There are some dietary things that most of us can agree on, which are the following:

• avoid caffeine
• avoid alcohol
• reduce or avoid sugar
• beware additives (packaged food)

I would also say anything really high in salt can be a problem, especially MSG. I buy No Salt or Low Salt whenever possible.

So basically, you need to eat the type of diet we were all told to eat all our lives but most of us just didn't.  Whole, natural foods made by the earth and not by people.

There's a lot of talk about special diets in the community, so I'll give my take on that. I think there's a fine line between being aware of your reactions to foods and becoming afraid of food. That's one thing to keep in mind. Because if we become afraid of food, we'll get reactions from the fear and may omit things unnecessarily. Personally, if I think something has bothered me, I'll try it again. If it happens twice, then I might remove it for a time and try it again down the road. (Unless the reaction is severe, of course.) You want to be aware of how food is affecting you but not paranoid about it. I've also learned that there are things that will bother me in a wave that don't bother me most of the time, so I might alter my diet slightly during a wave.

If something legitimately bothers you, by all means take it out of your diet. But there are no hard and fast rules to this because we are all unique. Some people benefit from eating more meat, and others from eating less. This is true of all people, so people in recovery are no different. My husband doesn't digest meat well and does better with plant-based whereas my daughter feels better when she eats a lot of meat. Neither of them are in recovery.

Regarding changing diet, I have to admit to being on both extremes of the continuum at different times. At first I was very slow to cut out anything or change my diet at all. I was convinced that I would heal quickly and was quite stubborn about making changes. I would implore you not to be as stubborn as I was. I constantly revved up my own system with my choices and suffered unnecessarily. On the other hand, there was a time when I was overly strict. I decided histamine was my problem (it often is one of them) and I went low histamine with my diet, which is quite restrictive. In some ways this helped because I was able to identify some foods that did bother me, like hot dogs, lunch meat and leftover meat. But overall I think I cut out too much, and a lot of the foods were healthy and didn't particularly bother me and I didn't eat them for ages. I also became quite afraid of food while I was on this diet.

For myself, the most effective diet has been the MIND diet, which is simply a diet that is good for the brain and for inflammation. It's not terribly restrictive and simply involves eating decent food with lots of veg. That's it. Nothing complicated and no food groups left out.

Lastly, I think there is a tendency to use diet as one more way to try to control a process that is largely uncontrollable. We think if we can find the exact right diet, we'll heal quickly. I don't personally believe this is true. I think it can help and can certainly help you feel better during the process, but I don't think it will directly heal you. The gut is often part of the problem, but not the whole problem. That's my personal opinion, for what it's worth. My advice is to find a middle ground. You don't want to be constantly eating stuff that your nervous system doesn't like, but it's probably not helpful to go on an endless search for the perfect diet because then food becomes stressful, which is the last thing you want.  I think diet is a contributor, but one of many. It can certainly affect how you feel and it is an important factor in health (for everybody, not just us), but I don't personally think it's a magic bullet.