The elimination diet, which should be undertaken only with advice from a health care provider, can cause cravings and leave you hangry, but it can also reveal foods that might cause gas, bloating, diarrhea or other gastrointestinal issues. Image: Pixabay

Why I Eliminated Almost Everything in My Diet

The ‘elimination diet’ is a tool for identifying causes of bloating, excess farting, diarrhea or other food intolerances

Robert Roy Britt
8 min readApr 4, 2021

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Years of growing gastrointestinal issues you don’t want to know about — increasingly frequent need to go №2 with increasing urgency and lots of uncomfortable bloating and risky farting — grew so frustrating I recently embarked on a draconian, challenging, weeks-long diagnostic food journey.

I stopped eating almost everything.

At the outset, I limited my intake to a wee handful of relatively benign foods, tummy-wise, a mere 27 basic items even counting water, various spices and oils, and a multivitamin.

The experiment, based on a strategy called the elimination diet, involves stripping your food choices down to a spartan level and then gradually reintroducing foods or food groups during a systematic “challenge period.” There’s not a lot of research on the potential benefits of the strategy for any number of conditions you might aim to address, nor on how best to execute it. But studies have suggested an elimination diet can be useful for identifying foods that exacerbate everything from irritable bowel syndrome to ADHD and dermatitis.

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Robert Roy Britt
Robert Roy Britt

Written by Robert Roy Britt

Editor of Wise & Well on Medium + the Writer's Guide at writersguide.substack.com. Author of Make Sleep Your Superpower: amazon.com/dp/B0BJBYFQCB

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