Full Transcript. Episode 14.
Michelle: Hey, guys. My name is Lindsey. And you’re listening to nurse verse
Michelle: Hey, everyone. My name is Michelle.
Lindsay: And I’m Lindsey. And you’re listening to nurse verse. Hey, guys.
In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about the free diet
In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about the free diet. We have mentioned it a bunch in previous episodes, and we thought we might just share everything we know about the free diethyde, our experience with it.
Michelle: Yes, I think the free diet has been probably our most successful diet. I hate to use the word diet, but diet in terms of helping both of us with our stomach issues. But, more so, Lindsey with her food allergies, we’ve tried so many different diets, and I am not saying that this one beats out all the other diets, because I don’t want to knock any of the other ones like other diets or food changes. Other dietary changes can work for other people and be beneficial, but the free diet, we’ve seen the best results. And I think it’s also because it was the one that we were the most disciplined with. We truly stuck to it. And there was absolutely not one, second of straying from the rules for this dietary change.
Rafrano: We were trying to reduce Lindsey’s inflammation and GI upset
So we want to talk about the free diethyde in relation to. We were trying to reduce Lindsey’s inflammation and both of our GI upset not to lose weight, and not knocking any diets about losing weight, but just for the purpose of what we’re trying to accomplish.
Lindsay: That wasn’t our goal. To eliminate all the ailments that we were experiencing. We even kept a journal. A spreadsheet, actually.
Michelle: Well, there’s a spreadsheet, and there’s also a Google Doc. It’s depending on which one, we’re had.
Lindsay: A bunch of different symptoms that include being itchy, allergic reactions to foods, brain fog, poor memory, PM’s symptoms, constipation, upset stomach, fluctuating energy and mood, difficulty concentrating, poor memory, acne and that kind of stuff. Those are the things that we were experiencing and what we wanted to eliminate by doing this diet to see if anything would change or help us and.
Michelle: All of that, too. I think, could be residual effects of being a nurse, working night shift, having high levels of stress, also even just living in the city for a long time. And then overall, just a preface. Lindsey and I love to eat. We eat.
Lindsay: We do.
Michelle: We, live to eat, not eat to live. So we are fed.
Lindsay: Yes, we lived it up when we lived in DC. And, when my food allergies weren’t that bad, when gluten cutter was my BF, we enjoyed, we indulged. Yes, it was great. And I miss it.
Michelle: But so we’ll take full responsibility for the fact that we brought these symptoms upon ourselves, for our poor discipline around what we were putting in our bodies and, the complication, because nowadays there’s so many toxins everywhere, there’s so many chemicals and everything, that when you’re trying to figure out what exactly you need to cut out, it gets really complicated really fast, because everything, it’s hard to narrow it down. And so that’s why we’ve tried these different diets, to figure out, are there certain food groups or that we need to stay away from, et cetera. So the free diet is different in the sense that you’re cutting out everything that could potentially cause any type of inflammation in your body for one month, just to give your gut the rest, just to be able to reset. And then you are slowly reintroducing foods to see, one by one, how your body responds to each of those types of food. And so that’s why we were doing that diet.
Lindsay: And how we decided to do this was you had clients tell you every single day about this doctor Tom Rufano and the free diet and how it changed their life. Yes, completely. And we’re like, who is doctor Tom Refrano? What is this free diet? What’s this book all about?
Michelle: Yeah, absolutely. I had a lot of clients who went above and beyond and out of the way to try to resolve their ailments. They were all people that felt that they had gone to regular doctors or providers that basically said to them, we don’t know why you’re having these symptoms. And I. Here’s a pill. But these individuals did not want to just take a medication to resolve their symptoms. They wanted to figure out what their body was trying to communicate with them. and so, doctor Tom Rufrano is a functional medicine doctor that will get down to the bottom of your ailment. His goal is to figure out what exactly is going on in your body, what is happening in your body, what is your body trying to communicate to you, and how can we use diet and supplementation to get your body back to equilibrium again, and get you functioning normally. So many of my clients had tremendous amounts of success with him. They could not speak highly enough of him. but of course, with functional medicine, because you’re doing really expensive testing and you’re having to take supplements and eat really clean foods, it’s very expensive. And, of course, insurance doesn’t cover any of this.
