Healthy Weight Loss — Without Dietingreaction, you almost always feel better if you can eliminate the food
from your meal plan (or at least substantially cut back on your
consumption of the food). As you will see later in this chapter, this
process of avoiding potentially troublesome foods usually falls
under the heading of an “elimination diet.” Later in this chapter, I’ll
be telling you much more about the details of a modified elimination
diet that you can follow in your own meal planning as you pursue
weight loss and more vibrant health.
Adverse food reactions really boil down to a kind of mismatch
between a person and a food. You and I may just not be cut out to
eat anything and everything! If you and your food are mismatched,
you may have a more difficult time losing weight. Recent reviews
of popular weight loss diets clearly show that unusual diets—
mismatched not only to a person’s nutrient needs but also to a
person’s broader metabolic pattern—are unsupportive of weight loss
in comparison to balanced, metabolically matched diets. Although
adverse food reactions have not been specifically studied in this
regard, they are established as real-life responses to food that can
upset many different metabolic balances in a person’s body, and can
compromise function in several different body systems, including
the digestive system, immune system, nervous system, endocrine
system, and inflammatory system. If these body systems are not
working well, your path to healthy and optimal weight loss will be
compromised.
Two important examples of adverse food reactions—not specifically
linked to weight management problems but relatively high up on
most research lists of foods most likely to cause adverse reactions—
are dairy and wheat. Here’s a closer look at each of those foods and
their potential for adverse reactions.
In the case of dairy, as many as 15% of all U.S. infants show unwanted
reactions to cow’s milk, including common symptoms that can be
related to many other factors besides food. These symptoms include
irritableness, fussiness, upset stomach, and bowel problems like