by Amanda Malachesky | Sep 10, 2018 | Diet, Functional Nutrition, Nutrition
I was recently invited to write a guest blog post for The Unchargeables, a support network for people with chronic illness. They wanted to hear about easy, accessible dietary practices for people with chronic illness. I wrote about how to use food as medicine when you have a chronic illness. You can read it here:
14 Ways to Use Food As Medicine for Chronic Illness
And really, the dietary advice I wrote about works for anyone, no matter their illness. But the TRUE work, besides simply substituting foods, or removing or adding foods, is to understand which of these changes is RIGHT for your body, and which ones aren’t.
If you’re new to making dietary changes for your health, this list could seem intimidating and overwhelming. If that’s you, never fear. Just start somewhere. Choose the one or two things that stand out most to you and begin there.
Once you have gotten comfortable with that, then think about adding something new. The process of learning how to live with the body you’ve been given is a long-term process. Using food as medicine takes time to learn. You won’t figure it all out or get it all right overnight. There is no magic pill.
Though this is the case, there is A LOT of benefit to identifying the foods that trigger your symptoms. This can make your symptoms less random, and give you a lot more control.
Getting clear on how to use your food as medicine is Step 3 on my Roadmap to Recovery (you can download that here). When you’re ready for some in depth support and guidance on YOUR Road to Recovery, you can schedule a free 30-minute session with me. Together, we’ll get clear on where you are in the process right now, and what your next best steps are.
by Amanda Malachesky | Jul 30, 2018 | Chronic Illness, Functional Nutrition, Inflammation, Nutrition, Stress
Please note: This post contains affiliate links. Should you purchase something using these links, I get a small commission, at no increased cost to you. Affiliate links are one thing that allow me to continue to produce high quality content.
Blood sugar imbalance is one of the biggest American public health epidemics of our time. According to the CDC, approximately 10 % of Americans have Type 2, or adult onset diabetes. Even worse, 33% have pre-diabetes, and most of them aren’t aware that they are pre-diabetic.
Diabetes is caused by excess sugars or glucose in your blood. Normally, when our blood sugar is too high, our pancreas produces more insulin, which helps the sugars enter body cells.
When the body can’t produce enough insulin, or can’t use insulin as well as it should, this is called diabetes and insulin resistance. A diabetes diagnosis is made when your body can no longer control blood sugar in a normal range without intervention.
But blood sugar handling occurs on a spectrum. There is a range of normal blood sugar levels. Pre-diabetes means that your circulating blood sugar is a little higher than normal, and that your blood sugar is trending higher than normal, but that it hasn’t yet reached diabetes levels.
The excess circulating blood sugar in pre-diabetes and diabetes leads to a suite of health problems including cardiovascular disease, obesity, vision problems, peripheral nerve pain and degeneration, and kidney disease. There is also a growing correlation between blood sugar imbalance and Alzheimer’s Disease and cognitive decline.
But although Type 2 Diabetes is one of the most common chronic illnesses, it’s also one of the most possible-to-treat chronic illnesses with diet and lifestyle modifications. Though the changes can feel challenging if you’re used to eating and living a certain way, you CAN often reverse Type 2 diabetes with diet and lifestyle changes.
And even if you don’t have diabetes or pre-diabetes, it’s important for you to keep reading, too. Even if your body is handling your sugars just fine for the time being, excess sugars in the body promote more generalized inflammation. This inflammation has a role in many chronic diseases, not just diabetes.
Here is what you need to know to bring your blood sugar into balance, without medication.
How to Balance Blood Sugar
Balancing sugars is one of the first steps of getting a handle on chronic illness, no matter your diagnosis. And even if your health challenge isn’t a diagnosis, balancing your blood sugar is a foundational practice. Keeping your sugars balanced helps support the health of your adrenal glands, manages your weight, keeps your brain clear, and helps keep your moods stable.