Lindsay: So doctor Tom Rafrano wrote this book called the Free Diet, and he recommends his patients before he even sees them. read this book.
Michelle: Yes. And he wrote, he wrote the book because he had a laundry list of ailments and conditions that he had the similar experience. Nobody could figure out why all these things were happening to him, what was going on. and so this book is a result of his own health journey and how he was able to get himself back to equilibrium.
Lindsay: And he also illustrates how he’s healed so many other people by this diet and supplementation and stuff like that.
Michelle: What he’s trying to do is get your body back to the point where it can heal itself. You can get yourself back to equilibrium, you can get yourself back to a normal functioning state. And then at that point, you’re just maintaining, you’re not having to necessarily do this crazy strict diethyde, but depending on what your body needs, that’s will determine how you’re going to maintain from there.
Lindsay: So this diet is broken up into three different phases. And, can we just tell you, phase one was so hard for us.
Michelle: So phase one is when you’re cutting out everything, you’re just cold, Turk. Well, you don’t have to cold Turkey. You could ease into it, but for 28 straight days, or was it 30? No, 28 days. You are eating so, so clean. There is one page list of foods that you are actually allowed to eat. And it basically looked like, it basically.
Lindsay: Looked like a smoothie in the morning, which was flaxseeds, pea protein, a half a cup of blueberries, water, and some athletic greens. And then for lunch it was chicken and I avocado and roasted nuts.
Doctor Rafrano says to get raw nuts and soak them in salt water
Can we tell you how dirty your nuts are?
Michelle: This blew my mind. So with nuts, because they can stay at room temperature for very long periods of time, they can accumulate mold, mildew, and all types of stuff on the outside. And so what doctor Rafrano says to do is when you get your nuts, you want to get raw, don’t get roasted. You got to get just plain, the raw nuts, nothing on them. And then you want to take those nuts and soak them in salt water, clean filtered water with salt for 24 hours. Well, twelve to 24 hours. The color of the water is so disgusting. What comes off of these nuts, how.
Lindsay: Do they get so dirty?
Michelle: Is really like walnuts. Walnuts are the worst.
Lindsay: Are the worst.
Michelle: They’re so dirty. But actually, Costco’s cashews are pretty clean.
Lindsay: The organic ones are pretty clean. But you gotta soak and roast your nuts.
Michelle: Yes. And then after you soak them for 1220 4 hours, then you put them dry and put them on a baking.
Lindsay: Sheet and in the oven at 275 for at least 99 minutes.
Michelle: Yeah, probably more.
Lindsay: 2 hours. Yeah, possibly more.
Michelle: And they’re delicious. So much better than any. You don’t need to put anything on them. They’re so tasty and delicious.
Lindsay: Roast. Roasted nuts are delicious.
Michelle: It’s clean roasted nuts.
Lindsay: I can’t believe how I used to just like raw dog magnets that I didn’t roast or soak before.
Michelle: Bar peanuts.
Lindsay: what did we do?
Michelle: And I’ve actually tested this. A lot of people might say, well, oh, it was probably just delicious for you guys because you guys were on that diet. So everything tasted.
Lindsay: We’ve offered our nuts up, you guys. People love it.
Michelle: People not on this diet also raved about these nuts.
Lindsay: People love our nuts. Our roasted nuts.
Michelle: I have had individuals who, like, drink energy drinks and garbage, and they have tried these nuts, and they’re like, nuts, and they loved them. So ten out of ten recommend. If you take anything from this episode, just smoke your raw nuts and salt water and then roast them, and it’s gonna change your life.
Lindsay: Yes. For the better.
Michelle: Yeah.
