The Health Pursuits Reading/Study Groups Diet:

What's Helping You Rise, What's Holding You Down

Diet:

Strategies for improving your nutritional status (Food)

Diane’s 4-day Rotation diet: Recipes, and Tips

The Foods on the Rotation

Menus and Recipes:

STRATEGIES FOR IMPROVING YOUR NUTRITIONAL STATUS (Food)

Keeping a food diary for a while may be a big help.

Replace your coffee, tea, soft drinks, alcohol, and even fruit juice with water, 8 glasses of it. Save the other things for treats, once in a while. Your body will be able to use the nutrients saved from processing these things to repair itself instead.
Replace sugar with fruit. Sugar has lots of calories, but no nutrients, and, in fact, uses up more than it provides, while fruit has vitamins, minerals, and fibre. You will have to read labels carefully. A surprising number of things have sugar, e.g., canned soup and ketchup. Getting rid of sugar will eliminate most junk food. Each cigarette has the same effect on the body as a teaspoon of sugar so eliminating that will certainly help free up nutrients for healing.
Increase the number of vegetables you eat. If you can't handle raw ones, cook them. If you haven't liked many vegetables, experiment with tasty ways of preparing them. A spicy dip with raw veggies, a filling soup with vegetables, a stir-fry, a stew, veggies wrapped in a a pita or other flatbread are all ways to squeeze in more veggies. Vegetables have vitamins, minerals, and fibre,
colour, taste, and smell. Yes, I know they take work, but looking after our bodies takes time and is important.
Eat foods that look like what they are: fruit, vegetables, grains, and meats. Anything that doesn't ,has been overly processed and so has lost a lot of its nutritional value. It may fill you up, but it won't give your body what it needs. Processed foods tend to have a lot of additives to preserve them or replace the flavour lost in processing. Further, they are usually loaded with trans-fats (not edible.) Increase intake of beneficial oils and fats, e.g., certain fish, flax oil, olive oil, etc.
Eat foods that agree with you. If you have gas, upset stomach, tiredness after eating, rashes, upset bowels, racing pulse, or aches and pains, it may be what you are eating. If you eat simpler meals with, say five foods, it is easier to tell what is the problem. Keeping track in a food diary might help, or even setting up a food rotation for a while.
If you are experiencing pain and biomechanical factors have been ruled out, you may want to investigate allergies, environmental factors, or specialized diets, such as the blood type diet (Dr. P. D'Adamo) or gluten-, dairy- or nightshade-free diets. Just cutting out the 'Avoid' foods given for your blood type in D'Adamo's books may be enough.
You can do a challenge of a food group, e.g., corn. Eliminate it for 4 days and then eat a lot of it on the fifth day. (Many books including Doris Rapp's Is This Your Child? tell you how to do both a challenge and a rotation diet.) A rotation diet helps because you eat different families of foods each day for 4 days and then repeat the process. You can often tell which day is a problem and thus narrow down the culprit.
You can go for allergy testing (e.g., ALCAT, micro-elisia, Biotron, skin, P/N, etc.) But be aware that each test has its limitations (and expense).

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DIANE'S 4-DAY ROTATION DIET: RECIPES, AND TIPS

REASONS FOR THE DIET:

Many of us have food sensitivities or allergies. There are many strategies with varying degrees of accuracy and expense. Many tests are only about 50% accurate. It can cost $500 for a blood test that is about 85% accurate. Using a rotation diet to help you sort out your sensitivities is cheap and quite effective.
It can take a long time to figure out sensitivities using an elimination diet, which works quite well for children, but not so well for adults, because we have built up such a complexity of problems over time. Using the rotation diet, you will only have a relatively few foods each day. If you feel worse on or after a certain day, you can narrow down the suspects more quickly.
Many of us have an overloaded immune system, which can be calmed by not having to deal with the same foods day in and day out. The combination of an antigen and an antibody is a large molecule called an immune complex. Allowing 4 days before eating the same food family again allows the body to dispose of these immune complexes and not let them build up to do damage.
This rotation will actually make it easier to shop for and prepare meals, because you will know every day what is on the menu. There will be less waste. You can make up a shopping list which lists the ingredients for each day so that you only have to check off what is needed. Laminate it so it's reusable or computerize it. If you make batches of, for instance, soups, you can freeze them in 2-cup wide-mouth sealing jars, as long as you leave a half inch space at the top for expansion during freezing.
When you haven't had certain food groups for 4 days, your taste buds will be eager to have them again. This diet doesn't get boring for that reason. On the rotation, you may actually eat a wider variety of foods than you did before. It's a new cooking adventure.
This diet is gluten-, dairy-, nightshade-, ferment- and citrus-free. I have NOT attempted to rotate oils because they are in the least reactive category and there are not that many good oils to use. Use olive oil in any of the recipes. Use the best quality you can afford, e.g., cold-pressed extra virgin.

CAUTION: If there is a food on the diet that you know causes trouble, leave it out or replace it with another that you know is safe for you. However, if you do change a food, be aware that you may have added gluten, or dairy, or nightshade, or citrus. Some fruits available for substitution are pineapple, mango, or grapes. Some vegetables available for substitution are asparagus, Jerusalem artichoke, eddoes, yucca, or watercress. Kelp or other sea vegetables are a good addition. There are plenty of fish families to use in place (plaice?) of other protein.

