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The Elimination Diet Step
T
his chapter and its procedure is the key to the whole success of the
diet wise plan. Elimination dieting, that is the avoidance of certain
foods as a means of recovery, was first pioneered as a technique by
an American, Dr Albert Rowe Sr., as early as the 1920s. Many doctors have
gone on since then to verify and extend his brilliant work. A classic text on
this subject is Food Allergy by Herbert Rinkel, Théron Randolph and Michael
Zeller, which dates from 1951.
Obviously, mere avoidance is not enough. A recovery might be
coincidence. We follow through with a further step – introducing foods,
one at a time, to test for adverse reactions. This is called “challenging.” So
the whole procedure we may christen elimination and challenge dieting.
I learned it from Dr. Richard Mackarness, the UK’s great pioneer
doctor, who had earlier written a successful diet book, Eat Fat and Grow
Slim, which anticipated the Atkins low-carb diet by some fifteen years.
Mackarness was a psychiatrist in a major British regional hospital and had
put his patients through this regimen, sometimes with astonishing results.
He wrote about these discoveries in Not All in the Mind (published in the
USA as Eating Dangerously).
The elimination plan, given below, is simply a version of the Stone
Age or “caveman” diet. Basically it consists of only meat, fish, fruit and
vegetables plus water, with only slight modifications. Think of a caveman
and his family walking through a forest or across the plains. They would eat
fruit (berries etc.), gather roots (vegetables), occasionally catch fish or game;
and they would drink only water.
It is important to remember that the exclusion diet is not for life, no matter how
well you feel on it. Your maintenance diet may have a few exclusions but not all banned
foods will turn out to be a problem. If not, you simply return them to your diet
within a couple of weeks (after careful evaluation with a challenge test).