day "A"...

We're getting a little more organized around here! We mentioned this before in an earlier post, but for people with food sensitivities/intolerances & leaky intestinal walls, it's important to use some kind of rotation system with the foods you ARE tolerant to eat. A 4-day rotation diet can be extremely helpful (in our case, vital!) for many reasons:

• Rotation diets can help prevent the development of allergies to NEW foods. (while you're trying to repair the intestines so they'll one day be able to handle the OLD foods) Remember we told you that in people with "leaky guts," you are susceptible to developing a food intolerance to ANY food you repeatedly eat? Too much of one particular food gives a greater chance for it to leak out into the body, and then the body attacks it & develops antibodies to fight it. By giving the body less frequency of a certain food, you decrease the likeliness of developing a sensitivity against it.
  
• A rotation diet allows you to eat foods to which you have a mild or borderline allergy and which you might not tolerate if you ate them often. For us, we are going to be rotating in a few fruits & veggies (one at a time) that even though they showed up as mild reactions on the blood test, they contain great nutritional content and might be handled well in low quantities. This is tricky because food intolerances don't usually show up immediately-- symptoms can show up anytime within the next 3 days!
  
• A rotation diet helps you pick out allergies to foods that didn't show up when you were tested and may not have suspected were problems.
  

Okay, so here's how it's gonna work in our house for Caroline:

I made up a quick chart & tried to spread out various foods (categorized by flours/starches, meats, veggies, fruits) across 4 columns. Certainly it will be subject to much change! (Now if I were really good at this, I'd be rotating out the types of cooking oils I use & milk substitutes each day as well.... ha ha...I may be good, but not that good.) If you see some wierd foods on there, it's because those "wierd" foods are great to throw in since the body's probably never seen them before-- therefore she wouldn't have any sensitivity to them. And thankfully my child is a GREAT eater. Praise the Lord she loves vegetables.

So today officially marks "Day A." Rice day! (whew! that's an easy one when you've got things like rice cereal, rice pasta noodles, rice cakes with almond butter, rice itself, etc.)


All of our foods for Day "A" are listed on the fridge, and then next to it is a chart we use (one a day) to record what she ate & symptoms we observe. (helpful for finding connections between food & eczema flare-ups or loose stools or circles under eyes, etc.)


I know this may seem rather extreme to most (I still can't believe all of this is happening to us, but you do what you've gotta do!), but setting up this system is somewhat helpful to me so that I'm not just guessing & worrying about what to feed her each day.

I know we won't follow this plan to a "tee" and I don't intend to.
I'll try & do what we can, but I'm not going to be utterly enslaved to it.
It's simply an aid to help give us ideas for the day so that we don't get into the rice-at-every-meal-rut & end up in a few months with a rice allergy!! (crazy, isn't it!?)

And when we use our juicer each day, Marc & I have agreed we'll use foods from each of the 4 days. (For example, if carrots are listed on our day "B," we will still juice them on any other day since as a juice, it would be much easier to digest & in smaller amounts anyways.)


This may not be the most interesting stuff to many of you, but it's at the forefront of our heart & minds and thought we'd share! Wish us luck! We'll keep you posted.