A rotation diet involves eating any member of a particular food family for one or two days and then excluding that family completely for several days. If you find you are intolerant of one member of a food family, it is quite possible that you may cross react to another member of the same family. Occasionally, completely unrelated foods can also cross react in the same way. A great advantage of this diet is that it encourages you to eat a wide variety of foods.
If you follow the 8 day rotation diet suggested globally, you will find that a food family eaten on days 1 and 2 is not repeated until days 9 and 10, when the rotation is started again. This regime has been chosen in order to simplify shopping and cooking. Try to choose different family members each time around. This can be difficult as far as grains are concerned, since many of the ones we ear most often belong to the grass family, which is allowed on only two days each cycle. Other starch foods are available for the days in between. Not many convenience foods fit this diet, but you can reduce the amount of time you spent in the kitchen by bulk cooking and freezing the extra food for future use.
How Will A Rotation Diet Help?
One advantage of the rotation diet is that it makes you eat a wide range of foods. The foods that cause the most symptoms of food intolerance are those normally eaten every day, such as wheat. In the hurry of modern life, it is all too easy to fall into the habit of eating cereal for breakfast, a sandwich at noon, pasta in the evening, with cookies in between as snacks, all of which are wheat based. By eating the culprit foods less frequently, the body becomes able to tolerate them. In addition, the rotation diet lowers the risk of your developing intolerance to other foods. The immune system is also likely to benefit from the greater of nutrients available to it.
You may well find that the rotation diet is more effective than the mini elimination diet in identifying the foods that cause you problems. This is because eliminating a food for 6 days often heightens your sensitivity toward it, so your symptoms become more obvious when you eat it again.
Make sure you continue with your food, mood, and symptom diary, and exclude any food that produces symptoms each time you eat. Excluding the food for a few months usually allows its reintroduction without any recurrence of symptoms, but if symptoms do recur, excludes the food for another 3-4 months before trying to reintroduce it again. The symptoms almost always disappear eventually, and then you can safely ear it once a week, twice at most.
How to do Your Rotation Diet Plan
For each day of the diet, choose at least one helping of a protein food from an animal source, or, if you prefer, a combination of two vegetarian proteins. In addition, eat one or more portions of a carbohydrate food, and at least five 85 grams portions of fresh fruit and vegetables per day.
When you start your rotation diet, eliminate any foods that you are certain are causing your symptoms. Having followed the diet for a few weeks, reintroduce each of these foods, every other rotation of the diet at first, for one day. If they fail to produce symptoms, you can increase the frequency.
If you dislike the foods suggested on a particular day
If you find that the suggested rotation food diet leaves you with days when you dislike most of the foods, refer to the list of food families. You will find a number of foods that are the only food listed in the botanical family. This is because these foods have no close relatives that are eaten on a regular basis. These foods can easily be moved to different days of the rotation. However, if you experiment with new foods, or cook those you disliked as a child in new ways, you may find that you come to like them after all. So, enjoy your rotation diet in a healthy manner.
