Eliminating EVERYTHING - The First 6 Weeks

With less than a month until I start the 6 food elimination diet, I'm definitely in preparation mode.  Step one - reschedule a pie baking class that I'm gifting my mom for Mother's Day!  I realized after buying it that I booked it for mid-elimination.  2.5 hours of pie baking without a single taste???  Pretty sure that classifies as cruel and unusual punishment.  Thankfully I was able to reschedule to 2 weeks before my start date, so now I can have my pie and eat it too!

Other than that, I started by getting to know the elimination list.  The University of Wisconsin guide that I found was helpful with a handy dandy chart:

Ok, gripe number one: this is totally not SIX categories, but rather EIGHT!  In nutrition school we learned these as the top eight allergens.  Shellfish and fish were considered two groups, as were nuts and tree nuts.  I know it's just semantics, but it feels like more foods than I was led to believe!

After a few days of thought, I've decided eggs are going to be the hardest by far.  We LOVE eggs at my house, eating them nearly every day for breakfast.  Dairy will probably be the second hardest.  We have followed a paleo diet on and off for a while now, so I'm actually used to life without dairy, but cheese is one of my favorite foods, and Greek yogurt and cottage cheese are usually my high-protein egg alternatives.  Now I'm just stuck with meat and beans for protein, which kind of bums me out.  I won't miss nuts, fish or soy that much, other than perhaps as an alternative protein source when I'm officially sick of meat and beans.  As for wheat, I'm not too nervous.  The world is pretty used to catering to gluten free folks these days, so wheat probably won't be as tricky as it would have been five or ten years ago.

T-28 days till go time!