Remember, changing your diet is only one of many tools
available to help you take charge of your health and
rebalance your body from yeast overgrowth.
So, don’t give up. Yes, this eating plan is
usually difficult, especially at the start. But relief
is possible. Following the diet plan helps you experience
relief faster. Ask for help and support from others
in our online support
group.
The Anti-Yeast diet has four distinct stages and for
best results should be followed in order from elimination
to maintenance:
-
Elimination
-
Challenge
-
Reassessment
-
Maintenance
Each
of these diet stages includes specific lists of foods
choices that are permissible and not permissible to
help you get the maximum results for your efforts.
Each stage also allows for experimentations by adding
foods to help you determine if they cause you problems
or not. When you’re starting out, this sort
of experimentation can be confusing, awkward, and
uncomfortable. To start, focus only on the first stage,
elimination.
Also, using the right supplements
and prescription medications
while you’re addressing the diet component of
your anti-candida program helps tremendously by confronting
your body’s imbalance from multiple points of
view.
1. ELIMINATION:
In the first phase, you’ll eliminate foods
that feed yeast organisms and encourage yeast overgrowth.
Sugar, yeast, and mold containing foods are the
most important items to eliminate. In addition,
keeping starches and fermented foods out of your
food plan helps tremendously. This first phase of
your diet usually needs to last for 2 to 4 weeks,
depending on how long it takes for your body to
start feeling relief from some of your major symptoms.
The simplest way to approach this phase is to focus
on eating fresh meats, vegetables, nuts, seeds,
unprocessed oils, water and tea. Here’s a
shopping list
to help you.
If you eat other foods during this first stage,
you may slow the process of clearing yeast and toxins
from your body. And, you may have a more difficult
time noticing a direct link between foods and symptoms.
But, you may also find foods that don’t cause
trouble for you. In Dr. Crook’s newest book,
The Yeast Connection and Women's Health,
you’ll find foods to eat cautiously or experiment
with that aren’t on the grocery list we’ve
supplied. Whether you choose to experiment with
a broader array of foods or not, it’s important
to remember, perfection is not what we’re
after here. Instead, experiment, explore, get curious.
Don’t be afraid to make a “mistake”.
Just tune in to your body’s
signals and notice what your intuition might
be telling you.
Eliminating foods that enhance your yeast overgrowth
plays an important role in getting relief, however,
eating such a limited diet is often inconvenient,
impractical, and difficult. We offer new recipes
each month on this site and a cookbook
with specially written recipes and menus to help
you with easy, quick, tasty food ideas. Plus, see
TRY THIS and EXPERT
ADVICE for other ideas to get relief. And, be
sure to sign up for our free weekly E-news
to receive suggestions and ideas to help you as
you focus on taking charge of your health.
When you’ve finished this phase, go to:
2.
CHALLENGE.
To begin this phase, you will have experienced some
relief and begun to control your yeast overgrowth
by following the elimination phase for 2-4 weeks.
Now you’re ready to add back in some of the
foods you avoided in the phase 1. From the information
you gain through the challenge, you’ll develop
a list of foods which you can and cannot tolerate.
Here’s how this phase works. Continue following
the diet plan from the elimination stage. ADD ONE
PORTION OF ONE NEW FOOD IN A DAY and notice any
reactions or symptoms your body experiences in response
to the addition of the new food. If you notice a
reaction, give yourself at least one day without
symptoms before challenging yourself again with
another new food. If you don’t notice a reaction,
continue each day adding another new food and noticing
your body’s response.
An important point: start with foods containing
only one ingredient. For example, if you add bread
and experience a reaction, you will be hard pressed
to determine whether wheat or yeast or some other
ingredient caused the reaction. Dr. Crook suggests
beginning with a tablet of brewers yeast to find
out if you’re sensitive to yeast. Then try
one type of fruit. And, so on. For the greatest
success hold off adding sugar or sugar containing
foods until your body has been clear of symptoms
for a much longer period of time. Get on the online
support group
and vent the frustration and impatience that you
may be feeling at this point. And, ask for help.
People have made it through this stage and can give
you hope to hang in there. Ask.
Record
the foods you eat each day and body symptoms and
sensations linked to eating those foods to help
you track your challenge phase with more accuracy.
