Thank You

I have noticed today that I have several new followers to this blog.  I would like to take a moment to welcome you and say thank you.  Please feel free to comment on blog posts and ask questions. 

You will see that I have a great group of followers who are amazingly helpful as well.

To all of you, both new and long-time followers, I say thank you for wanting to learn more about my story and environmental and chronic illness.  Your support and encouragement mean a lot to me.

Why am I still sick on a 4-day rotation?

When checking the stats on my blog today I discovered that someone had searched “why am I still sick on a 4-day rotation”.  There could be many reasons.  One reason could be that he/she needs to extend the rotation diet to a 6-day or 8-day rotation.  This is because for some they have a longer transit time through the bowels and out of the body.  A 6-day or 8-day rotation diet can be difficult though if you don’t have many foods to rotate.

Another reason is that the person may be just too allergic to the foods and rotating them still isn’t enough as corn was for me.  While re-reading “Rotational Bon Appetit Cookbook” available from the Environmental Health Center-Dallas I discovered some other possible causes.  For some eating more than two food items in the same meal can cause problems and they must follow a mono-rotation diet.

In following a strict rotation diet, it is advised that if you are having a certain food on Day 1 ( corn for example) that you do not have it in more than one meal for that day.  You may have popcorn, corn, corn tortillas and corn oil together in the same meal.  It is not recommended, however, that you eat corn tortillas for dinner and then have popcorn later that night for a snack.  I found myself guilty of doing this sometimes and would have to rethink about whether or not I really needed a snack.

I have also read from information I have for my LDA (low dose antigen) therapy.  One suggestion is that a person eat several different foods in a meal but only one to two tbs. of each item.  I will talk more about this when I discuss the LDA therapy.

Rotation Diet Part 2

I have promised more on the food rotation diet.  When I was at the Environmental Health Center-Dallas in 2002 I was first placed on a 4-day rotation diet.  I was given a book “Rotational Bon Appetit Cookbook” that explained the diet and was told to start rotating foods.  I was in a horrible brain fog at the time and barely could remember how to walk the four blocks where I was staying to the center.  Two other women and I decided that we would do it together.  Maybe three foggy brains would equal one good brain.  We sat down and started making up a menu based on foods and food families.  It was hard.  Our plan  for each of us to be responsible for a meal each day and to sit and eat together worked but quickly fell apart as we each discovered more and more food sensitivities and we were left on our own.  In the beginning I only had nine safe foods which wasn’t near the 25 required to really be able to do the diet.

The rotation diet is very helpful for those of us with multiple food sensitivities.  The four-day rotation of foods follows the theory that most foods passes through the bowels within four days and therefore it is safe to consume the food again lessening the risk of severe reactions.  Food families are also rotated.  It is believed that being sensitive to a food in one food family (corn in the grass family) does not necessarily mean that you would be sensitive to rice or millet that are in the same family.  I discovered that while sensitive to both I could eventually include millet after doing desensitization but not the corn.

I developed a list of foods with their families for each of the four days and then would base what I ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner on the day’s list.  Here is a sample of my rotation diet list after I had been on desensitization treatments for a while.  You will notice that there are sometimes more than one food item from the same family.  This gave me a choice that day of one or the other.  For example on Day One.  If I chose to have butter on my rice or my artichoke bagel (oh how I miss those bagels), I could not have beef.

DAY ONE

Buffalo (137)       Butter (137)       Peach (4ob)    Pork (134)   Rice, Rice Oil (6)

Peas (41)              Crab (82)           Artichoke (80)      Carob (41)     Spinach (28)

DAY TWO

Elk (135)             Maple Sugar (50)        Cassava/tapioca (47)        Apple  (40a)

Eggs (124)           Cornish Hen (124)      Potato (74)          Canola Oil (36)

Coconut (8)        Squash (79)

DAY THREE

Beef (137)            Lamb (137)        Safflower Oil (80)        Cane Sugar (6)

Cranberry (66)          Rabbit (129)         Millet (6)            Apricot/Apricot Oil (40b)

Water Chestnut (7)       Asparagus (11)         Milk (137)          Taro (9)

Carrots (65)

DAY FOUR

Venison (135)          Chicken (124)         Grapeseed Oil (52)          Amaranth (30)

Scallops (81)            Blackberry (40c)          Broccoli (36)             Eggplant (74)

Pear (40a)                 Olive, Olive Oil (69)         Flax (44)             Turkey (126)

Sweet Potato (70)

I also found that a certain number of my supplements also had to be rotated because they were in the food families.  For example I could not have cranberry, olive leaf extract, grape seed extract, etc. more than once every four days so I had to develop a rotation guide for them as well.

While I don’t rotate like I did before I try to be careful.  I rotated very faithfully for five or six years. Occasionally I have thought about whether or not I should go back on the diet.  I have become stronger and have more foods than I did before which would probably make rotating a lot easier.  After years of doing all the severe regiments in healing (rotating my foods, rotating my supplements, scheduling in sauna therapy, oxygen therapy and rotating my antigens) it is hard to make myself go back there.  When I moved to my safe house, I didn’t bring anything with me.  I just received my new copy of the Rotational Bon Appetit Cookbook.  I am anxious to reread the entire book and try some of the recipes.

I do not want to make this post too long so I am going to try to post more information and a few recipes from the Bon Appetit Cookbook in the coming posts.  I am also going to see what the 4-day rotation diet would look like today with my new foods.  As soon as I do that I will post it here.

To read more about doing a rotation diet, please visit Julie Genser’s article at Planet Thrive:  http://planetthrive.com/2010/12/4-day-food-rotation-diet/comment-page-1/#comment-59449

Rotation Diet

The rotation diet was one of the first things I learned when testing for and battling with food allergies.  It was very hard for me to figure out in the beginning because I was so deeply sick and dealing with impaired memory.  The rotation diet operates on not eating the same food more often than every four days or a food in the same food family more often than every two days.  

An example of a food family is:  peas, beans, peanuts, chick peas, etc.  One obstacle was that so many foods were in the same family.  The hardest part for me besides trying to figure it out was that as soon as I would get a menu planned out, I would lose a food because of an allergy to it.

I write in my book about my first experience with testing and the rotation diet.

The twosome soon became a trio. Another young woman arrived the next week, and she joined the group going to and from the condo, the health center, and the grocery store. The rotation diet that we were placed on was overwhelming to figure out. We were all sick and tired and baffled at how to best tackle this diet. No food could be eaten more often than every four days, and no food in the same food group could be eaten more often than every other day.

We decided that we would eat our meals together. We would plan together, shop together, and each would be responsible for a certain portion of lunch or dinner. This worked for the first week or so. But as the three of us started our food testing, shared meals became more and more difficult. I wrote in my journal, “My body has gone through two anaphylactic and a delayed reaction three days in a row.” Every day one or all three of us would lose another food or two. By this time, though, we had a grasp on the rotation diet. We would still try and eat together but bring our own food.

I wrote on March 9, 2002, “Hooray, it is Saturday. We all can sleep in tomorrow. I have been very depressed all day. After the sauna I did some food testing. I cannot eat blueberries or navy beans now. So I have been tested for 18 foods and have five safe ones. Not good odds when I need 24 safe foods for the rotation diet….”

Breakfast was the same every four days. Day one was cooked apples, day two was eggs, day three was pears, and day four was raspberries.

I have thrown away so much of my materials and recipe books.  I didn’t keep anything when I moved into my safe house.  I am getting a new copy of the rotation booklet that I had and will post more on the diet in the near future.  I will also post some other recipes that I have found that are safe for me and avoiding mold at the same as well.