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
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.
