Comments Off on Food Sensitivity Elimination diet: Nightshade Ratatouille

Food Sensitivity Elimination diet: Nightshade Ratatouille

Category : Healthy Eating

This is my mini-chronicle of following the Dr. Oz and Dr. Hyman Food Sensitivity Elimination diet.  The beginning of this series and the links to the elimination diet can be found in this link: Click Here.

OK, my evil plan was a success and I was able to eat my brother-in-law’s incredible marinara and amazing ratatouille at my Mom’s birthday. Let me rephrase that; In pursuit of the scientific study of my diet, I risked fatigue and potentially worse by adding nightshades back into my diet.  And I loved every minute of it and my only reaction was Yum!

So it turns out that Ratatouille is the perfect dish for testing out nightshade sensitivity.   This is because the two main ingredients are eggplant and tomatoes, two of the primary members of the nightshades.  Other nightshades include red peppers (both hot and sweet), the spices paprika and cayenne, and potatoes.  I don’t eat these every day, so I wasn’t expecting trouble.

I’ve never had ratatouille before and I have to say it was absolutely delicious.  Of course, my brother-in-law is an amazing chef, so that is a large part of why it was so good.  He said that he grilled all the vegetables first to give it that bit of smokiness, but otherwise followed a basic ratatouille recipe.

I found a highly rated recipe from epicurious.com, the bon apetit recipe website, that I will be trying.  Epicurious Ratatouille, Click Here.  It’s a great way to get those vegetable servings that Karin has been promoting during March nutrition month.

Comments Off on Food Sensitivity Elimination diet: Adding Wheat back!

Food Sensitivity Elimination diet: Adding Wheat back!

Category : Healthy Eating

This is my mini-chronicle of following the Dr. Oz and Dr. Hyman Food Sensitivity Elimination diet.  The beginning of this series and the links to the elimination diet can be found in this link: Click Here.

I have a family gathering this weekend (Happy Birthday, Mom!) and it’s not going to be easy being on the elimination diet.  Like it wasn’t bad enough that the only meat we eat is fish (yup, we’re pescetarians), but my brother-in-law is a seriously gourmet cook whose culinary skills I sorely do NOT want to miss out on. He’s making ratatouille as well as his homemade marinara and pasta. Wheat

So I have a plan. The first two foods I’m adding back are Wheat (so I can have bread and pasta) and Nightshades (Ratatouille has both tomatoes and eggplant).  Luckily, Wheat is Thurs/Friday and the Nightshades just happen on the day of the party.  Whew! Disaster avoided!!!

Days 6 & 7: Adding the big “W” -WHEAT back into my diet.  Unless you lack a heartbeat, you’ve probably heard all the hoopla about the benefits of eliminating wheat from your diet.  Many of our clients feel better when they don’t eat wheat.   There are also many people who have the very serious disease Celiac, which is actually an auto-immune disorder and not an allergy at all.   Randi Mann, Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner at Wise Women’s Wellness in De Pere, says that simply eliminating wheat would help people lose much of the weight they need to lose.

So I was a bit apprehensive when I added wheat back into my diet because, well, I really like bread!  It’s no small task to eliminate wheat given that it is in so many food products as a thickener or filler.  Kiss any typical convenience foods or salty snacks good-bye!

My worries were for naught: Adding Wheat back to my diet was so easy and dare I say “fun”?  Instead of the cream of rice I chose the Hodgson whole grain hot cereal instead with walnuts and strawberries.  Not only did it taste good, I felt just fine thank you!

The funny thing is that now that I’ve added bread back to my diet, I can’t really do anything with it.  Everything I make seems to be missing something, like butter or cheese.  We made pizza tonight and I had more of a very thin focaccia than anything else.  Oh well.  Tomorrow I add tomatoes back and then I can have an avocado and tomato sandwich, one of my favorites!  Of course, in a few more days it will be better with a slice of cheese… 

Comments Off on Food Sensitivity Elimination Diet Days 4-5

Food Sensitivity Elimination Diet Days 4-5

Category : Healthy Eating

This is my mini-chronicle of following the Dr. Oz and Dr. Hyman Food Sensitivity Elimination diet.  The beginning of this series and the links to the elimination diet can be found in this link: Click Here.

Day 4:  Today is starting into the middle of my week and so far, I haven’t had the afternoon fatigue like I had it despite starting my day at 4am.  A little tired, but not the “can’t get off the couch” wave of exhaustion I was feeling in the afternoons.  I also attended another meeting in the late afternoon and stayed engaged throughout and never faded.  Yeah!

King Cake

Had to laugh about the piece of Mardis Gras King cake that I accepted from a client today.  Definitely NOT in the food plan,since it is sure to have eggs, milk, wheat, probably corn starch and who knows what else. I brought it home and happily fed it to the kids after school.  Not surprisingly, I found out later from Karin that Jack had a total melt-down over his homework.  They always have a snack after school, and if that was all he had…KA-BOOM!  Don’t you just love doing blood sugar experiments on your children?

Day 5:  Hump day:  A very tough day at the studio.   The phone was ringing off the hook while I was training clients.  I usually don’t answer, but if it rings with several separate calls within 10 minutes, and messages are left, it’s like an itch you can’t scratch.  Turns out they were all unique: a client and a trainer out sick, account questions.  All that is to say I didn’t have time to eat regularly, but I wasn’t crazy hungry either.  Another good day!  I have to fess up that I took a cat nap ~20 minutes but woke up refreshed instead of wiped out!

Just a side note:  I’ve been noticing that as I read ingredient labels how prevalent soy is.  It’s everywhere.  Many baked items like crackers have soy lecithin in them, soybean oil is fairly common, as is soy sauce.  All I can say is I’m truly happy that I’m not actually allergic to anything.  It would be a royal pain!