challenge - milk

Despite what you might think, or what I might hope, this challenge does not include all dairy products. It is predominately milk based and does not include cheese, which was very disappointing to learn. Having said that, soymilk really isn’t that great, especially when added to things like eggs or mashed potato. So bring on the milk I say.
It’s a seven-day challenge. You can have any type of plain, unflavoured milk you like (such as full cream or skim etc). You start day 1 with 200mls of milk, 400mls on day 2 and 600mls on day 3. Days 4 to 7 continue to have 600mls and you can include some cream cheese, yoghurt or ice cream off the allowed shopping list (provided before you start the baseline).

I learned before the challenge that there are dependencies between the first few challenges and the later challenges. The results of this challenge impacts what you can have for the others. So if you have a reaction to milk, you don’t get to have milk chocolate or cheese in the amine challenge. And you have to take milk back out of your diet until the tests are over! Geez, no pressure.

My prior history of lactose intolerance was not not helping my confidence levels. I mentioned to a friend that I would just lie about the results if they weren’t that bad, and at least that way I could a little bit of white chocolate and some normal tasting mashed potato. They protested quite strongly, and I knew they were right and it would defeat the purpose of doing this in the first place.

I struggled to finish the milk on the first day, not a good sign for the rest of the challenge. But it turns out that hot frothy milk is harder to drink that just plain cold milk. As the week went on, I was getting some strange headaches and periodic narcolepsy type symptoms (at work), feeling bloated and some small blotches on my face. Things didn’t look like they were going in my favour here. I might have also got a little but ambitious by adding all other possible allowed foods including yoghurt, white chocolate and ice cream.

My specialist she did suggest that perhaps we started the challenge to soon, and that I could either count this as a reaction, or at some other stage, retry the challenge. With so much riding on it, agreeing that perhaps these symptoms were leftovers from the wheat, and looking for any excuse to get a no reaction result, I decided that I would try again another time.

But this also meant back to the baseline until I was symptom free for at least 3 days in a row.