Excess circulating blood sugar that can’t get into your cells leads to inflammation. It increases inflammatory cytokines, and also causes oxidized fats to damage your arteries. In plain speak, that means you may gain body fat (especially around your middle), and experience increased pain, declining brain function, and increased risk of cardiovascular disease.
There is no debate: keeping blood sugar balanced throughout the day using diet is both doable and is an effective way to promote health.
From a Functional Nutrition perspective, the first question to explore and answer is: What foods are elevating your blood sugar too high?
The common American diet is full of foods that can aggravate blood sugars. Added sugars in all manner of packaged foods are a problem, but processed carbs, starchy vegetables, and fruits can also be culprits. Even a healthy, therapeutic diet can have foods that elevate sugars inappropriately.
The key is discovering which specific foods are problematic for YOUR unique body. Tracking food intake alongside blood sugar readings taken with an at-home glucometer is the best, most specific way to identify your blood sugar triggers.
How to Track Blood Sugar
Tracking your blood sugar requires using a glucometer, or sugar meter. You can buy one online or at your local drugstore. Make sure to buy test strips along with your meter. If you are a diagnosed diabetic, insurance will usually pay for your meter and test strips, but the cost isn’t too prohibitive to buy out of pocket.
Grab a sheet of paper or an online tracking app, and take note of what you ate and when during the day.
You’ll want to take your blood sugar at several intervals through the day. Add these values onto your food log.
- Immediately after waking, first thing in the morning (functional range: 78-88 mg/dL)
- 40 minutes after breakfast (functional range: <135 mg/dL)
- 40 minutes after lunch (functional range: <135 mg/dL)
- 20 minutes before dinner (functional range, if >2 hours since last food: 78-88 mg/dL)
- Just before bed (functional range, if > 2 hours since last food: 78-88 mg/dL)
If you find values above these ranges, it’s time to evaluate what you had for your previous meal. Were there ingredients or products with added sugar? Were there foods with a high glycemic index, like breads, tortillas, pasta, crackers, or baked goods? Even white or sweet, white rice, winter squash, legumes, grains, or beets and carrots could be triggers.
Certain fruits or fruit juices could also be a problem, but will likely cause a delayed elevation of blood sugars, because the fructose must first processed in the liver before being broken down into glucose. Dried fruit can be a particularly strong trigger, as it is a concentrated food and it’s easy to overdo it.
Alcohol and caffeine can also be blood sugar destabilizers. Drinking alcohol in the afternoon and evening may contribute to elevated waking sugars. Caffeine may lead to blood sugar problems near lunchtime if you drink coffee first thing in the morning.
The triggers will likely be different for everyone. To manage your sugars well, you need to get curious and become a detective. If you feel like you’ve identified a blood sugar trigger, remove it for a week and keep tracking your sugars.
Do your numbers stabilize? Or are they still elevated? If they’re still elevated, get curious about what OTHER foods might be triggers. Do removal trials until you identify the culprit(s).
Common blood sugar triggers include:
- Bread, pasta, or tortillas
- Chips, pretzels, and other snack foods
- Baked goods, like cake, cookies, pastries, pie, etc.
- Boxed cereal
- Potatoes (plain, or French fries, potato chips, etc.)
- Fruit juice
- Dried fruit
- Even healthy foods like grains, legumes, or starchy veggies could cause a problem for some people.
Lifestyle Can Affect Blood Sugar
Lifestyle choices, including when we eat, how much we sleep, and how we manage our stress can affect our blood sugar.
Two hormones, leptin and grehlin, are responsible for signaling our appetite and turning it off. Grehlin is produced in the stomach, intestines, and kidneys, and tells us we’re hungry.
When we don’t get enough sleep, our grehlin output increases, which increases our appetite. Fructose (fruit sugar) consumption will also increase grehlin, and therefore appetite. So you can see a self-reinforcing pattern developing here: don’t sleep enough —> increased grehlin —> increased appetite —> eat not great food choices, including sweets or drinks with high fructose corn syrup —> increased grehlin —> repeat… you get the idea. This pattern increases the likelihood of overeating, reaching for quick energy foods like sodas, caffeine, and treats that elevate blood sugar.
