Nutritional therapist Sam Josephs recently featured on our Living Well with MS podcast and discussed some useful steps you could take to ease yourself into the OMS diet.

If you feel comfortable, it’s a really good idea to talk to friends and family about why you are changing your diet, so they can support you in your transition. Explain the reasons why you are adapting your diet, to reduce relapses and improve you're overall health.

Starting the OMS diet in a positive head space can help you stick to it. Accepting that you have a chronic condition and that in order to stay as well as you can, you need to remove certain things from your diet. 

Some people may find it easier to start the diet by following all the steps straight away, others may prefer to break it down and tackle each step before the next.

Here are Sam's steps for adjusting to the OMS diet, with useful reading for each step:

1- Stop eating all processed foods with hidden fats

Start by cutting out all processed foods which have hidden saturated, hydrogenated and trans fats. Increase your intake of plant based foods such as fruit, vegetables, grains, beans and legumes. 

2- Cut out all dairy

This is a key step to achieve as quickly as possible as connections between dairy intake and MS progression have been proven throughout numerous studies.  

3- Give up red meat

As a population, many people are trying to cut down on their red meat intake. However people can sometimes worry where they will now get their protein from. If you follow the OMS diet you will be eating so many sources of protein, such as fish, green vegetables, legumes and whole grains such as brown rice. Read the following two links for more information.

4- No more chicken and egg yolks

Eggs can often be the most common ingredients used in cooking, so this can be a tricky step. When following the OMS diet, egg whites can be eaten but egg yolks should be avoided due to the saturated fat content.