What to Do if the Diet Succeeds 131Suppose you were testing milk and there was no observable reaction.
‘Good,’ you might think, ‘I’ll carry on taking milk in my diet.’ This is quite
proper. The next day you might test egg, and again there is no response: at
the same time you are having milk. On the third day you might introduce
pork and feel ill: obviously, it was the pork! Well, it may not have been if you
are having a delayed reaction to milk. If this does happen to you, it can become
very confusing. You may be ill again before you know where you are and
have learned nothing about your allergies. What do you do? Well, the thing
not to do is give up.
Think of the delayed reactions if you do not get well rapidly after
avoiding a test food that caused a return of symptoms, especially if you
used the bicarbonate remedy given in the previous section. The reason
could be that you are not avoiding the right food. Go back to three days
prior to the re-onset of symptoms and eliminate all foods introduced since
then. Recovery within two to four days will confirm that delayed reactions
are the problem.
If necessary, go back to the elimination diet exactly as given. You
were well (or much better) on it, so always revert to it in a crisis or when you
find yourself stuck for an understanding of what has been happening. This
becomes your default position or baseline for wellness.
If you do stumble and find yourself floundering with uncertainty,
proceed with tests much more slowly: instead of trying a new food each day,
introduce only one or at the most two items a week. Eat them regularly each
day in substantial quantities and see if you can force a reaction.
If after four days of eating something fairly intensively you feel no
different, then it is indeed a safe food. You may then proceed to the next
one. Don’t continue to eat the safe food in abundance, by the way, otherwise
you may develop a reaction to it even if you don’t have one at the time of
testing: moderation is the key to food indulgence and staying healthy (see
Chapter 15).
What to do if no food reacts on testing
Even more rarely, it may happen that nothing seems to react when you
perform challenge tests. This is puzzling because, having felt better avoiding
certain foods, you would naturally assume that one or more of them wasn’t
suiting you. This is a logical deduction and one that remains quite valid.
The reason for this anomoly is that avoidance of an allergen,
even for as short a period as two weeks, can reduce the fierceness of the
sensitivity to a point where a single test dose, or even a series of meals