As you begin to feel comfortable with your list
of foods that your body seems to tolerate and not
tolerate, take a look at Phase 3, the reassessment
phase, to begin identifying possible hidden food
sensitivities or allergies.
3.
REASSESSMENT
Are you still bothered by quite a few symptoms?
Do you have a large list of foods that you haven’t
tolerated well from the first two phases of the
diet? If you answer “yes” to either
question, you’ll want to follow this reassessment
phase to determine if food allergies and sensitivities
may be playing a role in your continuing discomfort.
In The
Yeast Connection and Women's Health,
you’ll find chapters on allergies, asthma,
and food and chemical sensitivities that may be
playing a role in your symptoms. Here, we pulled
some highlights from those chapters.
If you are feeling much better and aren’t bothered
by many symptoms, you may choose not to work through
this phase and go on to the maintenance
phase.
There are two major parts to this reassessment phase:
Testing for your body’s reaction to all the
most common allergic foods and rotating your foods
so you eat a particular food only one of every four
to seven days. To begin, avoid the following foods
for at least two weeks. Some bodies need 3-4 weeks
to clear out enough to notice a distinct change, so
if you don’t detect a noticeable difference
in symptoms, continue for a few more weeks to see
if this helps.
-
Any food or beverage you eat more than once a week.
Track
your normal week’s intake and then notice
which foods are on there frequently.
-
Chocolate
-
Citrus
-
Corn
-
Food coloring and additives
-
Fruit punches
-
Milk
-
Processed and packaged foods
-
Soft drinks
-
Sugar
-
Wheat
-
Yeast
-
Beef
-
Chicken
-
Coffee
-
Eggs
-
Oats
-
Pork
-
Rice
- Tea
-
Tomatoes
-
White potatoes
Once you recognize you are feeling more clear, begin
adding each one of the avoided foods back into your
diet. Add only one new food at a time. And, give at
least a day or two between each addition to help you
clearly identify any symptoms that might be caused
by that food. Make sure you track in detail your food
and symptoms as you do these experiments.
If you don’t notice any symptoms, wait another
four to seven days before eating that particular food
again. This rotation of foods helps you detect hidden
sensitivities.
If you notice symptoms, you may want to discuss allergy
treatments with your physician. This may allow you
to eat this particular food without problems or you
may need to avoid eating it on any regular basis.
By the end of this phase, you’ll have developed
an individualized list of foods you can and can’t
tolerate which allows you to move on to phase 4, maintenance.
4.
MAINTENANCE
Congratulations! To have reached this phase means
you’ve explored your eating and your body’s
sensitivities in depth. And, from that search and
experiment process have developed an individualized
list of foods your body can and cannot tolerate.
No longer are you feeling sick all over and not
sure why. Sure, you may not be all the way back
to where you want to be. Diet is only one step of
the process. But, you have faced the unknown and
come out the other side with helpful and healing
facts about you, food, and your body. By using these
new awarenesses, you will be able to care for your
self and your health will much greater confidence
and assurance.
This is the stage you can begin to loosen up. “Eat
a slice of birthday cake on your birthday. Sip a
glass of red wine once in a while.” says Dr.
Crook, in The
Yeast Connection and Women's Health. You
now know what to watch for and can go back to a
more restricted food plan any time you run into
trouble.
You and your health care provider will probably
want to develop a maintenance program of supplements
and prescription medications
to ensure a strong immune system and a balanced
body.
This phase also involves strengthening and reenergizing
your body and its organ systems. Your supplement
regimen will help with some of that.
Don’t forget all the other ways your body
is replenished. Take a look at your daily routine.
Review the steps in the lifestyle
section on this site and see if any of those techniques
to “feed” your body feel right to you.
Most candida-related conditions involve some element
of chemical and/or
mold sensitivities. Review your daily exposures
to perfumes, pesticides, household cleaning chemicals,
etc. and minimize your exposure.
Most importantly, notice and trust your intuition.
You have great instinct about what works for you
and what doesn’t. Don’t let “experts”
convince you that you don’t know what you’re
talking about. You know about yourself and your
body, probably better than anyone else. Trust your
own knowing, explore all sorts of avenues
for information. Take advantage of available resources
, talk to others and find out what works for them
. You deserve good health. Let us know how you’re
doing at contact@yeastconnection.com.
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