Conversely, when our body determines we’ve eaten enough, it releases leptin, which tells us to stop eating. But your cells can become leptin resistant and stop responding to the signals.
Guess what encourages leptin resistance? Fructose, including fruit juice, corn syrup, and agave syrup.
In this indirect way, lack of quality sleep can drive us to have an increased appetite, and can encourage poor food choices. Do you ever notice you have a bottomless pit of hunger when you didn’t sleep well the night before?
One simple way to help prevent this pattern from starting is to get to bed earlier, ideally well before midnight.
Stress and Blood Sugar
When we experience stress, our body mobilizes resources to meet that threat to our well-being. The “fight or flight” response tells the body, “it’s time for action”. To allow this response, the body releases stored energy, and elevates blood sugar.
We want this to happen if we are being chased by a mountain lion. This is the reason average sized people are able to lift a car off of their trapped child, or do seemingly superhuman feats when their life is threatened.
But when our body is experiencing this pattern many times daily, in response to stressors both big and small, this can have a significant effect on blood sugar. It can lead to highs and then lows.
Successfully managing stress, whether it’s from your boss, your kids, your commute, or your financial situation, is absolutely essential for balancing blood sugar. Inviting stress relief practices, such as meditation, mindfulness, walking in nature, spending time with friends, or doing things we enjoy can help us not only feel better, but improve our actual health data and statistics.
No matter your health challenge or diagnosis, making sure your blood sugar is in balance is a key part to healing or maintaining your good health.
When you are ready for help understanding which foods are blood sugar triggers, what to do with your blood sugar readings, or how to successfully manage your blood sugar with diet and lifestyle changes, please schedule a free Assessment Session with me to find out how I can help. You can also grab your free copy of Roadmap to Recovery: How to Move Beyond Your Symptoms and Create a Personalized Plan to Restore Your Health to learn more about how I would support you. I look forward to meeting you…
by Amanda Malachesky | Jun 12, 2018 | Chronic Illness, Nutrition
The internet is alive with discussions and opinions about how to eat a healthy diet. Message boards, Facebook groups, and social media are full of recommendations for many “healthy” diets, from the Autoimmune Paleo diet to completely plant-based diets. And there are success stories for all of them.
But there are also people who have given their all to try and eat a healthy diet, and still aren’t seeing the results they hoped for. And if this is you, nothing is more frustrating. What gives?
It’s bad enough to be aware of all the yummy foods that could be problem. But when you’re never sure if you’re going to feel ok or have the worst day ever, and feel anxious about everything you eat, how do you figure out how to eat healthy?
Healthy Diet Basics
Despite all the competing claims, the basics of a healthy diet aren’t really in dispute across all these different communities (with the exception of the carnivores vs. the vegetarians!).
We know that a healthy diet generally includes lots of organic fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, pasture-fed meats and poultry, wild-caught fish and seafood, healthy fats, legumes and whole grains, and spices, herbs, and seasonings.
We know that processed foods, refined grains, gluten, sugar, alcohol, dairy (for many people), artificial anything, and hydrogenated fats are generally not a good idea to consume. These items feed the inflammation that promotes disease.
The devil is in the details, as you no doubt know. For some of you, grains flare your symptoms and you can’t touch them. For others, too many vegetables make you bloated and gassy. For others still, too much meat will leave you feeling sluggish and tired.
There is no one right diet for everyone, just one right diet for YOU.
So even though we know that these general principles work, why are we still SO confused? The answer is because very few people understand that they need to learn how to combine these foods properly for their particular body.
The Magic Pill Pitfall: Rearrange your Expectations of What it Means to Eat Healthy
For many of us, muddling through chronic illness, we’re willing to try anything that might bring us relief. It’s easy to be wooed by the promise of a simple fix when you feel crappy. Like me, I suspect many of you have been guilty of assuming that the “right” diet would cure everything.
