Your Personal Paleo Code: The 3-Step Plan to Lose Weight, Reverse Disease, and Stay Fit and Healthy for Life (20 page)

Now that you’ve finished the Thirty-Day Reset and know how your body feels on a strict Paleo diet, it’s time to add some of the gray-area foods back into your diet. These are foods that were not a part of the original human dietary template but that are nevertheless nourishing and health-promoting
when they’re well tolerated
. The important thing to understand about these gray-area foods is that different people respond to them in different ways. For example, some people (I happen to be one of them) thrive on dairy products like butter and yogurt. However, those same foods can give other people stomach cramps or make them break out in hives. We don’t know why people react so differently to the same food, but genetics, gut microbiota (gut flora), immune health, stress, and emotional and psychological factors each play a role.

Before we get into details about how to safely reintroduce these foods, we should answer the question:
Why reintroduce them at all?
If you’re like most of my patients and readers, after the Reset phase, you’re probably feeling better than you have in many years—maybe better than you’ve ever felt in your life. If that’s the case, why rock the boat? That’s certainly a valid question. If you are feeling better than ever, and you don’t miss any of the gray-area foods, then by all means, continue with the Thirty-Day Reset Diet. There’s no risk in doing so. That’s how our ancestors ate
for hundreds of thousands of years. The foods permitted in Step 1 are loaded with all of the nutrients necessary for you to be healthy and vital and avoid disease. You could keep eating that way for the rest of your life (likely to be a lot longer than if you stayed on the standard American diet), and many who embrace the Paleo diet do just that.

However, if you’re like most of my patients, you might be missing some of the foods that were prohibited during Step 1. I’m sorry to tell you this, but if potato chips and cheese doodles are two of your favorite foods, you won’t be reintroducing them in Step 2. The good news is that if you’ve been missing butter on your sweet potato or that morning bowl of yogurt with berries you love so much or that occasional Thai food meal with white rice, you’re in luck. Those are some of the foods you will be reintroducing during Step 2. They’re perfectly healthy foods—provided you tolerate them well.

But how do you know if you tolerate them? I’ve developed a very specific program—tested and refined with thousands of patients and readers—that will help you answer that question. And in my opinion, doing a controlled food reintroduction like I’m about to teach you is the only way you can accurately determine how a particular food affects you. There are many food-sensitivity tests on the market, but all of them have serious limitations or problems that limit their usefulness. It sure would be nice if there was a test that told you which foods you could tolerate and which you couldn’t, but so far that test doesn’t exist.

While the food reintroduction does require some time and effort, by the end you’ll know exactly what does and doesn’t work for
you
—which is much better than relying on the experience or advice of others. Just because something works for me, your best friend, or a total stranger on an Internet forum doesn’t mean it will work for you.

In the sections that follow, I’ll explain some general guidelines about how to successfully reintroduce foods, tell you which foods I think are safe to reintroduce, and provide specific advice about the order in which to reintroduce them.

Food reintroduction requires a methodical approach, and there’s both a right and a wrong way to do it. The method I’m going to share below has been tested with hundreds of patients and thousands of readers and listeners around the world, and it is very effective provided you stick with it.

It’s important to understand that negative reactions to food can happen in three different ways:

The delayed and extended reactions to foods are what make it so challenging to determine how a particular food affects you. For example, let’s say you’ve just finished the Reset phase and are ready to move on to Step 2. You decide you’re going to reintroduce butter, since it’s the food you’ve missed the most. So you get up in the morning and cook your eggs in butter instead of coconut oil. You feel fine at lunchtime, so you boldly decide to reintroduce white rice at dinner, which you’ve also missed. The next morning you wake up with terrible diarrhea. Logic might suggest that it was the white rice, since you ate it at dinner and had problems the next morning. You might even forget that you ate butter at breakfast the day before. It’s entirely possible, though, that the butter, and not the rice,
is what caused the problem—it simply took a while for the reaction to manifest itself. This illustrates the importance of the first guideline of food reintroduction:

It’s essential that you reintroduce only one food in a three-day period. This gives time for the immediate, delayed, and extended food reactions to happen. If you don’t wait this long before introducing the next food, and you have a reaction, you’ll never know which food caused it. When I say one food, I’m not referring to an entire category of foods (like dairy products),
but a single food
. For example, you could introduce butter, wait three days, then try cream, wait another three days, then yogurt, and so on. This may seem overly cautious, but it’s necessary. I suggest eating one normal-size serving per day of the food you’re reintroducing. Make a note in your food diary (see below) of exactly when you eat it, so it’s easier for you to track any reaction.

