the baseline

Bamboo shoots, cabbage, celery, chives, dried beans, green beans, leek, lentils, iceberg lettuce, mungbean sprouts, white peeled potatoes and red cabbage. These vegetables are my new best friend. Sadly, there is only so much you can do with them. Pears in syrup, chicken without skin, salt, eggs, sugar, canola oil and quinoa are pretty much the only other things I can add to my diet. It’s really not that exciting. Not only that, but the first part of the diet consists of four weeks of these baseline foods.

Also at first I thought I would only have to eat this kind of food for the first four weeks and that would be the end of that. But it turns out that is not the case. If at any point I have any kind of symptoms during the tests, I have to revert back to this food until the symptoms clear for a period of time.

While I knew that not eating wheat would make me feel better, I was surprised at how quickly it started to work. Emotionally I could feel a difference within the first week. Sadly, it did take quite some time for all the other symptoms to disappear. Slowly, but surely I was improving. I just hoped that the results of the challenges would swing in my favour, and I was confident that with wheat out of the way, and the support of these new colourless and flavourless foods, I would do just fine.

What's even worse is that I can't even eat some of the baseline foods - just to make it even more of a fun challenge. Rice and some other foods are also included on the baseline for the more normal people, but it sure does make it more interesting... or less depending on how you look at it.