The unfortunate truth is that if you’re chronically ill, or your health challenges are complex, you aren’t likely to completely reverse your problems with a diet shift alone (though this DOES happen sometimes).
While therapeutic diets are wonderful and important, and are a cornerstone of my work with clients, they are always a template to start with, and MUST be customized. For you. Just because the Paleo diet recommends plantains or meat at every meal doesn’t mean your body can tolerate this. You should always be looking to your body to tell you what is a healthy diet.
Eating a healthy diet starts first and foremost with understanding that your diet (along with digestive function) is your FOUNDATION for health. What we’re aiming for with a good diet is providing our bodies with what it needs to do its work.
The Healthy Diet Key to Success
The true key to success when trying to figure out your healthy diet isn’t contained in the food lists, recipes, or cookbooks. What creates success is learning HOW to determine whether your diet is working for YOUR body or not.
You may not have been given the tools to figure this out before. To truly practice Functional Nutrition, and help you get to root-cause resolution, we need to get ultra curious, and observe, observe, observe.
In practice, I use a Food-Symptom Diary tool to help my clients track what they’re eating along side of their physical, mental, and emotional symptoms. By bringing awareness to these connections, I can help them learn which foods help their bodies thrive, and which do the opposite.
Using this tool is essential when changing your diet or trialing a therapeutic diet because you need a way to notice the changes. Effects of diet changes, and symptoms from foods can appear up to four days after consumption!
You can do this, too. It’s not as easy-sounding as following a diet template. But if you invest in doing the work, you will have the information you need to eat a healthy diet for YOU.
Remember, the goal isn’t to figure out the magic pill, because there likely isn’t one. The goal is to establish a trusting relationship between food and your body, so you can know how to best support yourself while you work on other layers of your puzzle.
What Should You Eat?
If you have tried special diets and haven’t had success, and feel even more discouraged than when you started, never fear. It’s time to get curious. You can figure out which foods are safe, and which ones need to be avoided to prevent symptoms.
The first thing I suggest people do in this situation is to get back to the basics. Zoom out and tinker with your macronutrients, which are your carbohydrates, your proteins, your fats, and fiber. Find the right fuel mixture for your body by doing an exercise like the breakfast experiment. In this experiment, eat something with different ratios of macronutrients for several days in a row for breakfast, and observe the effect on your energy, mood, and other physical symptoms.
When you eat mostly simple carbs for breakfast, like a piece of toast and coffee, how do you feel? How about when you add an egg to that mixture? What about when you add steamed greens or other vegetables to those eggs and toast? See if you can get this mixture right, so that you feel satiated and energized until lunchtime.
Your needs for the mixture may be different at different times of day. Experiment to see what works best for you.
Once you feel like you have a good handle on how much protein, fat, fiber, and carbs you need to eat, THEN zoom in and get curious about more specific things: particular foods that aggravate symptoms, or help symptoms.
Using my Food-Symptom Diary, begin tracking what you eat alongside your symptoms. Really get curious. Consider many layers of detail. Look at all the ingredients in your products. Do removal and reintroduction experiments..
Though my Food-Symptom Diary has only 7 days-worth of pages, with more complicated symptoms, it can take more time than that to figure out the source. If you find yourself in this situation, don’t give up. It took me 5 or 6 weeks of tracking to finally figure out that broccoli was contributing to my constipation.
If you still can’t make heads or tails of what you find in your Food-Symptom Diary, it’s time to get connected with me (www.confluencenutrition.com/contact) or another practitioner who is trained to see patterns in a food diary. There may be layers you haven’t considered, or be aware of that could be impacting your symptoms.
Happy tracking!
Have you discovered something useful about your chronic illness by tracking your food and learning about your body’s specific needs? Leave a comment down below!
Sometimes, simply tracking your food and symptoms isn’t enough. You may need deeper layers of investigation. When you’re ready for some support figuring out why your “healthy” diet isn’t working for you, schedule a free Assessment Session with me, and I’ll help you explore how you could find YOUR answers.
