Elimination Diet Process: Finding food allergies or just intolerances

It's a slow process and requires a lot of patience.  The difficulty in pinpointing the offending foods is that symptoms can occur within the hour or after days and days.  Finding the foods that cause immediate reactions first is easiest; by getting those out of the way it is easier to gauge which foods cause more delayed and subtle reactions.

Starting the process involves several days, up to three weeks, on a completely allergy-free diet.

*TIP for nursing mothers: Extra time = time cleaning out your system, followed by time replacing your breast milk with allergy free milk, then the baby's system getting cleaned out.

1. You stick to a completely allergy-free diet for several days or weeks, until you see a significant reduction in symptoms.  
2. Then you choose what you suspect to be the most offensive food and add it back to your diet and log your reactions, noting times of ingestion and time of onset of symptom.  
3. Between food tests, go back to the allergy-free diet you choose until symptoms are gone for a few days, then introduce the next suspected food.  
4. It's a long process, but results are great!

You can research ways to follow your own allergy-free diet, but we went with the following foods:

a) Turkey breast

b) rice

c) potatoes and other starches like yucca and plantains

d) oatmeal (replaced with plan rice cereal because we later found oatmeal was affecting the baby)

e) soy milk (replaced with rice milk because we later found that he was allergic to soy)

f) fish (only salmon caused a bad reaction - we have no idea why)

g) non-acidic fruits, like bananas

h) tea (decaf)

i) pears

Thing you want to avoid:

a) gassy foods & spices, like onions, beans, garlic, peppers, cumin, etc.

b) eggs

c) nuts

d) candy

e) all processed foods (or anything with more than a few simple ingredients on the label)

f) caffeine and coffee

g) chocolate

h) acidic foods, like orange juice, grapes, etc.

i) wheat/gluten

More info on GI issues and gassy foods: 

• Diet Detective - Food and Gas
  
• Colic Calm - The Cause and Treatment of Infant, Newborn, and Baby Gas Problems
  
• About.com - Food Allergy or Intolerance?