You are a foodie when investigating diet

In fact being a foodie helps you manage your diet! Yes, you have your lists of allowed foods but even in those lists there are words such as “fresh” or “mild” or “just ripe”. How do you decide what they mean?

I have listened to food sensitive people describe how they feel about food for years. They say things like “I wouldn’t use cake mixes, the smell would give you a headache!” or “The food in the fridge is off!” or children say “I won’t eat that: it smells yuk!”. They are showing us that food sensitive people have always been foodies, but until diet investigation they felt more apologetic or ashamed about what they noticed, and their friends or relies more often said “You’re too fussy!” and rarely said things like “You should be a wine taster” or “You should be a gourmet chef”.

The low chemical elimination diet is in fact a diet that excludes foods that have over-ripe, strong or stale flavours, and aged, acidic or bitter tastes. While you are running your four-week elimination diet trial at the beginning you start to notice that foods excluded often agree with what you don’t want anyway. (There is one catch though. The diet also excludes a few nicely flavoured foods you just love, and maybe even crave! Foods like mint, spice, chocolate, tasty cheese, some high additive food, and tea. I will explain how to manage them later.)

As you are running your trial you start noticing how much better you enjoy your food when it is very fresh, not strong-tasting, with no tang or bitter tastes.

The main idea I want to give you in this article is that choosing, storing, cooking and serving your food should be done in that way that is just right for you. Instead of thinking of yourself as feeling apologetic about not liking over-ripe bananas or left-over food, you can change to sounding just like any foodie.

Foodies are people who are careful about food for their enjoyment. You should be that too, but the more important reason for you is that the more foodie you are in your own way the less of your distressing symptoms you will have.

When you have to eat away from home you realize just how much you do at home to make the diet just the way you like and need it to be. You get to know your suppliers, especially your butcher, buy your fruit that is a bit under-ripe or just at the perfect stage, or quite under-ripe so you can store it until just the exact level of ripeness. This applies especially to bananas, papayas and avocados. Hard pears in a decorative bowl do look nice as a table centre while ripening.

You can cook your toast to the exact level of crunch, browness, or crispness you want and note that this means your gut, skin or brain do not complain when you go to this effort.

You work out flavours that go together: golden toast with firm banana and just that touch of decaf coffee in your drink, or pear, cream and mini-meringues to have a pavlova effect, or have the cooked pear with one coconut macaroon, or a white raffello chocolate.

You can flavour your meat with a gravy made with the not-too-much browned pan and the small amount of water left after your veges are cooked, or you put slices of pear with your very fresh pork.

 

At some time you will be able to test those foods you loved or even craved, and you will realize you only want small amounts, and, if you test them one at a time, you may not have your symptoms return to the same bothersome degree. After you have learned what foods you have the strongest reaction to you can stop being apologetic about your choices, and not notice if anyone says you are fussy, and learn to enjoy your new role as a foodie!