FODMAP: Week 2

Today marks the end of week 2 of our elimination phase. I'd love to say that things got a lot easier, but the truth is, it actually got much more difficult. While we had our lows in week 1, week 2 proved to be even worse. For a lot of week 1 we were riding on the high that my husband felt so much better. Now that we know the elimination period actually worked, why do we have to do it for longer? Well it takes this long for all the built up high FODMAP foods to exit your system. Even though there's quite a lot we can still have in the elimination phase, it's hard anytime you have to cut out foods based on necessity, not choice.

As I said before, we want to continue cutting out certain foods in the future that really had no nutritional benefits for us, but we're eager to start finding out what exactly the hubby is intolerant to, so we can go back to having some of the other foods we've been missing (all in moderation, of course.) Since I've always relied on the same sauces/spices to cook with, it's been a real struggle to find other ways to season things, not to mention time consuming. Anytime I want to add garlic flavor to a dish, I have to infuse oil with garlic and strain it to get the flavor. While this isn't a big deal, try multiplying that by 5 or 6 things I have to do to make just one dish. I know I'm complaining, and I really shouldn't be, because being able to create my own foods from scratch has been very rewarding, I just feel like having to do that for every meal and all our snacks has been quite overwhelming.

We just have one more week to get through and then the challenge phase starts. When I told my husband yesterday that the challenge phase would last 6 weeks, I swear I saw a tear escape his eye. During the challenge phase, while we introduce 1 category of food at a time, we continue to eat as we did on the elimination diet. Which is half good and half terrible and bland. So, that's where we're at. I have found a couple of recipes that my husband has really liked, so I will for sure be adding those in future posts.

Tell me what helps you stick to a healthy lifestyle?