Changing your diet when you first start the Overcoming MS Program can feel overwhelming. Nutritional therapist Sam Josephs, has suggested some steps to help you break it down.
Nutritional therapist Sam Josephs, who has been featured on our Living Well with MS podcast, discussed some useful steps you could take to ease yourself into the Overcoming MS 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 your overall health.
Starting the Overcoming MS diet in a positive headspace can help you stick to it. Accepting that you have a chronic condition and that 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 Overcoming MS diet, with useful reading for each step:
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.
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.
As a population, many people are trying to cut down on their red meat intake. However, people can sometimes worry about where they will now get their protein from. If you follow the Overcoming MS 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.
Eggs can often be the most common ingredients used in cooking, so this can be a tricky step. When following the Overcoming MS diet, egg whites can be eaten but egg yolks should be avoided due to the saturated fat content.