I work with women with endometriosis. I help them change what they eat and use nutrition to reduce the severity of their symptoms.

What I have noticed in the talk around endometriosis and food is that there is a strong focus on finding what the triggers are. Finding out what foods will lead to a flare-up. With the assumption that if you remove those foods your endometriosis symptoms will reduce.

Knowing what foods affect your endometriosis is absolutely important, but I think it’s even more key to look beyond triggers.

I’ll use an analogy to explain.

I have a nail sticking out of the doorway from my kitchen to the laundry. It’s been there for as long as I’ve lived here. Now let’s assume I keep getting caught on this nail and scratching arm each time I walk past it. The trigger for my injury is the nail in the doorway.

I know it’s there and if I put a bit of conscious thought into going to the laundry I can easily avoid it.

This is how trigger foods work with endometriosis: you know when you eat your trigger food, your endometriosis will flare up. With a bit of effort (or a lot, depending on how much you love your trigger food) you can minimise your flare-ups by not eating your trigger food.

Going back to my analogy, what if I do scratch myself on the nail, and as the wound tries to heal, I keep picking off the scab, causing it to get infected and not heal? I can avoid the trigger, the nail, all I want, it’s not going to help my scratch to heal. Instead, I would need to put something on the wound to disinfect, perhaps put a band aid on, etc.

Endometriosis is a chronic inflammation disorder. Your whole system is in a constant state of inflammation and your immune system is super-sensitive to anything that may look like an invader.

Your trigger food(s) will act like a fire-alarm for your immune system. But because of your inflammation, the fire-alarm will get triggered far to easily.

Removing your trigger food(s) will certainly reduce the strength of your immune system’s response, but it won’t deal with the underlying inflammation.

There will be foods that are not triggers for your endometriosis but will contribute to your overall inflammation.

And there are foods that can help reduce the overall inflammation.

Now let me make one thing clear: nutrition can not cure endometriosis. But you can feel so much better if you do more than just remove your trigger foods.

If you’d like to know more, get in touch! Or check out my program: Using Nutrition to Manage Endometriosis.