Food Sensitivities

Allergic reaction or just food sensitivities basically make us feel miserable. When we actually pay attention to what we eat and how it makes us feel, we can eliminate the foods that make us feel bad. Since the body is always striving for health, it lets us know what isn’t good for it.
When food makes us feel bad due to poor digestion, the immune system thinks we have been invaded by foreign particles and surrounds them with water as part of an inflammatory response in an attempt to flush them out. When they don’t get flushed out, we gain weight from the water retained and stored in our bodies with the undigested particles. Dr. Elson M. Haas gives us more information on this dynamic in his book, The False Fat Diet.

Risk Factors That Cause Food Sensitivities

The primary cause of most food sensitivities or reactions is incomplete digestion.

• We don’t have enough variety in our diets, and we over-eat the same foods, especially wheat and dairy. This exhausts the body’s ability to fully digest them.
• We eat too many fake foods – processed, refined and junk foods.
• We don’t have enough digestive enzymes (which eating more raw food would give us). We eat too much at once, overwhelming the digestive system.
• We don’t chew our food completely.
• And we drink too much liquid with meals, which dilutes our digestive juices which compromises our ability to digest food.

 

Symptoms Caused by Food Sensitivities

For women, the top three symptoms of food reactions in the table below are similar to those caused by hormonal imbalance.

For me, starches and wheat make me feel bloated, sugar and caffeine give me headaches, garlic and onions also give me headaches, ice cream causes bloating, gas, headache and congestion, and alcohol interferes with my digestion, causes bloating and gives me headaches and congestion. I feel so much better when I don’t eat or drink this stuff.
Food reactions also exacerbate or make worse these chronic ailments:

Foods to Eliminate

Below we show the most common reactive foods, the sensitive seven, and the other usual suspects, and finally some occasionally reactive foods.

The Elimination Diet/Fast
or the Food Sensitivity Diet

The best way to determine which foods are reactive for you is to go on the elimination diet for 7-10 days. Then reintroduce the reactive foods one by one to see which ones produce symptoms. As a rule, food reactions occur within a few hours of eating, but some may take up to three days to appear. Don’t reintroduce more than one or two foods per day.
The fastest way to do the food sensitivity diet is to go on a juice fast for 7-10 days. It’s good because it strips down the diet to so few foods. It also allows you to eliminate toxic debris and excess mucus.

Symptom Free

After the elimination diet/fast you may find yourself symptom free. What all the things you thought were a sign of stress, female issues or just getting older were really reactions to foods your body doesn’t like or want. Wow! All you have to do is stop eating them – at least so often – or suffer the consequences. Also, many foods are not as reactive in raw form, blended or juiced.
That’s why the raw food diet is so great, because it eliminates so many of the issues we are afraid are serious problems. Now that you know, you can just eliminate your symptoms by eliminating your problem foods.