To get the bigger picture view of what you can do to restore your whole health, grab your free copy of Roadmap to Recovery: How to Move Beyond Your Symptoms and Create a Personalized Plan to Restore Your Health here.
by Jen Briar-Bonpane | May 16, 2017 | Brain Health, Digestion, Functional Nutrition, Nutrition, Uncategorized
Most of us know by now that refined sugars aren’t good for us and don’t serve our long term health goals. So why is it so hard to resist a stop at the office cookie jar? Understanding how sugar and sweets affect our brain chemistry and mood can be the key to making healthier choices.
Maintaining balanced blood sugar is essential for overall health. Blood sugar that swings high and drops low throws the body into a state of imbalance that can make you feel extremely tired, jittery, anxious, or angry. Excess sugar circulating over time leads to increased insulin production, increased fat storage, high blood pressure, cancer, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, exacerbation of autoimmune conditions, adrenal fatigue, hashimotos, candida, and mental health issues. Eating refined sugar and simple carbohydrates (the “white stuff”) wreaks havoc on our blood sugar and triggers a cascade of reactions in our bodies that affect all of our organ systems.
A few powerful brain chemicals play major roles in driving us to have another muffin, a little more bread, or another quick pass by the candy dish, even when we know we shouldn’t and are committed to our health goals.
- Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that creates feelings of pleasure. When we eat something sweet, we release this potent brain opiate and it makes us feel good…like an instant reward system.
- Another player is the beta-endorphins, which are the brain chemicals known as the brain’s pain killer. They help us cope and boost our feelings of self-esteem. Eating sugar temporarily increases the beta-endorphin levels and leaves us feeling like we can manage the stress of the day a bit better.
- And, of course, our good friend seratonin is part of this as well. When we eat sugar, our insulin levels rise resulting in increased tryptophan which is a precursor to seratonin production. So, more sugar means more seratonin, which helps us feel peaceful and more relaxed.
With these powerful chemicals flooding our system with rewards after we eat sugar, choosing to pass on the treats can be extremely challenging. The good news is that we can stimulate these three neurotransmitters without consuming the sugary foods and simple carbs that can feel good in the moment but set us up for disease in the long term. Here are a few ideas:
- Tyrosine-rich foods like lima beans, avocados, pumpkin seeds, and almonds can stimulate the release of dopamine
- Tryptophan-rich foods like spinach, salmon, mushrooms, mustard greens, and tamari help increase seratonin production
- The taste of something sweet on the tongue helps these feel-good brain chemicals flow. So try experiencing the taste of sweetness without the harm of refined sugar by using low-glycemic sweeteners such as stevia, or naturally sweet low-glycemic foods like grapefruit, nectarines, pears, and blueberries.
by Amanda Malachesky | Apr 25, 2017 | Cleansing, Functional Nutrition, Nutrition, Recipes
Just the other day, my five-year-old found the dried beans in jars in the pantry, and begged me to make sprouts. What’s a mom to do?!
We started mung bean, adzuki bean, and clover sprouts, and I realized that there is no better time to make sprouts than the spring season, as our metabolism is emerging from its winter dormancy. Spring is an ideal time to clean out the cobwebs in our body by cleaning up our diet, and adding lots of fresh foods like sprouts to our diets.
Shown are my mung bean sprouts, and they contain bioavailable vitamins A, C, and E which are important antioxidants to help keep our cells healthy, along with iron and potassium, and 20% protein. The adzuki beans also have niacin (B3) and calcium, along with all the essential amino acids and 25% protein! Clover sprouts also have vitamins A, Bs, C, and E and 30% protein, along with the minerals calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, and zinc. Each of these minerals is important for maintaining the adequate function of our cellular enzymes that keep our DNA healthy and help support our energy and moods.
With all these benefits, I want to make sure you know how to make sprouts! It’s really very easy, and they are a tasty addition to salads, sandwiches, and stir-frys.
I make my sprouts in a pint sized Mason jar, and I replace the cap portion of the lid assembly with a piece of stainless steel window screen cut into the right size. You can also use these pre-made stainless-steel screen lids, available here, or these plastic lids.
