Food sensitivities aren’t food allergies – allergies are where you have a life or death reaction and a sensitivity is a reaction that occurs at a lower level. For example, if you’re allergic to nuts and you eat them your throat could swell up and potentially lead to a life or death situation. If you are sensitive to nuts, you could experience GI upset, rashes, brain fog, etc. Allergic reactions are almost instant, whereas sensitivities can take 1-3 days to present themselves.
Sensitivities are hard to nut out because they take this amount of time to present themselves – rarely do we think that a burger we ate on Monday could have us feeling like shit on Wednesday.
Everyone is different, just because gluten can cause an issue for one person, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an issue for the next person. The top ones are normally:
Gluten
Wheat
Eggs
Dairy
Coffee
Whatever the offending food or liquid is, if you remove it completely for a set time, 12 weeks for example, then reintroduce it, then you shouldn’t have a problem. Personally, for whatever reason, gluten and wheat definitely don’t agree with me. I find it easier to eliminate them and choose other options.
Food sensitivities can present themselves in heaps of different ways:
Nausea
Bloating
Constipation/Diarreah
Brain fog
Rashes
Depression
Pain
Weight loss/weight gain
Dandruff
Memory loss
A lot of the time if you just remove the offending food/liquid, all the symptoms disappear or reduce to some degree.
What to do now if you think you may have a food sensitivity:
Keep a food and liquid diary for 5-7 days and basically stop eating the foods that are on there most frequent to see if symptoms disappear. Re-introduce one at a time to see if you can figure out what it is.
Get a food sensitivity test – not a food allergy test, these normally turn up negative for foods that you are sensitive to (HINT: We do the testing!!)
As a rule, avoid dairy and gluten as these seem to be the top two offenders.
Coffee can make whatever the symptom is worse – for example, let’s say your symptom is nausea, if you eat eggs for breakfast then have a coffee, you will notice that this will speed up the time of digestion which makes the nausea more pronounced.
For those of you who don’t care about the health side (I know there are a lot of you out there) and just care about looking good, then pay attention to this:
If you are sensitive to a food/drink and consume it on a regular basis then your ‘gains’ will be super slow. Remove the food/drink and all of a sudden you start dropping more fat and increase lean
muscle mass. Main reason for this is that you are chronically inflamed – picture this: walking with a
nail in your foot every single day. Your foot will be swollen, painful, and cause some pretty gross conditions if you don’t take care of it. The same thing is happening in your body. Inflammation means stubborn fat loss and an inability to recovery which is where you put on the majority of you lean mass.
Performance wise – well, lets just say you could PB a lot more if your body was actually working the way it was designed.
So lets say you’ve done all the above steps, figured out what the issue was and fixed it, you need to make sure you don’t get another food sensitivity.
Here’s what to do:
Regularly rotate foods – avoid eating the same foods every single day, plus it’s super boring have chicken and broccoli 5 times a day.
Get to know your body – as soon as you feel unlike yourself, look at your daily intake and make sure it’s not another sensitivity coming up.
Take care of your gut – good gut health = good health everywhere!!
Make sure you’re ‘regular’ – 1-3 times per day minimum with good consistency
If its all a bit overwhelming and you aren’t sure where to start or how to go about it then you can always let us do the work for you.
Send us through an email at totalhealthep@outlook.com and let us know what you need!