Over the past few months I have been recovering pretty well. I have managed to avoid a number of symptoms that I usually suffer from. However I have had the presence of one unpleasant symptom, it has been driving me up the wall and causing me much grief. It felt like every few days that I will go through a patch of having an upset stomach. At first I thought it must have been something I was eating. I would monitor it every time it happened, until it got to a point where I was eating fresh raw foods and I was still having this problem. I like to think that I’m a healthy eater. I was avoiding gluten, dairy, processed foods and just trying to eat as fresh as possible.

I was out one day visiting one of my local health food stores, buying some supplies. I was after some gluten-free oats that the shop assistant had shown me previously. Cameron pointed out that they weren’t actually gluten-free and were $12. They had GF on them but it didn’t stand for gluten-free it stood for something else. It turns out gluten-free oats are hard to come by in Australia. I had also been buying gluten-free bread. I was now wondering why am I buying this if it’s not fresh bread? It’s still filled with preservatives. Are they any better for you!? Probably not!

I was pretty over it! I felt like I was wasting money on foods that weren’t really helping. Since I’ve been suffering with ME/CFS, it has made me more sensitive to foods. Is it really just ME/CFS making me feel sick all the time? What if I possibly had a food allergy? Or a intolerance to a certain food? I needed to find out for certain.

When I visited my Naturopath last month I expressed my frustration. She presented me with two options. The first option was the rule out rule in option. How this works is you pick out certain foods that you think are contributing to making you feel sick. Stop eating them for a few weeks and then slowly re-introduce one of the foods back over a period of time. This option was not going to work out for me. ME/CFS brings on a lot of symptoms by itself, which you would get if you had a food intolerance. The second option was paying for a food intolerance test. How it works is a blood test is taken and they test the antibodies in your blood against the foods. It’s not tested on all foods only on the common foods; fruits, meat, vegetables, seafood, milk, wheat, chocolate etc.

I went with the second option. The test was priced at $380. It was a bit pricey but I was going crazy and it was doing my head in. I needed answers!!!

The results came back a couple of weeks ago. There were two foods that came up that I have a mild allergy too. The first was egg yolk, I’m not too fussed about this one. I use to feel a bit yuck sometimes after eating eggs, so I never really have been a huge egg eater. The second food surprised me a bit, it was almonds. I eat almonds daily, if I’m not snacking on them, I’m using almond milk in my granola, smoothies or oats. Lucky for me I only have a mild reaction. Basically this meant that I should only eat these foods occasionally.

Although my test came back fine against milk (that was the only dairy food listed) I’m still going to avoid dairy or only have it occasionally. I feel better when I’m not having lots of dairy. I honestly think that it may have been the cause to all my migraines.

I’m glad that chocolate was fine, I would have had big problems if it wasn’t. Over all I’m happy to have had the test done. I now know that having almonds everyday could of had a little bit to do with my upset stomach, but is also just part of ME/CFS. I will not be going out of my way to buy gluten-free products as I feel I do not need too. I’m sticking to fresh food!

I would love to hear your thoughts or tips! Have you done a food intolerance test before? What did you think of it?

Lennae xxx