Welcome to Pick Your Foods. My name is Karin Macon and my journey led me to finally find my passion in sharing recipes for food intolerance and bringing more awareness of leaky gut to every household.
I’m not a doctor nor a licensed health practitioner, but due to my own journey and my daughters Celiac disease, I have dedicated a good portion of my life to learning and researching as much as I can on this subject. I hope you will find it informative and helpful in your journey to be a healthier you.
Growing up in a small village in Germany (you can see my entire village in the picture), I was never around much processed food or GMOs, because GMOs were not allowed in European countries. All of our vegetables were grown in our own garden. I also never had any health issues at that time with food.
Everything changed when I moved to the US. Turn time forward 20 years and I was so sick I looked like I had the flu on a daily basis. My immune system was so run down, that I had food poisoning four times in one year.
It’s not something that just happened overnight. It snuck up on me slowly over 10 years. Every doctor I saw claimed I had allergies, to the season, dogs, dust, etc. They put me on every medication known for allergies, just to find out none of them worked longer than 2 weeks. Talk about just covering up the symptoms but not fixing the cause.
Then a friend of mine told me I’m intolerant to food and need to get tested. You should have seen the thousand question marks on my face. How can you be intolerant to food?
That was the turning point for my health. Between the endless medication, antibiotics, stress, and processed food, I had a severely leaky gut, that sent me to my breaking point.
I got tested. When I got my results back, I was shocked to say the least, I was reacting to rice. Rice! Almost no one has reactions to rice. My list of food reactions was very extensive.
So, my journey began.
I started a food elimination diet. All kidding aside, it takes dedication to heal your gut, but I could feel the immediate change in just 7 days. Of course, your gut is not healed in that short amount of time, but it’s a start, and I had also stopped aggravating my body with the wrong foods.
For the first time in 10 years I did not have a runny nose and I was no longer sneezing constantly. This extreme change in my health showed me what I needed to do and it made me a believer that food intolerance is real.
It was a very long journey. For almost an entire year I stayed away from my highly reactive foods, before I took the step of re-introducing them again. I really wanted to make sure my gut was healed. Nowadays there are supplements you can take along with cutting the intolerant foods out of your diet that can heal a leaky gut way faster.
Ironically, I’m the only one in my family who does not have an issue with gluten, my issue is with wheat itself.
Depending on the years of abuse to your body, it can be a long road before certain foods can be eaten again, and some foods you may never eat again, if you want to stay healthy.
Of course, there is always the 80/20 rule in life. Don’t eat any at home, if you get any cross contamination in restaurants your reactions should be less severe. It took me almost 3 years before I could eat potatoes again. For this reason, I do not bake with potato flour and instead I enjoy my baked potatoes or fries in restaurants without any side effects now, but, as with everything, moderation is the key.
To this day I can’t have anything with whey in it, but I really don’t miss it either since there are so many great Paleo substitutions nowadays.
There are still way too many people that are in disbelief that food intolerance is real, and I really want to bring more awareness to it.
I have helped many of my friends over the years to improve their health by cutting out the foods which made them sick.
One non-believer at a time, is my motto!
Just to give you a sample of all the foods, I was unable to eat over the years:
- All wheat/gluten
- Rice
- Potatoes
- Corn
- Nightshades (too many to list them all individually)
- Soybean
- Turmeric
- Hazelnut
- Food coloring
- Cow’s milk
- Whey
What can I eat today? Almost everything, except wheat and whey. Dairy and potatoes I eat in moderation. Corn only if its GMO free and soy I almost never eat, since it’s just bad for you in general.
As I said before, food can be your best friend or your worst enemy for your health, no matter what is claimed as a healthy food. I have seen people who can’t eat quinoa, avocado, coconut, bananas, sweet potato, and things you never would consider since they are claimed as health foods.
I’ll say it again, and will continue to say it over and over, none of it matters if your leaky gut chooses it as an invasion to your body.
Heal your gut!
This journey has brought me to finally create my own, Pick Your Foods blog. I have always loved to cook and started at the young age of 12 baking anything and everything possible.
Between my food intolerance journey, my daughter’s Celiac disease, and my husband’s dairy issues, I’ve been on a mission to create gluten free and dairy free foods, and make them taste unbelievably good.
I’m not stopping there. My next step is to help people with other food options (no matter what you are intolerant to) to come up with a better fulfilling way to eat. If you can figure this out, your journey will be half as hard as mine. I had no guidance on what was and was not possible 10 years ago.
Send me your stories and let me see if I can help you. To make this process even easier, I have created a food list PDF where you can mark off your known food intolerances, to help you avoid them.
Please Send Me the Food Intolerance Checklist
My Learning and Research Experience
Attended the NutriDyn Great Lakes Conference in 2018/2019 and learned from:
Chad Oler, ND.- Correcting Cardiovascular Disease – Using Advanced Assessments to Address Dyslipidemia
Bob Rakowski, DC, CCN, DACBN, DIBAK.- The Trillion Dollar Mistake – Redirecting Our Misguided War on Cancer
Andrew Rostenberg, DC.-Methylation from Gut to Brain – connecting dots between gut health, genetic expression, and optimum brain function
Rachel Fresco, LAc., PhD-Botanical Medicines in Lyme Disease
Joel M. Evans, MD.-Women’s Wellness: A Functional Medicine Approach
Trish Paulson, ND.-When Life Is Good On Paper But… Anxiety And Depression
Chad Oler, ND. – Taming the Silent Killer: Advanced Techniques to Address High Blood Pressure
Charles Sefcik, DC, DACNB, CCN. – Recharging A Dying Battery: Simple, Effective Ways to Energize Your Patients
Jeffrey Kotulski, DO. – Debunking the Myths of Cancer
Kurt Waples, DC. – The Quantum Nature of the Thyroid
Pat Luse DC, DABCO, CCST, CCRP. – The 7 Pillars of Health
Kristi Hughes, ND, IFMCP. –Genetic Testing – Truly Personalized Medicine for the Integrative Healthcare Practitioner
Jocelyn Strand, ND. – Botanical Medicines in Complex, Multi-Pathogen Disease: How Gu Syndrome Relates to Chronic Infectious Disease
Robert G. Silverman, DC, MS, DACBN. – A Functional Approach to the Blood-Brain Barrier in Health and Trauma
METABOLIC ANALYTICS PRACTITIONER
EPIGENETICS OF OPTIMIZING CARBOHYDRATES FOR MAXIMAL PERFORMANCE – MA MODULE 4 (2017)
NUTRITIONAL STRATEGIES FOR JOINT PAIN – MA MODULE 5 (2017)
BUILDING A HEALTHY BRAIN FOR AN ENHANCED LIFE – MA MODULE 6 (2017)
MUSCLE CENTRIC MEDICINE – MA MODULE 7 (2018)
FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE APPROACH TO PAIN MANAGEMENT – MA MODULE 8 (2018)
FUNCTIONAL APPROACH TO SLEEP – MA MODULE 9 (2018)