Many of us, when we discover food allergies or intolerance, we remove those foods from our diet and find foods that are “safe.” Then, through convenience or comfort, we fall into a pattern of eating the safe foods over and over.
Sometimes, we’ll eat some of the exact same foods many times in the same week – even the same day.
This pattern puts us at high risk for developing new food allergies. The best thing to do to avoid adding new allergies to the list is to rotate food on at least a four-day rotation. This means you want to spread food out by at least four days.
For example, if you eat salmon on day one, you want to wait to eat salmon again until day five. This allows the salmon to be completely eliminated from your system before introducing it again and therefore lowers your chance of developing an allergy to it.
One good thing about rotating food is that you can eat the same food all day, if you’d like. So you could eat lox for breakfast, salmon sashimi at lunch, and baked salmon for dinner all in the same day. Just don’t reintroduce it as a meal until four days later. This approach will feel frustrating and cumbersome when you first begin rotating your food, but once you get the hang of it, it’s not difficult. And it’s absolutely easier than having to eliminate another food or food group from your diet completely!
There’s a new iPhone app called the Rotation Diet Assistant specifically designed to help people keep track of their food when on a rotation diet. Though the app was just released and being updated, it’s absolutely on its way to being one of my go-to apps to help me manage my rotation based, food restricted diet. This app was designed by the same wonderful people who created the Gluten Free Registry application. This app makes finding gluten-free friendly restaurants much easier. I highly recommend it!
