I hadn't fully considered the risks of this business until now.
This is why they have exclusion diets for trying to work out in a controlled way what things in your diet might be responsible for making you feel crap. The downside of such diets is that they invariably involve living on rice and boiled fish (or similarly exciting foodstuffs) for about two weeks before you're allowed to introduce anything interesting back into your diet.
If you're thinking of trying an exclusion-type diet for yourself, I'd recommend the one in the book You Are What You Eat. It's a TV tie-in, but don'tlet that put you off. There's amazing advice in there on how to feel happier, stronger and healthier by eating the right things. It's led me to cut down massively on dairy products, caffeine, refined sugars and wheat, and I do feel that I have more energy for it.
Have you asked your GP? If so, why wouldn't/couldn't he help?
I mean, I just said to mine that I was feeling under the weather (tired, low-level stomach upsets, headachey, etc.) nearly all the time, & I was sick of taking ADs which always just made me feel worse, and I wondered if at least some of the symptoms might be diet-related, and was there a good way I could test this? And he went away and asked a nutritionist & then got back to me with a diet-sheet and said I could follow it myself if I wanted to.
But it's not a "diet" that you stick to for ever. It's a fixed-duration process where you basically eliminate everything from your diet that's even vaguely likely to cause allergies, for 2 weeks (IIRC), and then reintroducing things in a controlled fashion. (The reintroductions sound about as horrible as the abstinence -- you have to have enough of each thing that it would definitely cause a reaction if you were allergic/intolerant to that thing, e.g. drinking a pint of milk a day - blehh!)
I can do you a copy if you want, but I've never tried it, because it really does require having several weeks when you can completely control what you eat... and usually in any given month I have too many meals-out and parties and stuff that I just don't want to miss! The symptoms I get are all so vague and low-level that I can't quite convince myself that the hassle of the diet is worth the potential gain...
And the downside of *that* is that it can be self-fulfilling - if you cut *anything* out for a prolonged period, there's some chance of there being some kind of reaction when you reintroduce it. Usually temporary, but if you take that as confirmation of suspicions, then you'll end up cutting out foodstuffs or whole food groups for no damn reason.
Never do this sort of thing except under the supervision of someone who doesn't stand to gain financially from diagnosing an intolerance.
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This is why they have exclusion diets for trying to work out in a controlled way what things in your diet might be responsible for making you feel crap. The downside of such diets is that they invariably involve living on rice and boiled fish (or similarly exciting foodstuffs) for about two weeks before you're allowed to introduce anything interesting back into your diet.
I mean, I just said to mine that I was feeling under the weather (tired, low-level stomach upsets, headachey, etc.) nearly all the time, & I was sick of taking ADs which always just made me feel worse, and I wondered if at least some of the symptoms might be diet-related, and was there a good way I could test this? And he went away and asked a nutritionist & then got back to me with a diet-sheet and said I could follow it myself if I wanted to.
But it's not a "diet" that you stick to for ever. It's a fixed-duration process where you basically eliminate everything from your diet that's even vaguely likely to cause allergies, for 2 weeks (IIRC), and then reintroducing things in a controlled fashion. (The reintroductions sound about as horrible as the abstinence -- you have to have enough of each thing that it would definitely cause a reaction if you were allergic/intolerant to that thing, e.g. drinking a pint of milk a day - blehh!)
I can do you a copy if you want, but I've never tried it, because it really does require having several weeks when you can completely control what you eat... and usually in any given month I have too many meals-out and parties and stuff that I just don't want to miss! The symptoms I get are all so vague and low-level that I can't quite convince myself that the hassle of the diet is worth the potential gain...
Never do this sort of thing except under the supervision of someone who doesn't stand to gain financially from diagnosing an intolerance.