Testing Over! Now On To First Phase

The last two weeks has had me rounding out my testing of additional food types as I finish up my Virgin Diet.  Now that I’ve tried corn and peanuts all that is left is to summarize my results and prepare for my entry into the Paleo world for the next three months.  While I have had no ground breaking sensitivities to report, it’s good to know that there may be some minor effects I’m pretty much good to go on any of the foods I’d be considering trying in any of the diets.

I don’t know why I keep lamenting not having any major reaction.  I was just listening to yet another podcast where someone cut out grains from their diet and magically felt 20 years younger and got rid of their chronic symptoms.  Then again, a few days after that I was listening to a podcast where another person had the same radical transformation by eliminating all animal products and eating a whole foods plant based diet.  While it’d be great to feel such a profound transformation, I guess since I don’t have lots of aches, pains or other systems I don’t need that sort of transformation anyway.  That was the original point anyway, wasn’t it?  Rather than being a testimonial of someone whose system is a train wreck being transformed by a diet it was more about the subtle changes and effects of a fully healthy person.

I didn’t post updates on corn testing and peanut testing weeks, because quite frankly there wasn’t much to report.  I ate mostly organic, non-GMO corn, but I doubt I could say that the corn I had at the restaurants was up to that standard.  In the end though, there were no effects to report.  The same is true for peanuts.  The closest thing to an effect would be a bit of the weight gain that I reported during the gluten testing week.  However considering I was eating a lot more food those weeks to compensate for some work stress (yes I’m one of those people) some of that is just plain old fat gain.

So after being off all these foods for a month and then testing each one, what have I found?  It turns out that I don’t think there is anything that I absolutely need to avoid in any of my future diet phases.  I had pretty much no reaction to any of the standard test foods, the closest possible exception is to the gluten.  Even in the case of the gluten I didn’t find it to be something that destroyed me in any way.  There were milder symptoms that will make me cautious about adding it back in when I switch from Paleo to Pescatarian, but it’s nothing so acute that I will be intentionally avoiding it at all cost.

With the testing over I safely, but not intentionally, went on a bit of a bender this weekend.  I have had pretty much a bit of everything and I’m happy to report that I don’t feel much worse for the wear.  Since there was a bit of overindulgence in some dessert products (if you can call a cupcake followed by a cakepop within ten minutes of each other overindulgence) I did get a bit of a sugar rollercoaster.  However overall I’m doing perfectly fine.  I’m also looking forward to enjoying my “authentic” Shamrock Shake for the first time ever.  I just haven’t gotten the concept out of my head after a conversation I had at dinner on Friday night so I’m going to bite the bullet before the window passes this year and the Paleo diet begins.