How to Make Sprouts
- Pour a few tablespoons of your favorite food to sprout: try mung beans, adzuki beans, lentils, or peas; grain; clover or alfalfa; sunflower seeds; broccoli seeds and radish seeds, etc. Radish and broccoli sprouts are especially rich in sulfurophanes, which are potent cancer-fighting nutrients.
- Fill the jar with water, and soak seeds until they swell and begin to crack their shells. The time varies with the size of the seeds, usually 12-24 hours.
- Once they crack, pour out the water, and rinse the seeds well and drain.
- Lay the jar sideways on a windowsill or kitchen counter where it will get at least a little indirect sunlight.
- Rinse 2 times per day, and replace jar sideways.
- Continue with this step until the sprouts are the length you like. For mung beans, 2-3 days is sufficient.
- Rinse thoroughly, and drain well. Then, replace the screen insert or plastic lid with a normal Mason jar cap and store in the refrigerator.
For a very thorough discussion and specific instructions on how to make all the different kinds of sprouts, check out Sprout People. You can usually find many seeds to sprout in the bulk section of your local health food store (make sure to buy organic), or you could click here to order a sampler pack of organic sprouting seeds.
by Amanda Malachesky | Jan 18, 2017 | Digestion, Functional Nutrition, Nutrition, Uncategorized
Are you thinking I’m talking about the difference between the Standard American Diet (SAD) and a plant-based diet?
Think again.
I have been a dedicated diet experimenter. Not a calorie-restriction dieter, but I have tried being vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, mostly vegetarian with only familiar meat sources, gluten-free, sugar-free, paleo, keto, to name a few. I was trying all of these diets to try to improve my health problems, which in simple terms translated to hormone issues and fatigue. Some of them improved my health, and some quickly proved problematic.
While appropriate food is absolutely a crucial part of any healing protocol, understanding WHY you choose the foods you do is equally important. And if you are managing long-term symptoms or health problems, this is even more the case. Ultimately, there is no one right diet for everyone. Let me repeat: There is no one right diet for everyone! In other words, your food needs are very individual. Ignore this truth at your peril. Let’s dissect what I’m talking about here.
Quality Food, but Wrong Ratios
A few years ago, feeling bad in more ways than one, I stumbled across some information about the keto-adapted diet. I had already been eating a quality, low-processed-food, organic diet for many years, but I still had a dedication and practical addiction to eating carbohydrate-rich foods, including sugary treats. As long as they were gluten-free, we’re doing great, right?!
The keto dietary theory (and paleo theory, which overlaps in many ways) suggests that our bodies do not need to rely exclusively on glucose (sugar) to power our body, and that we can adapt to burning fat as ketones instead. In a keto diet, you eat a high fat, moderate protein, and low carb diet, which turns out to be absolutely delicious! Bacon, cream cheese, and butter are back on the menu, along with grass-fed meat and low carb vegetables. Grains, sugar, and high starch veggies are avoided, as are fruit, except for a small amount of berries. This diet works really well in a lot of cases to transform blood sugar, inflammation, and insulin issues, and reset metabolism. It often helps people lose weight.
When I found keto, I was ALL in! I had an extra fifteen pounds to lose, and hadn’t been feeling myself, and was sure that if I tried this, all my problems would be solved!
You can probably guess I’m going to suggest something different happened. I did feel good for a while, though not “amazing” as so many others advertised. I did lose the extra weight I didn’t want. But after about 8 months, my painful cycles turned to severely painful. I started sleeping even worse than I had been. And I had absolutely no energy. I could hardly get up off the couch, and folding my laundry had me needing a nap. What was going wrong??
