Yea, me either. Until I did some research trying to determine what was going on with my eyes. And that picture above? That is how bad it had to get before I was determined to figure out how to make it stop!! I was so ready to just take my eyeballs out of my head so that I could not feel so cruddy! It not only affected my eyes, but my energy. When your eyes are tired, your body feels tired.
You can read my first post about it HERE if you want to find out exactly histamine intolerance is and all the foods I have to avoid.
It has definitely been more difficult than I thought it would be to not eat any of the foods that could cause issues. I tried to start right after Christmas, but to no avail. There are hidden histamines in EVERYTHING!
On January 1st, I finally decided instead of thinking how hard it was and what I couldn’t eat, to then focus more on what I could eat. The first week I was literally eating non stop all day long. I was so hungry because of all the foods that were “fillers” in my diet and that is when I had to adjust my thinking on certain foods that I had given up and made the choice to add them back into my diet, mainly to allow myself enough calories and fats each day. I added back in plain greek yogurt to replace my avocados and nuts for healthy fats. I added back in GF oats and brown and wild rice to help get my calories up, especially on my heavy workout days. I also found that I needed more calories in the beginning of the day or else I was wanting to eat late at night and my energy was tanking mid afternoon.
I also started using an online food journal, called TwoGrand. I am not one to enter my foods daily, but with this, all I had to do was take a picture for every meal and if I forgot, I could still enter it in as a text. Then at the end of each day, I was able to “journal” and comment on how my eyes did that day. This enabled me to look back and see if I had consumed anything that would have caused my eyes to flare up. It was a GREAT tool!
In the last two weeks, I have went from having my eyes flare up almost daily to having only this happen 4x in total. Some were pretty bad, but some were very mild. I was able to look back with that app, and see what things had caused. Most of the time it was just because, out of habit, I didn’t even think twice about what was in what I was eating. Such as a pumpkin muffin top- it had cinnamon and cloves OR it could have been the decaf coffee. Another day it was the almond milk I put in my latte.
One day I even tested it by having just TWO ALMONDS that I had roasted in doTERRA On guard (which contains cinnamon and cloves) and within 20 minutes, my eye was reacting. Not only were my eyes reacting, but now I was aware that my skin and head were itching when I ate certain foods as well. Wonderful 🙁
As I keep more and more of these foods out of my diet, I have better and better days. My goal is to continue this for at least the next 30 days, and then retest by adding in just one thing at a time and waiting to see how my eyes react. The goal is to completely allow my body to “heal” by keeping these foods out of my diet as much as possible and allowing it to not have to work so hard to process the histamines. Then I should be able to allow all these foods back into my diet, and I will focus on keeping my histamine bucket from overflowing once again. 🙂