Were you naughty or nice this turkey day? I used to agonise over whether to be “good”, or just throw all caution to the wind and devour everything in sight: napkin, tablecloth and all. The latter left me beating myself up for days. I now understand that I can enjoy what I want, as long as I get back to the nutrient dense histamine balanced approach quickly. Before realizing that, I’d go on week long benders thinking, “Hey, I started this, may as well see where it takes me.”
It took me to being stapled to my sofa or engulfed by my comforter as I sought refuge from all the “terrible” things I’d done to my stomach. In reality though, they weren’t so terrible, just not the wisest choice when dealing with histamine intolerance inflammation.
I did so many things wrong, but finally, the persistent research, interviewing of mast cell experts and doctors, as well as unending self experimentation, paid off.
Over the years I struggled to explain why I seemed to have overcome the majority of my histamine intolerance symptoms while others still suffered. There is no one answer: genetics, concurrent medical conditions, access to foods and supplements only available where I was, all played a role.
But in my view, it’s because I approached it from a number of angles, treating the body and mind rather than just hacking away at my food list till nothing remained.
Though I did do that too for a few years…and it left me the sickest I had been.
Are you struggling to get histamine symptoms under control? Are you tired of endlessly searching the internet for answers? I’ve been there and done that, and tried every dietary approach, only to be disappointed time and time again.
I can’t begin to tell you how many diets I’ve followed, people I’ve consulted, doctors I’ve worked with, naturopaths I’ve shelled out for. It all worked for a little while, and I’d be filled with hope and immeasurable joy, only to come crashing back to reality when my symptoms came raging back.
Going through histamine intolerance and mast cell activation with no resources: no one to help guide me, no one who had been through this and shared their experiences, was a bewildering process that nearly broke me as a human being. I don’t honestly know that I could have done it if I hadn’t experienced all that I went through as a journalist for CNN and the BBC covering war zones and accomplishing the seemingly impossible regularly (sometimes that just meant getting out of somewhere in one piece).
Once better, I began creating digital books, one off workshops on the body, or mind. It slowly dawned on me that these products were created from the standpoint of someone who had reclaimed their life and was well enough to put all these disparate elements together themselves. And that wasn’t helping enough people.
I was going to have to lay out an exact program, with daily/weekly steps, and menus, to resolve the anxiety many of my readers were writing to me about.
It’s a step-by-step program I’ve personally developed over years of research and trial & error. This plan is designed to help you gain a better understanding of histamine while helping you reclaim your life to feel (and look) better than you ever have.
And, because I believe so strongly this material is just what you need, i’ve also created a free online workshop to take you through all the basics you need to know before getting started on the program.
The Free Workshop Covers:
What is histamine?
Why diagnosis is tricky
Misinformation on the web
Which healthy foods hurt
The traditional approach to healing histamine
The Healing Histamine way
The inflammation bucket (understanding it helps us eat more of what we love!)
How Anti-Foods empty the bucket
My top Anti-Foods
To Get Instant Access To My Free Workshop Please Fill Out This Form
In my previous workshop Beyond the Low Histamine Diet we explored histamine intolerance, mast cell activation, diagnosis and supplements. We also learned about different types of supplements and how exercise and happiness affect histamine, and our lives in general. And in the Healing the Brain to Heal the Body we learned ways to fix negative beliefs and emotional baggage that could be causing stress related mast cell activation and histamine release.
But I purposely left out my food re-introduction techniques.
Why?
Because there’s much work to do before we can begin thinking of re-introducing foods. It’s essential that we understand the role that the brain and stress play in the healing, and sickness process.
The low histamine diet wasn’t mean to be a way of life. It was created as a four week elimination diet to help reset the system and figure out what’s bothering us, before re-introducing foods one by one at the end of it.
The problem is that so few of us are able to go back to eating the way we did before, or are just unwilling to once we experience the relief these four weeks brings.
(In my case by the way it took longer than a month.)
So we keep on going, and going and going, till like me, you’re left with four or five foods that are tasteless and not particularly nourishing.
Till anger and devastation destroy the soul.
People not familiar with this condition, with the doggy in the window syndrome it triggers, think this is an exaggeration.
I’d like to see how they’d feel if sentenced to spend the next five years eating the same bland foods day in day out while watching everyone around them indulging in all their favorite foods, seemingly with not a care in the world, while those they lean on for support tell them they’re out of their mind and nothing’s wrong with them.
Thankfully I came up with an approach that’s worked for me, and thousands of others. There’s no guarantees but approaching this in a common sense way, with the collaboration of your doctor, is a good place to get inspiration.
In the last few years I’ve not only worked my way up from the four or five foods I could eat, to eating pretty much what I want (in moderation and well timed), as long as it’s healthy.
