Eliminating my diet

We have just finished our elimination diet experiment. This is a diet where we only eat from a short list of "safe" foods for a week or so to clear our system and then each day after we get to try one of the eliminated foods and see if it causes a reaction. It took us three weeks start to finish, and our whole family did it together.
We had a lot of friends asking us why we chose to do this diet, because none of us are suffering from some unknown food allergy that causes our quality of life to be horrible (which is the only reason anyone else would ever do this). I did it simply because I've seen the way wheat and milk have affected Alex and I wondered if we weren't all affected by a few foods in some way or another.
So...I learned to really like brown rice, organic turkey, and yams. I like rice milk better than soy milk, which is too bad because it was twice as expensive. I learned that I don't handle red meat well, and really shouldn't eat sugar. Especially not 10 sugar cubes in one sitting, which is the way we were supposed to experiment with it during this diet. Ugh. We also tried high fructose corn syrup, straight from the bottle, which is what is in pop and all sorts of candies and...well...everything. None of us reacted to chocolate, which surprised me because I thought I did, except that in order to test pure chocolate we had to eat the baker's kind (which is awful!) and so maybe what I react to in the chocolate is really just the sugar. We all reacted to red dye #40 -- that was an awful day.
I learned a lot about what certain foods do to you (did you know that wheat contains a high amount of toxin, and after going on a diet like this for awhile and then testing wheat you can actually taste it?), and talked to a lot of other people about their own food issues. I learned a lot, and lived it while I was learning it, and now it is over and I see food in a whole different way.
I felt really good while I was on this diet, and only had two days at the beginning where I felt odd and very hungry (all the articles I read about this diet said we should expect to "detox" during the first couple of days), and I lost ten pounds (legitimately, Mandy, not just the initial water weight Dad was talking about) without limiting my food intake at all. Now that I am done with the diet I am having a hard time eating the things that I used to eat. I look at wheat with suspicion. Anything with high fructose corn syrup in it makes me shudder. Food that looks unnaturally red is automatically off limits for anyone in my house...we even switched to Tylenol no-dye and GNC children's vitamins to avoid the evil #40.
So my grocery bill has soared, because it is much cheaper for everyone in the food industry to take food straight from the fields and do all sorts of unnatural things to it so they can package it to last for years. I am sure I will get over this as soon as someone puts something in my path that is tempting enough to lure me out of this food-snobby ditch I am in, but for now it is actually pleasant to feel good all the time. The most amazing thing is that I don't have any food cravings whatsoever. I'm sure if I were living with Mandy she would cure me of that immediately :) I haven't eaten a single chocolate chip cookie in a month!

This is a picture of Pavel trying milk, in the form of homemade whipped cream (made with local farm honey) and strawberries!