As you know, I have been on the caveman diet to cut out foods that I tested allergic to.  I eliminated any and all forms of eggs, milk, corn, soy, and wheat.  Then I added them back in one at a time to learn how I reacted to each food.  I had absolutely no problems with eggs and milk.  Corn gave me slight discomfort, mostly a feeling of puffiness in my cheeks.  I wasn’t too bad until I ate corn twice in one day.  Then I had a lot of itchiness and got a little rashy across my chest and neck. The worst was soy.  I had a small, small amount of soy milk and got an instant and intense headache.  The soy also made me dizzy and the headache lasted all night.  I had a little bit more soy milk the next night to make sure I had the same reactions, which I did.  The wheat is definitely what has been causing my nausea and stomach pains.  After just a small amount of cream of wheat I had to lie still for a while until my stomach recovered.  I can’t believe how strong the reactions were and that I was never able to put two and two together before.  It’s just so hard to tell when so many meals have multiples of these ingredients mixed in.

It might not sound so bad to find that corn, soy, and wheat bother me, but it’s hard to realize how many things include those three ingredients.  Almost everything contains corn syrup!  And I never realized how many things have soy.  When I was told to cut out soy I thought it would be no problem.  However, soy is an ingredient in things like hard candies, pasta, ice cream, lunch meats, and soups.  Then there are the non-food items such as candles, soap, printing ink, creams, and cosmetics.  You just can’t stay away from the stuff.  We now spend forever in the grocery store reading all the labels.

Today is the last day of the caveman diet and challenge foods.  Tomorrow I can go back to normal, keeping in mind that eating these ingredients will cause the reactions I learned. I think we will keep a lot of our new recipes in place though.  Being forced to cut out so much has helped me learn to be a more creative and better cook.  Not to mention that we both feel so much better eating fresh foods.

I also did some more reading about food allergies on the allergy doctor’s website.  I read that as long as you spread out the foods you react to, your body can handle it okay.  It seems backwards to me.  Like the more you have of something, the more you would get used to it.  But the website suggested that you need to separate these foods by four days.  I hope that adding these foods back in doesn’t get me back to the way I was feeling all the time before… but I sure am ready for some spaghetti!