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THE FOODS ON THE ROTATION

Day One: Bananas, eggs, chicken (or turkey,) rice, parsley family, including carrots, celery,
parsnips, parsley, ginger, and you could add peas.

Day Two: Pomme fruits, including apples and pears, quinoa, fish including tuna, sardines, ocean
perch, cod, halibut, bluefish, sweet potatoes, spinach family, including spinach, beets and chard, cloves.

Day Three: Berry family (including raspberries, strawberries), blueberries, cranberries, and Melon family (including watermelon, honeydew but not cantaloupe or musk melon because of the mould), amaranth, lamb or beef, bean family including lentils, chickpeas, soybeans, green & yellow beans, black beans, white pea beans, peas, squash and cucumber, garlic and onions, bay leaf, lettuce, raw pumpkin seeds.

Day Four: Stone fruits (including peaches, plums, cherries, nectarines), almonds, millet, salmon, trout or char, cabbage family including cabbage, cauliflower, turnip, broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, bok choy, fennel, anise, dill.

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Menus and Recipes:

It's important for us to have sufficient protein, so each menu attempts to balance fat, carbohydrate, and protein.

Day One Ideas: 2 eggs and a piece of rice toast (Little Stream Bakery's Brown Rice Bread freezes well, so you can use one piece at a time. It's better toasted. It contains nothing but brown rice, flax seed, olive oil, and sea salt.)

2 eggs and a banana
Chicken soup (Make it packed with vegetables and enough chicken so that it's more like a stew.
Carrot soup made with chicken stock and sprinkled with parsley
Rice and a stir fry of veggies, chicken, and grated ginger
Rice stir fried with veggies and 2 eggs
Roast chicken with wild rice and steamed carrots
Roast chicken with mashed parsnips or mashed celery root.
Oven-fried chicken coated with olive oil and rice bread crumbs and carrot and parsnip fries (Coat with olive oil and bake at 400 for 40 min.)
Bananas make a great ice cream substitute: slice and freeze on a tray and then put through the food processor or blender.

Day Two Ideas: Use eggs from previous day for breakfast and make sweet potato fries and fried eggs or sweet potato pie using 1 mashed sweet potato, an egg and one-half chopped apple or pear per person. Stir together with salt and cloves to taste. Pour into a pie plate greased with olive oil and bake for 25 min. at 400 degrees. Can be made the night before for a fast start and tastes good either hot or cold.
Make a chowder, Bake a sweet potato and a piece of fish per person. When it's done, puree sweet potato in food processor, add fish and process. Steam spinach or chard and add. Puree once more. Salt to taste. Good for breakfast, lunch, or supper.

Quinoa porridge: Use quinoa flakes (about 1/3 to Ω c. quinoa flakes to 1 c. water.) Cook until thick. Add a dab of oil, fruit, e.g., poached apples or pears, salt and some spice, e.g., cloves. Quinoa is higher in protein than most grains, so this might hold you until lunch. If not, add some nuts that you know agree with you, e.g., almonds, or peanuts, or pumpkinseeds.

Borscht (beet soup made with a white fish and stock.)
Baked sweet potato and sardines or tuna.
Cold boiled sweet potato salad and tuna or sardines with spinach leaves.
Baked fish and sweet potato, beets and steamed spinach or chard.
Fried fish (rolled in olive oil and quinoa flakes), quinoa pilaff and spinach beet salad or a
spinach apple salad.
Poached apples and pears or applesauce for a dessert when required. You can even put a
beet in for a lovely colour, with no one being the wiser.

Day Three Ideas: Chickpea porridge or amaranth porridge with soy milk and berries

White bean soup with green beans and lamb stewed with garlic, onions, and bay leaf
Lentil soup with lamb stewed with garlic, onions, and bay leaf
Squash soup with chickpeas or soy milk
Lamb chops with baked squash and cucumber salad (use berry juice and olive oil
dressing)
Lamb chops with beans baked with allowed ingredients
Soy burgers made with allowed ingredients
Lamb burgers with sauteed squash rounds and salad
Hummus with cucumber and lettuce and onion salad (watercress is an option)
White pea bean or black bean dip (I use McCormickís mild nightshade-free curry
powder) with zucchini sticks

Day Four: Millet cereal with peaches and almond milk or soy milk from previous day.

Salmon Chowder made with any combo of the cabbage family and dulse. You can use tinned salmon in this when you are rushed.
Millet pilaf with salmon or trout, treated with olive oil and dill and baked on top. This could be made ahead and eaten cold as well.
Salmon and trout fried with salad or stir fry made from any of the cabbage family. Stir-
fried kale is delicious in winter. Steam it for 5 minutes and then stir fry with chopped
onions or garlic. Salt to taste.

Eating Out: This is difficult. One way is to chose a meal, e.g., chicken and rice and carrots no matter what day you are on in the rotation and then just resume where you left off. It won't hurt once in a while. If you have to eat out more often, it will be a challenge. Build from the protein choice: fish, chicken, lamb, or salmon, and then see what vegetables are available. Do not accept their mixtures. A restaurant that cooks fresh food will be able to accommodate you.

Restaurants that merely heat up frozen stuff will not. If you are suspicious that you will not find much acceptable, eat before you leave home, so you aren't hungry. This also goes for eating at others' homes.

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HEALTH PURSUITS Reading/Study Group's
Supportive Reading:

Health Pursuits Rotation Diet:
A New Spin On the Rotation Diet