Well, as I announced last week in my post on the Emotions of Reintroducing Foods on the AIP Diet, I have begun the reintroduction process. I have been strictly in the elimination phase for about seven months and my ulcerative colitis has been fully in remission for a little over four months.
I am very adamant that this is not a process that can or should be rushed. I am not reintroducing foods because I am desperate or deprived. I am reintroducing them slowly and in the proper order because I feel that I have given my gut enough time to heal and now it is time to move on to the next stage of information gathering.
So, what do I mean by reintroducing foods in the right order? According to Sarah Ballantyne’s book The Paleo Approach, “My (Sarah’s) suggested order of food reintroductions takes into consideration both the likelihood of reaction (based on what science says about how that particular food interacts with the gut barrier or the immune system) and the inherent nutritional value of the food.” 1
Sarah breaks up the order of reintroductions into four phases. Right now, I am still in phase one. Some of the phase one foods are foods that were optional to remove in the first place, such as legumes with edible pods like green beans, and other things like fruit based spices, neither of which I needed to remove. The rest of the foods are things that are the least likely to cause problems, such as egg yolks, seed based spices and grass-fed ghee.
When I first started thinking about reintroductions I was not terribly thrilled about only being able to add back in the yolk of the egg. What is the point? I thought. An egg is an egg; only being able to add back in half of it to my diet doesn’t really help me. However, as I started to more seriously research the reintroduction process and create a plan for myself I realized that egg yolks from pastured, healthy chickens, actually have a lot of nutritional value and that being able to include them into my diet would be beneficial for my health as well as for my morale as I began the reintroduction process. I was right. Just being able to taste the egg yolk made me excited and lifted my spirits. Plus after going through the reintroduction process with seed based spices, having an egg yolk felt so substantial and like a great achievement. That may sound silly to you, but it was a great morale booster for me and made me feel more confident about my future reintroductions.
All of that being said, cooking with just an egg yolk can be kind of strange at first. For my actual reintroduction I chose to just poach or fry my egg yolks in a safe oil. However, now that my reintroduction was successful I am excited to try some new more involved recipes. Here are a few egg yolk only recipes I found that are otherwise AIP friendly, enjoy!
Egg Yolk Recipe Roundup:
Ice Cream: http://paleoleap.com/paleo-coconut-vanilla-ice-cream/ 
Garlic Aioli: http://paleomg.com/carrot-fries-with-garlic-aioli/
Coconut Milk Custard: http://lifefoodjourney.blogspot.com/2012/02/baked-custard-recipe-gapspaleo.html
Hollandaise Sauce: http://againstallgrain.com/201202/21/paleo-coconut-oil-hollandaise-sauce/
Citation: (1) Ballantyne, Sarah. The paleo approach: reverse autoimmune disease and heal your body. Las Vegas: Victory Belt Publishing Inc. , 2013. Print.
2 Comments
Congratulations on goong through such a challenging mission!! I know it’s not over, but I am curious how they are able to determine your UC is in remission. I have been trying to get off my meds through whole food nutrition for about a year and I’m not sure how to assess my progress of my UC without a colonoscopy. Is that how they determined it for you?
Hello Meg,
Remission is determined by a lack of symptoms. For me this means no bleeding, no pain, and a stabilized weight. For others, it may look different. You could get a colonoscopy to look for inflammation (or a lack thereof) but it would probably only risk your health unnecessarily. If you are feeling good and having no symptoms for more than a month off of steroids than you are probably in remission. I do still take a very low dose of asacol which is an aspirin based medication that helps keep me in remission but I feel like that is a better choice for me than many of the more serious medications.
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