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:

1. Elimination
2. Challenge
3. Reassessment
4. 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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