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Narrated.

Working it out

Finding what is actually doing it

How to work out which foods are involved without cutting out half of what you eat.

5 minSource: Narrated

Why guessing goes wrong

Symptoms often arrive hours after the meal that caused them, so the food you blame is usually the wrong one.

That is how women end up having eliminated gluten, dairy and onions with no improvement and a much smaller diet.

A simple version that works

Two weeks of plain notes. What you ate, roughly when, and how you felt that evening and the next morning. No changes yet.

Look for repeats rather than single incidents. One bad Tuesday is not evidence.

Change one thing at a time for two weeks, then put it back and see whether the symptom returns. Putting it back is the part everyone skips and the part that proves it.

Take the notes to a doctor or a dietitian rather than a longer exclusion list.

Before cutting anything major

Coeliac disease testing needs gluten in your diet to be accurate, so cutting it out first makes it harder to diagnose. That alone is a good reason to raise it with a doctor before a big elimination.

The gut is one of the few places in this stage where small, ordinary changes to what you eat reliably show up within weeks.

General information, not medical advice. Narrated never diagnoses.

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