Lindsay: So that was lunch. So chicken, cucumber, avocado, and nuts. And then dinner. We had salmon, arugula, salad with avocado, and then a snack. You could have an apple or some fruit and nuts, which were blueberries. So we had a limited variety of protein for dinner, which included chicken, salmon, or grass fed beef.
Michelle: Or there was one other white fish we were allowed.
Lindsay: We did mahi mahi. As long as.
Michelle: No, we had another one.
Lindsay: Wild cod.
Michelle: Cod. It was atlantic. Atlantic cod. Wild caught cod.
Lindsay: We did cod every other night. And salmon. And then for lunch, we would do the grass fed beef and chicken, and then we could do asparagus. And then we did a lot of butternut squash as well. And bok choy and cauliflower rice. Oh, I also made the cauliflower mash. That was so good.
We had such a crazy craving for sugar and sweets after 28 days
But can we just say in the first 28 days, our sweet tooth. We had such a crazy craving for sugar and sweets. And I missed wine, you guys. I missed wine a lot. I just really like the feeling of drinking wine and having a cookie or something. It’s like a proverbial hug. It’s a hug in a glass or a circle shaped cookie. And I wanted that so bad. I.
Michelle: Those 28 days were hard. There were plenty. There were a lot of times that I wanted to be like, fuck this, I’m getting a cookie. But we stuck through it. You were so. You were so disciplined and committed. There was not a choice that we were gonna, you know, so you didn’t.
Lindsay: Have to do it, but you stuck in there with me. You dove in, you jumped in with me.
Michelle: Yes. And just like anything in life, it takes 30 days to make or break a habit. And it is so incredible. When you get to the 28th day or the 30th day, you’re just like a different person. You.
Lindsay: We, survived 28 days without coffee.
Michelle: And you don’t even want it anymore. You don’t, like, now your sugar craving goes away, your caffeine addiction is gone, and you don’t even care to have all of those things that you were craving prior to it. but just like a little excerpt of that, it’s all like the wolf you feed. If you are feeding your stomach foods high in sugar or chemicals or heavily processed, you’re growing and feeding the bad bacteria, so to speak, in your stomach. and so that bacteria starts to grow and that bacteria starts to win and feed me, I want this food.
Lindsay: I want more sugar.
Michelle: I want this. But if you don’t eat those foods for 30 days, now, that bacteria in your stomach starts to die off, and now you’ve been feeding the good bacteria the healthy microbiome, and that microbiome starts to flourish, or that bacteria starts to grow, and now that one starts to win, and now it starts sending messages of, feed me asparagus and grass fed meat and healthy things that your body likes. and I think also the fact that you also feel great, you’re more clear. You sleep better, you have better energy that only further contributes to that cycle. Now you’re going to continue to want to eat that way because you’re intrinsically motivated, because you feel better. You want to continue to feel better at that point.
Lindsay: And then also, we were in the kitchen for, hours, but so much cooking. But while you’re in the kitchen and you’re. You’re on the kitchen and you’re not on your phone, you’re not thinking about other things. You’re chopping away. You are cooking.
Michelle: Chopping is nice.
Lindsay: You are chopping. You are meal prepping. You are present in the moment. You’re not scrolling comparing yourself to others. You’re not doing that. You’re not scrolling down a rabbit hole.
Michelle: It’s a good way to spend your time cooking and being with your food.
Lindsay: Mm
Michelle: Then in phase two, you get to start slowly introducing. So you have a small pool of foods that you can bring back into your diet. It was a pretty good grouping of foods, like sweet potatoes, was in there.
Lindsay: And I think even the pepper. Pepper, you guys, we couldn’t have certain.
Michelle: Spices for the first.
Lindsay: It was so hard to eat chicken without pepper and steak without pepper.
Michelle: I realized how much I loved pepper in those 28 days.
Lindsay: It was wild. So every three days, you were reintroducing one food.
Michelle: You got to reintroduce one food if you didn’t have an inflammation inflammatory response to the food that came prior that you reintroduced. Otherwise, you’d have to wait a week to reintroduce something else. Right?
Lindsay: Something like that.
