Restrictive, Elimination Diets, Disordered Eating Habits, and Eating Disorders

 I was removing food after food from my diet. My symptoms didn’t get better, instead they got worse…

I felt like everything I ate triggered symptoms, and my diet got smaller and smaller…

I became afraid to eat…

This developed into a long-term struggle with disordered, orthorexic eating habits.

This is part of my story.

This is a reason why I am passionate about helping others avoid falling victim to the mentality that removing foods, food groups, and categories of foods from the diet is healthy, and it will resolve symptoms and health problems (exceptions are IgE food allergies, and potentially a few other foods depending on what’s happening).

I am especially sensitive to seeing children on restrictive, or elimination diets. They desperately need nutrients from foods because they are growing and developing. When nutrients are missing, imbalances develop and symptoms and health problems follow. So does a worsening of current health problems.

If your child has skin rashes like eczema, gut problems, or food allergies and food sensitivities you’re probably very familiar with and have tried elimination diets.

Food allergies and sensitivities are not the root cause. In fact the two most common root causes I see are a lack of nutrients needed for healthy skin (which is made worse by elimination diets), and gut problems.

This is why we start with nutrition (nutrition is giving the body what it needs to grow, develop, repair, function, and thrive), and restore gut health, and why we don’t address the root cause of symptoms and health problems with restrictive, elimination diets.