Caring Medical
& Rehabilitation Services
715 Lake Street, Suite 600
Oak Park, Illinois 60301
708.848.7789 Phone
708.848.7763 Fax

Understanding food allergies so you can lose weight

Are you consistently bloated or had a day when you can't think of any reason why you should be bloated but you are? You might start thinking about the previous 24 hours and what you ate.

Understanding the signs of food allergy

Some people think that Anaphylactic Shock (severe constriction of the airway), vomiting, or diarrhea are the symptoms that have to be present in order to have a food allergy. There is so much more to it.

The reality is that there are many less severe side effects to having a food allergy, including being gassy, having headaches, the inability to lose weight, and being bloated.

The other shocker to most people is that it can take days for the body to show signs of having a reaction.

I don't have food allergies

A lot of the patients think that they don't have food allergies. They've never "noticed any symptoms." But because of the ailments they describe to the doctor, he orders a Food Allergy Test. When the results come back, the patient is shocked. "But I never feel any different after eating those foods", they say. Our question is always "how do you know how you should feel if you don't know any differently? If you've eaten a certain food for years that you've developed an allergy to, how do you know how you feel not eating it?"

The real test comes when they have to give up that food. We recently had a 54 year old male patient that had allergy testing done. It came back positive for numerous things. Two of the foods the test said he was allergic to were pineapple and eggs, which he had been eating his whole life and never noticed any "symptoms".

We asked him to cut out all the foods he was allergic to from his diet for 3 weeks and see how he felt. When following up with him he said he was feeling better, but still thought that he wasn't allergic to eggs and pineapple. So, he decided to add them back in on his own. We got an email about a week later. He couldn't believe it, but he noticed that after adding those two items back into his diet some of his ailments which had began to subside were popping up again, including bloatedness.

If you are noticing some common, unexplained symptoms that keep popping up, it could mean it's time to see the doctor.