Michelle: But so we kept a very detailed spreadsheet of the food that we introduced. The day, the time, and then our response to it. Good, mild, bad, and what it was and everything. and so this allowed us to then keep track of everything. And then we saw day three. We were fine with this food. Now we can introduce the next one. Day three. We’re fine with this one. You have to be, like, really diligent, really, really deliberate so that you can be certain, because if stuff starts to overlap, you can eat something and have a reaction roughly three days later. And then if you ate something else within those three days, now you don’t know which food was it. And so that’s the whole point of this, why you’re doing it. You’re eliminating everything, and then you’re just slowly adding it back in.
One of the foods that I had a reaction to that was a surprise
Lindsay: One of the foods that I had a reaction to that was a surprise was rice.
Michelle: Both of us, so terrible.
Lindsay: We ate rice almost every day because I’m half asian, and it was such a staple in our house.
Michelle: We made sushi burritos all the time.
Lindsay: We always made bowls and chicken bowls, rice bowls.
Michelle: And especially when your meal prepping and you’re a nurse, it’s so easy to just make a rice bowl. But that’s a no. We don’t.
Lindsay: That’s a no for us.
Michelle: We don’t have rice anymore. We still have this half full, gigantic.
Lindsay: Bag of jasmine rice. Thanks, Costa.
Michelle: That goes to monster.
Lindsay: Now it goes to the dog for her tummy aches. and then that was the most shocking.
Michelle: That ice.
Lindsay: Also coffee. For me, I can’t do coffee, but I have found a organic, low acidic coffee that we get at sprouts, and I only have it on the weekends with food.
Michelle: That was a big thing. definitely no coffee on an empty stomach for you, whether it’s clean or not clean coffee. But the low acid, organic clean, no chemicals, no anything in it. Coffee has been great for you.
Lindsay: It’s been good. During phase three, we experimented with all different types of dairy. Sheep’s milk to goat’s milk. Was it a one or a two?
Michelle: Ag one?
Lindsay: No, that’s the.
Michelle: Oh, no, not ag a one milk, a one protein?
Lindsay: Oh, a one or a twelve? I don’t know.
Michelle: Something that.
Lindsay: All different variations, easier to digest.
Michelle: None of them worked, sadly.
Lindsay: None of them.
Michelle: None of them. They were all instant bloating and all kinds of.
Lindsay: Yeah. Upset. It was something that we cannot bring back. So we experimented with all different types of dairy and it’s just something that we unfortunately. Well, I definitely cannot bring back.
Michelle: That’s a no go hard pass for the time being at the moment.
Lindsay: So maybe things will change once I get all the extensive testing done. But we’ll see what happens.
Michelle: Exactly. just for now, we know that’s what you’re reacting to.
Lindsay: And then we also brought back peanut butter, which, we did fine with. Totally fine with peanut butter, which, is nice. Let’s see. Maple syrup was something we brought back.
Michelle: Yeah, totally.
Lindsay: Totally fine with maple syrup. Really good in coffee, if you guys haven’t checked that out. It’s really good. Just a little goes a long way. Don’t needle up just a tad. And then I think we also tried, we reintroduced sweets, things that we used to always eat before we even did this diet. And we were so shocked that the things that we liked were terrible. So sweet. Or like, what we liked it. It tasted different. You guys.
Michelle: Yes.
Lindsay: It was wild. It reset our taste buds or something.
Michelle: We were. Before this, we were obsessed with Costco’s dark chocolate covered mangoes and we would buy them multiple bags at a time. And we were so excited to reintroduce these chocolate cover mangoes and I’ll never forget that at the dinner table. So excited to try.
Lindsay: We cheers them and everything and we were like, we take a bite and we’re like, what is this? What happened?
Michelle: Yeah. that was just such a crazy experience going from. You’re so obsessed with something to be like, oh, my gosh, I don’t like this at all. This tastes gross.
Lindsay: Such a shock.
Michelle: Transformation.
Lindsay: So crazy that. And then what else?
Michelle: Just our taste buds changed so dramatically, it was unreal. you would normally like to eat cookies and ice cream and whatever.