In the end, it turns out that I wasn’t thinking about my health problems functionally. I didn’t consider the WHY behind the weight gain, or the hormonal symptoms I was having any farther than food. And because I wasn’t thinking in this way, the keto diet actually turned out to be the perfectly wrong solution. The dramatic increase in dairy consumption worsened my hormone symptoms, because dairy, even if it comes from dairies that don’t give supplemental hormones, comes from a lactating or pregnant animal. The low-carb aspect of the diet DID enable to me to break my addiction to carbs, but since my body wasn’t actually able to digest fats very well due to hidden infections I learned about much, the increased fat consumption worsened my digestion and acne, and left me without energy, and further stressed out my adrenal (stress response) system.
Basically, even though the diet I had been consuming before wasn’t great, it was holding together a pretty delicate system of adaptations to adversity in my body, and switching it up without laying a proper foundation had pretty dramatic and negative consequences. I got a “A” for effort, but an “F” for understanding the WHY behind my choices and what their effects would be. In short, I was asking the wrong questions.
Good Intentions, Accidental Consequences
After wondering why my acne was so bad, and my pain worse, and my digestion terrible, I decided to tilt things toward paleo. Add some more starchy vegetables, like sweet potatoes, and carrots, and squash back in, also some fruit, and lots of those yummy almond flour treats you read about on Pinterest!
My energy did improve a little with increased carbohydrate intake. But in spite of these good intentions, and thinking I was doing my immune system and inflammatory response a favor, I found my pain was still just as bad, there was no change in my skin, AND my digestion was even worse! So frustrating!
Enter oxalates. Oxalic acid is a naturally occurring substance found in humans, animals, and some plants. In plants, they are a defense mechanism, to dissuade herbivory. When consumed by humans, they are ordinarily broken down, bound to minerals, and excreted in the urine or stool. However, if a person has a permeable gut, and if that person is also deficient in minerals that bind to oxalates, they can enter the bloodstream, and travel anywhere the body, where they create sharp, jagged crystals that can cause joint and inflammatory pain.
It turns out that many of the foods that are very high in oxalates are also foods that are very commonly used in a paleo-type diet: spinach, chard, beets, sweet potatoes, plantains, almonds (and many other nuts), chocolate, and carob, to name a few.
Ultimately, even though these foods are healthy, and fine for many people, they can compromise others with certain physiological conditions, or make things far worse. Once again, I wasn’t considering the WHY about my symptoms and health issues, which was leading me down the wrong path. This is why it is so very important, if you want to use food as your medicine, to work with someone knowledgeable about food and how it affects the body, and to make choices aligned with where the body is at right now.
CAUTION: Do not go on a low-oxalate diet quickly! Consult with a knowledgeable practitioner to slowly work this into your dietary practice, to avoid painful symptoms!
How to Start Thinking Functionally About Food
Because we eat three or more times per day, it is crucially important to be choosing foods that will help your healing process. But how do you know which ones are right? We have to work carefully to find the foods that help, and identify the foods that trigger a problem. There are several ways to go about this. I’ll briefly describe two methods here: elimination diets, and food tracking. Food sensitivity testing is also an option, but because no lab test is perfect, an elimination diet is the gold standard for getting direct feedback about problem foods.
Elimination Diet:
In an elimination diet, you remove common problem foods, such as gluten, dairy, sugar, corn, soy, and eggs for a period of time, usually 2-3 weeks. Then, you carefully trial each food, one at a time, and only one per every 3-4 days, and observe to see if there are any negative consequences. You might be surprised about what causes a reaction, and the range of possible problems. Things like brain fog, achy joints, headaches, stomach aches, or gas might be some of the things that can happen. Once you are empowered with this information, the mysteriousness of some of these symptoms disappears and puts you back in the drivers seat of your life.
Food Tracking:
Food tracking involves journaling your food on a day-to-day basis for a while, noticing your macronutrient (protein, fat, and carbs) ratios, and noting any symptoms you feel, how your elimination patterns change or remain the same, and how your mood is faring, and seeing if you can correlate your responses to what you are eating. This kind of information also empowers you with the knowledge of what is creating an impact, and what is not, and provides focus on where to direct your attention to get the most benefit.
Download Your Food-Symptom Diary Here
