Food allergies can make for some of the most annoying realities to have to deal with, whether it’s allergies suffered by your kids or if you’re the unfortunate individual to have to constantly watch what you eat. Look at it as a blessing though – all the people I know who are fighting a lifelong battle with food allergies draw some or other advantage from it, from being forced to effectively lead a much healthier lifestyle to it manifesting physically.
One buddy of mine looks at least five years younger than he really is, all thanks to the fact that he basically doesn’t eat processed foods.
Now, it’s a serious challenge maintaining the kind of exercise-fuelled lifestyle required to achieve certain fitness goals – it’s challenging enough for anyone who doesn’t have to battle food allergies, so you can only imagine how it must be for someone who does indeed have allergies. Imagine if you want to bulk up and become a beefcake for example and yet you have to watch what you eat because you’re living with celiac disease. This means that the age-old gospel of loading up on carbs and proteins, which has proven to work time and again, simply isn’t an option for you. Well, that would be the carbs of course, because you can still load up on proteins, but then your muscles would still need the fuel which is best delivered by carbohydrates.
So here’s what you should do:
First visit your doctor, who should probably refer you to a specialist so that you can officially get allergy tested. The skin prod test would do just fine since it’s very accurate, but if you can go for the full blood screen so that ailments such as diabetes could be picked up since this also has a major impact on one’s optimal and even critical diet.
Food allergies sometimes develop later on in life and other times you outgrow them with time, so it’s important to get some updated intelligence on exactly where you stand as far as that goes.
Next, take an extensive inventory of all the foods you can eat – focus on foods you can eat and not on those which you can’t eat. You don’t need that kind of negativity. You’ll notice that in actual fact, there is a lot you can build some great menus with, paying special attention to the nutritional requirements that fall in line with your fitness goals.
Now set out a meal plan which is both extensive and intensive, meaning it should cover periods of up to six weeks at a time and it should be extremely detailed.
The reason why I focussed on diet almost singularly, even though this is indeed a post about achieving fitness goals, is because any successful fitness programmes in which a fitness goal is achieved is about 90% diet and only 10% exercise. You definitely do have to exercise, of course, but the effects thereof would be watered down quite considerably if you didn’t factor in the nutritional side of things.