Lindsay: Both have a sweet, your favorite ice cream. Ah. Cashew milk, oreo gluten free ice cream.
Michelle: Now. But before I didn’t like any of those. Healthier.
Lindsay: Oh, yeah, you like them now? But it was too sweet for me.
The diet heightened your senses completely because I never thought that before
Way too sweet.
Michelle: Too much chocolate. It was processed foods. The sugar was almost overwhelming. You get hit in the face with.
Lindsay: Sugar, straight with a, sugar headache. Oh, my gosh, it was so funny. My coworker opened up a yogurt and she was sitting maybe just right as if I’m right next to you. She opened the yogurt and I could taste the lactose from where I was so pungent. It was wild. She felt so bad. She, like, immediately closed it and we both started laughing. I think the diet heightened your senses completely because I never thought that before.
Michelle: It changes. So in terms of sugar, at least, it’s like you can taste when something is artificial. It changed our ability to be able to know. We can recognize this as fake sugar.
Lindsay: Versus,
Michelle: The flavor of fruits got better and better.
Lindsay: So sweet. Like, strawberries were like, what?
Michelle: yeah. When we reintroduced strawberries, we’re like, oh, my gosh, this is so delicious and sweet. It sounds so crazy, but you have to experience it because you just won’t believe how much of a difference it is of, like, you now. That’s the type of sugar that you want. That’s the type of sugar that’s delicious to you. And what better than that than have your actual cravings and what? Be something healthy.
Lindsay: I discovered a love for different apples. I eat an apple a day. And what was it? Ambrosia gold. Yeah, those are the best apples. They’re so sweet. And yes, my dad and I have a love for apples now. And, also fuji. I had no idea I would like fuji. I thought I liked Kayla apples more. And then pink ladies, not that sweet. Kind of tasteless to me. Weird. And then honeycrisp. You have to be in the mood for a honeycrisp. It’s like the difference between a gogurt and a yogurt.
A diet can help reduce inflammation in your body and get your body back to equilibrium
Michelle: I had no idea that you could talk about apples for this long.
Lindsay: You can, but moving on.
Michelle: So the diet helped us ultimately see what foods we as individuals were reacting to were having a, more serious, inflammatory response to that we might want to avoid or eat less frequently. So it just helped us cater our regimen a bit and it also showed us how much we had gotten off track because we really were eating a lot of junk and sweets and things like that. Again, although we’ve, like, gone up and down, we’re pretty good at implementing a change, but then staying consistent with that change is a lot of times can be really dictated on what’s going on in your life. So for us, I feel like around certain seasons now, we’re coming up on that season. It’s fall. We have a lot of birthdays coming up, the holidays, a ton of travel. It’s so hard to maintain our regular, everyday lifestyle in the spring and the summer. I feel like it’s way easier for us to just stick to our routine because there isn’t these big things changing or pushing us in different directions as when we go to travel or when it’s the holidays and we’re spending time with family. It’s so easy to be like, I’ll just, like, I’ll have a little bit of this, or I’ll have a little bit of that. And then before you know it, you start to, like, slip it, slide off that path back into your old habits.
Lindsay: But it’s not to say, oh, I ate a cookie and everything is washed. No, you could just easily go back to it because it will be there. You don’t have to stay like, you’re gonna eat a cookie, so that’ll unleash other things. I could eat. No, you could go back.
Michelle: Exactly.
Lindsay: It’s an easy change.
Michelle: And I think always knowing, too, in the back of your mind that you’ve done it already. You can do it again. It’s so easy. And knowing how good you felt when you did that is another intrinsic motivator for you to do it again. All eating all these sweets or carbohydrates or whatever it might be has been making me feel sluggish and fatigued, and I want to have that energy again. So it’s. It motivates you to do it.
Lindsay: So we started the diet in January and then ended in April. And ended in April or beginning of April, my birthday. So we were saying that we’re forever in phase three, so reintroducing food, introducing foods, keeping things out, and having some foods that were on the avoid list. And then I just stopped going off of that diet. And then I was experiencing hives more frequently in the past month, six weeks or whatnot. So I’ve been going back to phase two.
