Allergic Reactions
Disclaimer: If you are reading this and dealing with ANY health related problems I am NOT recommending you take the same unconventional approach as I have in my battle with Crohn’s disease. Any changes you wish to make in your care plans should be done in partnership with the team of qualified healthcare providers who treat you.
Why did I try an elimination diet?
When I started experimenting with diet change as a way to manage symptoms both the specific carbohydrate and FODMAP diets were good places for me to start. They prescribed a very specific set of ingredients which ensured I didn’t go too far off the rails in my first experiences with lifestyle change.
But my first foray into true a elimination diet started with a question - could I be allergic to egg? Years earlier I had done an IgE food allergy blood test which showed that I had a very slight allergy to egg. In fact, if my score would have been much lower it wouldn’t have been included it on the report. I dismissed the test results however since I had been eating eggs my whole life and I had never seen eggs give me an “allergic reaction” and I thought I knew a thing or two about allergic reactions…
Like most people, I thought an allergic reaction was both immediate and severe. We’ve all heard the stories of kids who are allergic to peanuts and have life threatening reactions within minutes of coming in contact with it. In fact in the early days of my battle with IBD the first two symptoms I had (before diarrhea and bleeding) were both severe and fairly immediate reactions.
The first was a reaction to fish (specifically to salmon) which caused me to vomit for a few hours after eating it. It wasn’t until the third time I had salmon (which was even the tiniest bite) that I was convinced it was the culprit. My second reaction was to shrimp which caused large blood and puss filled on my legs. It wasn’t nearly as immediate of a reaction but after eating shrimp on two different occasions and seeing a similar pattern I permanently eliminated it from my diet too.
As I thought about trying an elimination diet I started to wonder… what if a slight allergy could have a BIG impact over time? In April of 2017, I decided to put together an experiment where over four days I ate 40 eggs - literally nothing but eggs for 4 days. (I am not recommending this by the way)
When I started the experiment I wasn’t in a Crohn’s flare, I didn’t have any blood or diarrhea, and I actually felt pretty good - but by day 4 I was miserable! I was pale, my face started breaking out, I couldn’t think clearly, I was exhausted, and I just felt awful. Most importantly however was that I started having severe bloody diarrhea. I stopped the experiment.
Within four days of being back off of the egg I was back to normal - no blood and no diarrhea. WHAT?!?!?! Could this have been what was causing my Crohn’s symptoms all along?
A few really important things I learned from this experiment:
Allergic reactions - even slight ones - can build over time and have major impacts to your health.
Allergic reactions can impact your ENTIRE body - airways, digestive system, skin - all of it!
Once the allergen works its way out of your system, your body has the ability to quickly recover (which is super important as your body is built to heal itself!)
This really got me thinking - what if I could follow a similar method to pinpoint other factors that trigger my symptoms? This inspired me to take my journey with elimination diet even further.
After eliminating egg from my diet I hoped it would “cure” me of Crohn’s but I had another flare in 2018. While I’ve not confirmed this with a formal IgE blood test, after further food testing and journaling I have pinpointed corn as being the ingredient to blame - in addition to egg.
In a future post I’ll summarize the list of 20 things I’ve found (so far) that my body doesn’t handle very well.
Update: October 2023
This experiment with egg became the foundation for 3 years of testing over 100 ingredients to determine what my triggers are. Calling everything an "allergy" is probably incorrect as it appears I have a reaction to almost everything when I consume it in high enough quantities. I talk more in future posts about my thoughts on tolerance limits but whether they are true "allergies" or not is secondary to the idea that when I eat something in larger quantities than my body can handle then symptoms appear.
Original note:
To summarize my diet journey with Crohn's:
- 2012 - 2016: Prescribed diets for Crohn's (SCD, Low FODMAP, etc.)
- 2017 - 2018: Poor implementation of elimination diet
- 2019 - 2021: Refined approach to elimination diet
In the first two years of trying an elimination diet (2017 - 2018) I had very little success outside pinpointing egg and milk/cream as triggers for me. My method for tracking my symptoms was a mess.
It wasn't until 2019 when I started to refine how I was doing an elimination diet. Since then I've pinpointed over 20 ingredients that negatively impact me in one way or another. I'll talk more about this in upcoming posts.
