When is it time to move on?

This is a question my husband and I have been asking ourselves recently, and I'd love to hear everyone's input. How long do you stick with a particular change in diet with no improvement before you determine that it's not for you? We've heard that 30 days is a good indicator, but some health issues take months or years eating a particular diet before improvements are obvious.

Thanks!

If you don't mind me asking, what illnesses are you trying to recover from? Sometimes different foods affect different food but what really helps is your mind set. If you are battling an auto immune, I have seen more than one miracle come from Weston A Price eating combined with The Gupta Program.

Good Luck!

I'm pretty confident I had/maybe still have leaky gut. My husband has thyroid disease and what we suspect is gallbladder sludge. He's had unexplainable stomach & back pain for a year now, and no scans, tests, or diets have helped thus far. I'm sure he'd try the WAPF diet but if this gallbladder, a low fat diet is a must. :S

We're too young for this junk! Lol

It's not that we are too young, it's that our food is that bad for us these days. Or rather the food like products that we have been eating. I have two friends that fixed their leaky gut with the GAPS or Paleo diet. Worked great for them. I know there are herbs and foods that help regulate a proper flow of the gall bladder... Just will have to ask around. Whatever you do, don't take it out! It can fix itself! I know it's painful in the mean time, but it can be done!

If the problem is gallbladder, then yes, I might want to start with a low-fat diet. But the gall-bladder is cleared out only when there is fat in the diet - otherwise it stagnates and can create gallstones. Dr Natasha McBride (the GAPS diet) talks about how to go about this by slowly adding in fats. Her diet heals and seals the gut wall and allows the digestive system to rebuild. I'd highly recommend reading her book and the online resources (it's basically a sub-set of WAPF diet for gut healing). Also look into liver/gallbladder flushes - there is a lot of information online about these - they are pretty intense though - not something to take on lightly.

In terms of how long to try things out - I think it depends on what you are trying out. If you are trying a whole foods diet to heal leaky gut, it will probably never work (in my opinion), but if you are trying out GAPS to heal a leaky gut, then I'm guessing almost everyone would see improvements in 6 months (some in days, others in weeks, but everyone by 6 months). We have been on GAPS for two years now, and can finally eat cheese and raw milk again (we have been dairy free for 6 years) because we have healed our guts through a good diet, and time. Also, as I mentioned on another thread, it took close to a year on GAPS for my sons warts to just disappear.

I think your body takes a long time to heal and you need to stick with a healing protocol for at least two years, but I would expect you would be seeing healing well before then.

That said, it has to be a healing protocol that actually works. What are you doing now? I HIGHLY recommend GAPS. I'd suggest committing to 6 months and then see how you're feeling. You should be seeing healing by then so it's easy to motivated to continue. We've been on GAPS for a year now and we have a lot of healing still to go but we've come a long way so I WANT to stay on the diet. There's nothing else I would want to eat anyway.

GAPS has recommendations for gallbladder issues. Most likely your husband would need to take ox bile for a while to assist in fat digestion.