As you’ve gathered by now, it can be tricky to determine how foods are affecting you as you add them back in. This is where the food diary really shines. Sometimes it’s clear how a food affected you only in retrospect, when you look back at your diary to determine a pattern. I’ve provided a blank diary template as part of the Personal Paleo Code resources you’ll find on my website to make this as easy as possible. You’ll be recording what you ate, what time you ate it, how you felt before you ate it, and how you feel at various times throughout the day afterward. If you’re a little unclear on how you’re doing with a new food you’ve reintroduced, you can just take out your diary and study the previous two to three days. Has there been any change in your energy level, mood, or digestion compared to the days prior to when you introduced the food? If so, that’s probably a sign you’re not tolerating the new food very well.

If you reintroduce a food and have a reaction to it, it’s best to remove that food and wait until your body settles back to where it was before. This usually takes somewhere from one to three days, but if the reaction was severe, it may take longer. If you reintroduce a food and you’re not sure how you’re reacting to it, remove it, wait three days, and reintroduce it again. Most of my patients need to do this only twice or, at most, three times to determine whether the food is safe for them to eat.

The key is not to rush it. I know it can be frustrating, and you’re excited to start eating some of those foods you missed during the Reset phase, but if you move too fast, you risk having to start over again. You’ve already invested thirty days or more during Step 1, so don’t sabotage all that hard work. A little patience here will go a long way.

You might find that you’re able to tolerate certain foods well at some times but not others. For example, perhaps when you’re feeling well rested and healthy overall, you can eat some yogurt and feel fine afterward. However, if you haven’t slept well for a few nights or if you have a cold or the flu or if your typical symptoms are flaring up, even a small amount of yogurt might make you break out or hurt your gut.

This is why context matters. If you’re systemically inflamed due to sleep deprivation, an infection, or an autoimmune-disorder flare-up, your body won’t respond in the same way to food as it does when you’re feeling relatively healthy. Avoid reintroducing new foods if you’re sick, stressed, or otherwise unwell, and consider returning to a more basic Thirty-Day Reset Diet during these times in the future, even after you’ve figured out your own Personal Paleo Code.

Here’s a list of typical symptoms people experience when they are sensitive to a particular food:

This is just a partial list. You also want to look out for an increase of any symptoms that lessened during the Reset phase but were typical for you prior to starting it. If you do experience a reaction, stop eating that particular food and wait a few days for things to settle. This is important. At that point, you can try reintroducing that food again (if you’re uncertain whether it was responsible for the reaction), or you can move on to the next food. But do not move on to a new food when you’re still in the midst of a negative reaction to something you just reintroduced.

One last thing. It’s important to distinguish between food intolerance, which is what we’re talking about here, and true allergy. A food allergy involves an immune response to an antigen. An antigen is a substance (in this case, a food) that provokes the production of antibodies by the immune system. The reactions in true food allergies can be very severe and in some cases can even result in anaphylactic shock and death. The most common food allergens are peanuts, tree nuts (for example, walnuts, pecans, almonds), fish, shellfish, milk, eggs, soy products, and gluten-containing products. Fortunately, true food allergies are relatively rare.

Food intolerances are much more common. They involve an adverse reaction that isn’t necessarily characterized by an antibody-driven immune response. (One exception to this is gluten intolerance, which does often involve the production of antibodies against gluten.) A food intolerance occurs when something in a food irritates your digestive system or when you’re unable to properly digest or break down the food. Intolerance to lactose is the most common food intolerance.

When we talk about reintroducing foods in this section, we’re attempting to discover food intolerances rather than food allergies. If you have an allergy to something like peanuts or shellfish, it’s likely you already know that.
Do not attempt to reintroduce foods that you have a known allergy to.
Those foods should be avoided for life. However, it’s relatively safe to reintroduce foods you suspect, but are not certain, you might be intolerant of, because the intolerance reactions are not life-threatening. They can be very uncomfortable, but they are rarely serious.

I believe the foods below are generally healthy and nourishing when they are well tolerated by the individual. Remember, these aren’t mandatory. If you feel great on the Thirty-Day Reset Diet and have no urge to add these foods back in, by all means, continue what you’re doing!

While it’s true that dairy products have the potential to cause problems, recent genetic adaptations have enabled some people—particularly those of Northern European descent—to digest them without a problem (see
here
to
here
). In addition, there are several reasons you might wish to bring dairy products back into your diet.