2014-01-15
in
4 min read
With one week of the elimination diet now behind me I wanted to do a summary of how things are going so far. I think as the diets unfold it’s good to look at the state of the nutrition, how I was feeling, if there were any problems et cetera. So while this is important, I also think it’s good practice for the real deal.
I wish I could say I feel better than I ever have in my life. I can’t say that, nor can I say that I feel especially bad. Early in the week I had some fatigue problems and some mild near-headache symptoms. However if I were to compare that to my cold-turkey quitting from caffeine stint a few years ago they were extremely mild. I didn’t get any illness or flu like symptoms. I haven’t had some radical change in any emotional or physical states at all really. My stomach has been feeling better than it had in the month of December, but that was due to the overly indulgent nature of how I had been eating not a recurring condition.
It was good for me to get a focused cleaning up of my diet, which this obviously did. While I did eat a pretty good amount of fruits and vegetables, and a good variety, I did have some problems with getting all of my nutrients earlier in the week. This wasn’t due to not eating enough food, I actually ate to satiety on most days. It’s just a question of the foods I’m eating are missing some key nutrients. It’s not catastrophic, but my goal for any of these diets is to hit 100% of the RDA and DV values for every key nutrient. For the first week of this diet I instead got:
As you can see for the most part I’m not doing incredibly bad. Most of the categories are much greater than 100% of both RDA and DV. What are each of those columns? I’ll be having another article on the differences between the two, but think of them both as different measures for how much of a given nutrient a person should be eating in a given day. Generally over 100% is good, except for things like sodium. With that in mind I wasn’t thrilled with calcium being a mere 68% of values, iron being 84% and Riboflavin, Thiamin and Zinc being just below 90% in the DV column. Unfortunately I didn’t realize that was happening until later in the week, so for the second week I’m going to try to balance them all better each day. That is usually by doing something like eating some nuts fish or vegetables.
What about Pantothenic Acid at a mere 63% DV? This is one of those instances where I just have to accept some of the tool’s limitations. For whatever reason, Fitday has decided to not let you enter in that field on custom foods. Since a lot of my nutrition is coming from foods I had to enter manually, whatever pantothenic acid they did have simply isn’t in my numbers. What about folic acid being at a mere 8%? That seems off the charts low, doesn’t it? As it happens, folic acid is a synthetic form of folate that the food industry invented in the early 20th century as an additive to processed foods. If you aren’t eating a lot of processed foods, as in my case, you simply aren’t going to get any. It’s standing in, for lack of a better expression, for the food folate anyway, so as long as those numbers look good everything else is too.
Mood and energy wise things were okay. I was really crashing hard the first three days, starting off with Sunday feeling pretty high energy and bottoming out by Tuesday. I got some recovering by the end of the week, but high energy days are still few and far between. My knees started bothering me, even without any working out, which seems odd to me since that is often touted as a sign of inflammation that you would go on a diet like this to combat.
With no slip ups, a generally good experience and the nutrition being not outstanding but pretty decent, I’d vote for week 1 being a pretty decent one.