That’s included such notoriously high histamine foods as fish (only if not super fresh), shellfish, iodine and B12 supplements, pineapple, strawberries, cacao, and much more.
We’ll lean on meditation, neural retraining techniques and plain old common sense (that’s so hard to maintain when malnourished and desperate).
This workshop is for informational purposes only. You must share its contents with a medical practitioner if you plan to try any of the methods contained within. It’s not meant to be a “how to” but rather offer ideas to be explored under supervision.
2 hour live Q&A at 3pm Pacific/12pm Eastern on August 1st 2017
I’ll be taking all your questions. Can’t make it live? Submit your questions via email and I’ll make sure to answer it. A recording will be available to you after the event.
Dinner table meditation Mp3
A 20 minute meditation audio that can be practiced at the dinner table. I used this mindfulness technique to reduce my mealtime related stress.
Beach visualisation Mp3
A 20 minute visualisation I’ve used for years to help chill out my inflammatory stress.
32 page Food Re-Introduction PDF
A quick reference guide for the food re-introduction techniques discussed in the workshop.
Workshop transcript PDF
Because sometimes you just want it in hard copy so you can go to town on it with a highlighter pen (am I the only one who does that?).
I do not dictate frequency of foods or amounts – no one can tell you this, if they say they can they’re lying! How you feel will guide this. Please note, you will have to consult with a doctor if you wish to try any of my techniques. I am not a doctor and this workshop is not suitable for anyone who has had mild to significant reactions to food.
Please note, you will have to consult with a doctor if you wish to try any of my techniques. I am not a doctor and this workshop is not suitable for anyone who has had mild to significant reactions to food.
It’s time to move beyond the histamine elimination diet…
Are allergy-like symptoms preventing you from living the life you’ve always dreamed of?
Is your “safe” list down to single digits?
Are doctors telling you it’s all in your head?
I’m living proof it’s not, and that there is hope.
But it seems like just yesterday I was so sick, dizzy, fatigued and unrelentingly depressed that the bedroom became my whole life.
Bath products hurt me and so I scrubbed myself with sea salt and water alone. Make up brought me out in hives and migraines so I rocked the androgynous look. Crying over clumps of hair clogging the shower drain was a daily occurrence.
But worse than all that:
I was starving.
Literally.
I was terrified of food and felt life wasn’t worth living shackled in the low histamine elimination diet prison.
Suddenly I realised I was doing it all wrong. I did a 180 and now I eat what I want, go where I want and do whatever I want, and feel even better than I did in my teens.
And now I’d like to help you get here.
In this 90 minute webinar we’re going to cover a good chunk of the information that helped turn my life around, the key strategies I share in my private consultations at $150 an hour, for $45.
So for $45 you’re getting:
90 minutes of the best advice I wish someone had given me
50 page ebook Short But Sweet: A Nutrient Dense Approach to Histamine Intolerance and Mast Cell Activation
A symptoms PDF spreadsheet to help you work out what’s causing what
My personal antihistamine and anti-inflammatory shopping list to inspire your next pantry stocking
A weekly meal planner PDF to take the headache out of eating
My own personal weekly meal planner as a sample
A worksheet to help you prioritise food re-introduction
The online workshop covers:
The science
Histamine intolerance or mast cell disorder – which is it?
Diagnosis – nailing it down
Medical treatments
Scientifically proven supplements
Foods heal
How diet helps healing
The 4 week elimination diet (the right way)
Un-confusing histamine lists
The Anti-Diet vs the traditional low histamine diet
Why the histamine bucket theory is out of date
What my diet looks like (feeling like a champion)
Lifestyle
Pantry reboot: restocking for health
Kitchen hacking: less cooking more living
Don’t go for broke: spending your histamine allowance on a budget
Re-wiring the brain
Understanding how trauma can cause immune dysfunction
The role of the amygdala in food reactions
Brain reprogramming techniques
Beauty and body
The wrong exercise triggers histamine: here’s the work around
Beauty products that help lower histamine and inflammation
In addition to this wealth of information you’ll walk away with a number of documents to get you up and running*:
50 page ebook Short But Sweet: A Nutrient Dense Approach to Histamine Intolerance and Mast Cell Activation
A symptoms PDF spreadsheet to help you work out what’s causing what
My personal antihistamine and anti-inflammatory shopping list to inspire your next pantry stocking
A weekly meal planner PDF to take the headache out of eating
My own personal weekly meal planner as a sample
A worksheet to help you prioritise food re-introduction
I’m keeping this one small, just the first 100 attendees. There’s already over 2,000 people signed up to know when the course goes live, so don’t delay! Click here to go to online store and purchase.
