anything like that whatsoever for the week of eliminating everything, then one day when I’d forgotten to bring my lunches with me to work I had to eat some home made protein snakcs one of my customers made. A couple of hours later I was a bloated, flatulent mess. So yeah, no more whey for me, sadly.
The hot sauce thing is a total bitch but considering everything I’ve eaten for like the last 20 years has been slathered in it, I suppose the party had to end sooner or later. I’ll still use a tiny bit every now and then in cooking or whatever, but I’ll no longer use it as the sole source of flavour in my tupperware lunches.
Speaking of tupperware lunches, check out how I’m eating now:
-ground meat: beef, lamb or turkey. I use more beef and lamb than I do turkey for the sake of keeping omega 6 down (thanks, Bill Roberts), and when I do use turkey I add a ton of coconut and olive oil as it’s pretty miserably low in calories without it.
-a ton of veggies: bell peppers, onions, carrots, spinach, kale, mushrooms. Any and all of these go into my ground meat. I put them all into the food processor til they become mush, then pour the mush into the ground meat as it’s cooking. Stir it all up, let it simmer for a while, then: boom! lunch is done.
I eat this two or three times a day depending on my shift pattern with cooked and cooled white rice, and as a result my vegetable consumption is through the roof! I’m also getting a TON of fibre and resistant starch. I’ll probably eat like this every day at work now for the rest of my life. When I move house at the end of summer and have a big enough freezer to make paying for grass fed meat viable, I’ll be the healthiest damn human on the planet!
My gut feels the best it’s felt in years. I thought I was all good after the SIBO protocol, and while I still think that helped loads, it clearly just treated the condition that I had as a result of not paying enough attention to food intolerances, without correcting the issues that got me there in the first place. Now I am eating in such a way that it’ll never come back.
Good times, noodle salad. I haven’t tried adding wheat back in yet, but meh, I didn’t eat a huge amount of that to begin with. I think my wheat consumption will forever be limited to the occasional burger bun or pizza in a restaurant.
TL, DR - life is good and I hardly ever even fart anymore let alone anything else.