Michelle: And going back to phase two. I feel like instantly almost, we saw a huge improvement.
Michelle: Just so quickly cutting out all that.
Lindsay: Extra crap, which was like, I really. We had gotten into a peanut butter and jelly phase sandwich.
Michelle: We got into a sandwich, but it’s.
Lindsay: Like gluten free bread, but then we’re doing a lot of lunch meat, so it’s like a lot of sodium that I probably didn’t need, but.
Michelle: So the diet was super helpful for us to learn a lot about what we were reacting to. is less just like a really good diet or change to make to help reduce the inflammation in your body and get your body back to equilibrium. But just know that you could get back to equilibrium. But then if you go back into your old habits, you’re probably going to fall and end up in the same place.
Lindsay: I feel those same things over again. So the diet really helped with my. The inflammation, the brain fog that I was experiencing, the fatigue.
Michelle: Like always, we were good on 6 hours of sleep.
Lindsay: We were awake and didn’t need coffee or anything.
Michelle: It was crazy. The sleep, too. I feel like sleep. We had such deep sleep.
Lindsay: It’s a better sleep, much. We woke up, feeling more rested. Less amount of sleep, for sure.
Michelle: And my acne had completely cleared up. I lost a ton of weight. I, put some of it back on now, but, man, I didn’t realize how bloated I was until I saw that scale drop so quickly in such a short period of time. And then I lost a lot at once, and then it leveled out, and I was losing a little bit at a time. And that’s how I know the first portion of that was just bloating, bloat.
Lindsay: Weight, and then,
Michelle: Oh, my gosh, we were both so regular. Amazing bowel movements.
Lindsay: It was pretty great.
Michelle: If you’re gonna do this diet for anything, do it for those ten out of ten bowel movements.
Lindsay: If you don’t have them already, we recommend.
Michelle: So we. We feel that we’ve seen a lot of success with the free diet. and now next step is trying to. Next step for. For both of us, and specifically for Lindsey, is understanding what our body needs to get fully back to equilibrium and be more in a maintenance phase, because we feel like we made a lot of big improvements when we first did that diet. But then now we’re starting to see a lot of the symptoms come back, and we’re not 100% sure which things they’re coming from. Now, are there other environmental allergies at play here? Is she, like, allergic to latex? Or are there other toxins in her body that need to be removed or dealt with? And so that’s the journey. Where are we missing another piece of the puzzle? Now? We feel like we’ve gotten, so, so far with the dietary changes, but there’s still a little bit ways to.
Lindsay: Go, a little more investigating to do. 100% very expensive, very timely, but worth it.
Michelle: So worth it, because, especially nowadays, we are eating so many different types of foods, and we’re eating all the time. We’re eating three meals a day and snacks and stuff in between. So there’s so many things going into your system and being processed at different rates and different timing. So it’s so hard to narrow down. What are you actually reacting to? And the only way to know for certain, because a lot of these allergy tests are not that precise. And doing an exclusionary diet, the free diet, is really the only way that you can know for certain. Like this.
You have to be super diligent and precise. Once you get through those first 28 days, you feel amazing
You have to be super diligent and precise.
Lindsay: And once you get through the first 28 days, you can do anything.
Michelle: Seriously. Oh, my gosh. Once you get through those 1st 28 days, you feel amazing. It’s so worth it.
Lindsay: You might not like to have cooked or thought you couldn’t do it, but after those 28 days, you’re going to be the best chef ever.
Michelle: There is so much.
Lindsay: Especially when you could add in pepper if hopefully it doesn’t do anything to you.
Michelle: It’s good practice for cooking. Really good practice for sure.
Lindsay: There’s so many ways to cook a chicken. So many. But thank you guys for listening.
Michelle: Yes. And we’ll see you on the next.
Lindsay: Thanks. Bye.
Michelle: Thanks. Bye.