How this works: you will receive an email confirmation of your purchase and then a weekly reminder. On the day of the online course you will receive a link to join the broadcast. If you can’t make it, don’t worry, there will be a recording available for one week after the event for you to access as you please.
*You will receive these documents via email right after the workshop ends.
What this is not
I am neither a doctor nor nutritionist so please understand I do not dispense medical advice nor tell you what to eat. Any information given in this workshop must be shared with your medical professional.
You’ll find recipes full of foods with antihistamine and anti-inflammatory properties my books Anti-Recipes and The Anti-Cookbook
The cognitive hypnotherapy course has begun and already I’m feeling the stress relief kicking in. I don’t know about you, but I trace my histamine intolerance problems back to stressful life events. From refusing to eat when under great stress, to increased symptoms generally. Interestingly though, my histamine symptoms were under control for the most part while covering war zones as a journalist. At least in the short term anyway. I would collapse into a puddle after a few weeks but pop another handful of Xanax, Ambien and various mood stabilisers and somehow convince myself to power through to the inevitable collapse.
Funny thing though when you’re sick and people try to convince you it’s all about the stress. My usual response was denial, bursting into tears and calling them heartless bastards who don’t understand I’m ACTUALLY sick, or blowing them off and going to punch a wall repeatedly (or worse self infliction of pain to let off steam).
Eventually I accepted the link and the true healing began.You know this already: keeping the body in a constant state of high arousal, fight or flight, wears it down and causes it to go haywire. The body has an amazing wellspring of healing to tap into normally, but when it’s convinced that all systems are on alert because we need to flee, it’s not going to have the resources to run things in a way that’s geared for long term survival.
This became all too apparent recently when my hair began falling out after a fast and then a stressful event pretty much at the same time. Some reading into the matter revealed that in times of famine, the body will reroute vitamins and minerals to running the body for immediate survival. In my case, the sudden reduction in calories may have prompted my body to take the minerals and nutrients from my hair and eyebrows, to feed my vital organs instead.
I sat down and had a long, hard think about how my entire life had been spent in a similar state of stress. Thankfully I’ve had the opportunity over the last few years to try out various stress relief approaches. When combined with neural retraining to help de-condition my negative responses to the act of eating (histamine-induced projectile vomiting every time you eat over a few years will do that to you) it’s been nothing short of a miracle. My problem has been finding a brain re-training system that does it in less than an hour a day. That’s where the cognitive hypnotherapy has stepped up to the plate.
In 15 minutes daily I have been able to effectively re-learn how to manage stress, disassociate food from past negative outcomes, and truly convince myself that recovery wasn’t just something that happens to others.
In week one we work to identify how past events are impacting our present health. We then create an “anchor” connected to something that calms us and we learn to trigger it every time we’re experiencing any kind of stress. I initially dropped my anchor every time I sat down to eat. Doing it isn’t a cure. Hypnotherapy isn’t curing anything, but it is removing stress surrounding every day events that my body has been conditioned to respond to in a certain way.
Conditioning has been around for a really long time. In this postI cover studies showing that negative conditioning can cause increases in nasal tryptase, an inflammatory mediator released along with histamine when mast cells break open in a process called degranulation. Another study in my post points out that the ability to avoid foods that have previously caused us a negative outcome is of benefit to survival. But I don’t live in the jungle or wrestle tigers over food, and there’s now a number of iPhone apps to help me identify edible plants (vs. those that kill). So it’s time to decondition. That’s where this course comes in. It’s not too late to join. Hazel and I are keeping it rolling for a little while longer till we reach a number we can’t comfortably manage in the Facebook Group for course members.
It’s simple: if you have a negative outcome when eating, how many times does it take before fear triggers your stress hormones every time you eat? And then every time you think of eating. Not too long in my case.
It’s finally here! Man Food – a high nutrient antihistamine and anti-inflammatory ingredient filled book geared towards guys, women who love to work out, yoga like they mean it, or just load up on healing nutrients. Features my personal shopping list of antihistamine and anti-inflammatory foods.
The Anti-cookbook and all liquid Anti-Detox Book, don’t treat any conditions, but feature a plethora of the high nutrient antihistamine and anti-inflammatory ingredients that have been instrumental in helping me feed myself on a limited diet. The Anti-cookbook features a six page list of antihistamine and anti-inflammatory foods and comes in regular and Paleo.
The Low Oxalate Cookbook features antihistamine and anti-inflammatory rich recipes.
Don’t miss the Low Histamine Beauty Survival Guide for non-toxic beauty tips, the skinny on histamine releasing (mast cell degranulating) beauty ingredients, antihistamine and anti-inflammatory beauty alternatives and the top brands natural brands I’ve found.