Has anyone followed Dr John Mansfield's Eli... - Healthy Eating
Has anyone followed Dr John Mansfield's Elimination diet - for good health and added bonus of losing weight?
Not heard of that one. I am in the process of reading Gut Reaction by Gudrun Jonsson. My main interest is health but of course weight loss can be an added bonus. I do feel though that exercise is as important as a healthy diet in maintaining good health.
This my second occasion - I first read Dr John Mansfield's book on 'Arthritis; the allergy connection' way back in the early 90s. I found that improved my Arthritis dramatically to the point of hardly suffering. I wanted to loan this book recently to someone who I thought would benefit, obviously it had not been returned by whoever I had previously loaned it to - so I went online to see if I could still get it. It had been updated and now called 'Arthritis, Allergy, Nutrition & the Environment' but I also noted that he had written yet another book called 'The Six Secrets of Successful Weight Loss' - which had grown out of Dr John realising that in curing many ailments patients all lost weight - double benefit.
I have to say that I was actually thrilled to read both books - I felt I had gold in my hands!!! If only this information was out there generally you would empty the Doctor's waiting rooms by half at the very least.Most people could eat themselves healthy - the more refined, processed etc food we eat the more unhealthy we become, but of course the food industry has massive power, as does big pharma - so they do not want you to know this. The biggest tragedy is that as we age it is so much easier to eat a packet of processed food than prepared all the individual ingredients from scratch - especially if you are on your own - that creates the downwards spiral badly affecting not just your physical health but mental health too.
This very topic was on last nights news. I rarely touch pre packaged / processed foods, I eat fairly well so my doc says according to blood results and my hairdresser who says she can tell the health of a person by their hair. It stands to reason, put quality nutrients in the body the better it will be maintained. Put low nutrient food in along with excess, salt fat, sugar etc. illness is bound to result.
Glad you found the book helpful to you, want to share some more about the elimination diet? I am interested.
You start with about 40 foods - all basic of course - that you eat for the first week. You can only use rock salt and olive oil for cooking and seasoning and you must drink bottled water. Your weight will drop by about 7 lbs. Any symptoms you might have of migraine, arthritis, asthma etc may grow worse initially (withdrawal) but then should have disappeared by the end of the week. You then introduce specific foods twelve hours apart, weighing yourself before eating that food. Obviously you weight does go up naturally during the course of the day by around 1.5 lbs. But you lose that overnight. Any food that increases you weight above this is 'bad' for you, you may notice the return of your symptoms too. Some foods have to be eaten for more than a day as the reaction can be slow.
For instance the grains, potatoes and sugars - I reacted to all of them but quite rapidly. I also reacted to grapes with ghastly almost drilling sensation in my right hand. Sometimes it has taken me three days for my weight to get back down again. Even though I took a mixture of sodium & potassium bicarbonate to 'flush' the offender out of my system. After some 40 odd days I felt I was plateauing and got some advice and am now not eating fruits (obviously the fructose) to get the weight loss going again.
I thought that I did have a mild reaction to tomatoes so I cut those out, however I did go on eating peppers - mmm lovely grilled peppers (!) - but I had not realised they are relatives of tomatoes and aubergines......so hence my sticking I believe.
At the end of this I will know the foods that cause me problems and I will need to decide whether when getting back onto my usual raw foods diet I can live without them. If not one can be de-sensitised against them. It depends how often you want to eat them. In my case I do use quite a lot of sun dried tomatoes and peppers in my raw food dishes and I think I will miss their flavours.
But the bonus will be that I should have lost the weight that has built up over the last few years and feel absolutely top hole!!!
That's very interesting, thanks for sharing this. I hope you find the results are good. Keep in touch.
BC x
