Fine Tune Triggers
TLDR - If you are very sick, you may be negatively reacting to many things around you and identifying specific triggers can be extremely difficult. There are additional tools you can use to help sort this out.
Tools to Identify Triggers
Elimination Diets: Refer to my Elimination Diets post for more detail. This one is incredibly important. Our modern diets are very unhealthy. Even when you cut out the bad, your body may still give you a negative response to things that should be good. This requires limiting your diet to a very small list of foods that are less common triggers for most people, getting yourself to a baseline, then slowly introducing foods. This helps identify what your triggers are.
Environmental Controls: This one may be difficult. If you’re living in an environment that is constantly triggering you, then it will be difficult to identify what the specific triggers are. Is it mold, actinomyces, dust, pets, plants, or something else. Unfortunately you will need to clean thoroughly and test out different living environments until you find you are no longer triggered. You can then slowly introduce different things until you identify what the trigger is.
Symptom Journaling: We eat and come into contact with many things throughout our day. I found it very helpful to create a spreadsheet that mapped out everything I ate, any supplements or medications I took, any new locations I may have visited, and any additional comments. I also included a score with how I felt for the day. This helped me track if I was feeling worse and what might have happened that day or days before to cause it. This is time consuming but extremely helpful to identify triggers.
Muscle Testing: In my opinion, this is the most important and impactful tool you can learn. I put it at the bottom as it is difficult to learn and many people may consider it “woo.” I initially thought it was too, but it is absolutely real and will be an extreme game changer in your life. In short, you can learn a technique to use your muscles to tell you if you’re strong or weak with something, before consuming it. This is incredibly helpful in identifying food, supplements, and medications that could cause you a negative response.
Blood and Gut Testing: There are millions of different tests available that claim to identify specific food sensitivities or other triggers. In my opinion, all of these should be skipped. They are often very expensive and unreliable. Many gut tests claim to tell you exactly what you’re sensitive to. I wasted money on one and found that while it had some accuracies, it also had many inaccuracies. It is much more cost effective and accurate to follow the recommendations above. Remember, everyone is trying to make money.