You don’t have to be super-restrictive to get results

If you’ve ever googled foods that can help with endometriosis or adenomyosis pain, then you’ll probably have seen a long list of foods that it is suggested you cut out.

I went down this approach in the early days of my own endometriosis journey, and I quite often get clients coming to me on very restrictive diets.

Well, you don’t need to be super-restrictive to get improvements to your pain. And in fact, the more restrictive you go, I’d say there is a risk that you won’t get the results you are hoping for.

Of course there will be individual cases where people may be reacting to a lot of foods and you may need to take several things out, but generally this isn’t the case.  

Here’s why I find overly restrictive diets don’t work:

They are hard work

If you’ve ever followed a very restrictive diet you will know that they are hard work. You have to re-think everything you eat, buy different foods and spend more time doing food preparation and cooking from scratch. If you’re doing this when you are already tired and in pain then it is tough going and hard to keep up with – I know as I did it too. This means it can be hard to stick to it long term.

They can make you feel miserable

If you take a lot of foods away from someone, they straight away feel like they are missing out – particularly if they haven’t been given alternatives to replace the foods taken out of their diet. This can then have a negative impact on mood, particularly when someone is already feeling low due to fatigue and pain or if they are a real foodie. This also makes it hard for people to commit to long-term.

It makes it hard to go out

Clients often say how difficult it is to eat out with friends or family if they are on a very restrictive diet. I remember going to meet family in a café not long after I started on a restrictive diet and taking my box of carrot sticks to eat as I knew there was nothing on the menu I could have – and at that point I hadn’t got my head around some of the more interesting alternatives I could have made. And of course this makes you feel left out, and miserable and then it’s hard to keep committed to the plan long term – getting the theme here?

It gets stressful

At the extreme, doing a very restrictive diet can get stressful. You start to get paranoid about what you can and can’t eat, have to plan everywhere you go to make sure there is something you can eat, feel guilty if you don’t stick to the plan. All of this increases your stress levels, which you don’t need with a chronic health condition. And stress ultimately increases inflammation and so pain.

You can end up missing out on nutrients

If you go super-restrictive you can end up missing out on nutrients that may actually help with reducing pain and inflammation. One example I see is people being told to go on the Low FODMAP diet to help endometriosis. The low FODMAP diet can be helpful if you experience a lot of bloating and IBS, but only after other things have been tired first. Not everyone with endometriosis needs the low FODMAP diet, and if you do try it, you shouldn’t stay on the restrictive stage long term, and should move through the re-introduction process to get some foods back in.

So, what’s the alternative?

The reason I don’t recommend overly restrictive diets is not because they don’t work on paper, but because in practice they are really difficult for people to keep going with long-term. And you need to be doing this long term to get results.

So instead of following a ‘diet’ that is hard going, and you can only stick with short term I prefer to help people gradually move towards a different eating pattern that is more sustainable long term and just becomes your new way of eating. This approach focuses more on adding in plenty of anti-inflammatory foods and less on restricting foods. We’ll work out which foods you really need to restrict and which ones you can just reduce or be mindful about how much you eat of them. And as part of one of my nutrition programmes, I’ll work with you step by step to get this new way of eating in place in a way that matches your food choices and lifestyle.

Because ultimately we both want you to be able to get change long term without it being stressful or difficult.

Does that sound like the approach you need?

If so, book in for a free hormone health review to chat through how my nutrition programme could work for you.

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The information contained above is provided for information purposes only. The contents of this blog  are not intended to amount to advice and you should not rely on any of the contents of this blog. Professional advice should be obtained before taking or refraining from taking any action as a result of the contents of this blog. Emma Belton Nutrition disclaims all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on any of the contents of this blog.