Well, it’s that time of year when folks are sneezing, they’re itchy, their noses are running, their eyes are watery and as a result they’re often popping anti-histamines like skittles, but fortunately I’m going to share with you how you can rid yourself of seasonal allergies without the use of any drugs at all!

I’ve done it personally, I used to experience horrible seasonal allergies and I’ve helped many of my clients relieve their allergy-like symptoms as well and as a bonus, this stuff very often works for dog and cat allergies too, kinda cool right…so let’s dig in!

Allergy-like symptoms tend to flare up at certain times of the year most commonly when trees, grasses and weeds release little pollen particles into the air so they can fertilize other plants, but an interesting question to ask is, if these pollen particles are the cause, why doesn’t everyone experience seasonal allergies…why are they horrible for some folks, a complete non-factor for others and then anything and everything in between?

The reason is because of the immune system and the easiest way to think about how the immune system works is via a budget. We all have a certain immune budget that we’re working with based on essentially, how healthy we are and what dictates how healthy we are is our lifestyle via nutrition, movement and sleep status, meaning…

Someone who is eating super healthfully, incorporating plenty of movement, minimizing drug and alcohol consumption and sleeping like a baby has a much bigger immune budget to work with than someone who is eating unhealthfully, living a sedentary lifestyle, partying like a rockstar and sleeping like shit…shocker right!?

But, why is that? Because the person that has their lifestyle buttoned up has extra quote unquote ‘income’ to allocate towards unexpected costs that may pop up such as pollen particles, whereas the person that doesn’t have their lifestyle buttoned up has no extra income on reserve.

This is exactly why we get sick, our immune system is literally designed to deal with things like viruses, pathogens and allergens and so if we use that popular virus that was floating around over the last few years as an example, this is why healthy people handled it much better than unhealthy people.

Healthy folks have more money in their savings accounts and unhealthy people are cutting things so close that if an unexpected expense comes up, they have no extra resources to deal with it and therefore it pushes them over the edge, they get sick and they have a much bigger hole to climb out of.

If your car breaks down and it’s going to cost you $1000 to fix and you only have $200 in your savings account, you’re going into the red…on the other hand if your car breaks down and it’s going to cost you $1000 to fix and you have $2000 in your savings account, you’re fine, no sweat! Exact same idea here, pollen particles are an unexpected car expense.

Now what people usually do when they experience allergies is they take a drug like an anti-histamine and these drugs do dampen symptoms, but there is always a cost to convenience and in this case there are a number of them…

One, taking an anti-histamine may reduce allergy symptoms, however it’s not addressing the root cause of why someone is experiencing allergies to begin with and therefore that damage is still happening regardless of fewer symptoms due to taking the drug. It’s like having pain in your shoulder and taking a drug to reduce the pain, your shoulder hasn’t magically healed, you’ve just used a drug to numb that sensation.

Two, histamine has a number of functions in the body which include impacting alertness meaning, when we squash histamine via popping an anti-histamine, we tend to feel drowsy…but the pharma industry is smart and so they found out that histamine is important for alertness and so if someone is taking an anti-histamine drug, which makes them tired as a side-effect, they often just add a stimulant to the drug as well hence…daytime and nighttime anti-histamine drugs.

So now, not only are you taking a drug to reduce your allergy-symptoms via crushing histamine, you’re also taking a stimulant on top of that to combat the feelings of drowsiness that come along with not enough histamine in your body. This is classic symptom chasing and we see it all the time…

Folks start taking a drug for one thing, the body is brilliant and everything is connected and so they start experiencing other undesirable symptoms as a result of the drug, which then has them take another drug for the side effects of the first drug and now they’re on 2 drugs. The second drug also has side-effects that pop up and then they need a third drug for the side effects of the second one and on and on and on…

This is how people go from 1 medication to 5 or 10, you cannot outsmart the body, it’s far more intelligent than we are…we think that we can just take something that will have the one and only impact in our bodies that we want it to have and that’s it, but that’s not how a system works. You cannot impact something in isolation without impacting 30 other things downstream.

Okay, now that we’ve established how all of this stuff works, let’s touch on how can you increase your immune budget and reduce your seasonal allergy symptoms?

First of all, if you’re carrying excess body fat, get it off ya…plain and simple, it’s not healthy, it’s costing you every single moment of every single day.

Nutrition, favour single ingredient whole foods that you preferably cook yourself…more on that in a second.

Movement wise, hit your 10,000 steps per day or hit a weekly total of 70,000. If your steps are boxed off and you still want to move more, incorporate some weight training or whatever secondary type of exercise that you like to engage in.

Sleep, get 7-9 hours per night and preferably go to bed early enough so that you can wake up naturally without an alarm.

Getting more specific on the nutrition front, we have a few things to double click on and the first one is digestion. There will be a ton of folks that can just eat single ingredient whole foods and thrive, however, there will also be a number of people that will have specific food sensitivities to even to quote unquote ‘healthy foods’ and the most common sensitivity in relation to allergies is going to be dairy.

Dairy is a really nutrient dense healthful food option for someone who tolerates it well, but it’s actually unhealthy for someone who doesn’t because for an individual that is eating dairy on a regular basis that doesn’t tolerate it, they’re digging into their immune budget because their immune system has to clean up the damage that that dairy is causing in their bodies.

I have tons of clients who are sensitive to dairy. It’s actually far more common not to tolerate dairy as an adult than it is to tolerate it and so if it works just fine for you, great, you’re one of the fortunate ones and if it doesn’t, eliminating it will improve your seasonal allergy symptoms.

If you’re unsure as to whether you tolerate dairy, simply eliminate it for 10 days, see how you feel, reintroduce it at a meal and see if you experience any negative symptoms. Common symptoms are things like stomach upset, digestion troubles, dry eyes, stuffy or runny nose, joint pain, skin issues, throat irritation…some of that sounds pretty similar to allergies doesn’t it…coincidence…I dunno!?

Another common culprit is gluten, however it’s far less so than dairy and you can follow the same protocol to find out whether you tolerate gluten or ya don’t. If there are any other foods that you know that you don’t tolerate, skip them because they digging into your immune budget…so if you don’t do well with beans or legumes, ditch em’, if spinach upsets your stomach don’t eat it or if nuts make you feel nauseous they’re not for you.

Now there is one more specific nutritional input that is really important to be aware of and that is histamine containing and liberating foods and the tricky thing about histamine containing and liberating foods is that a lot of them would be classified under the ‘healthy’ category, such as…

Bananas and avocados, high in histamine. Chocolate, cocao and cocoa…also high. Pineapple and papaya, fermented foods in general so things like canned salmon, canned tuna, lunch meats, alcohol, kimchi, sauerkraut, kefir, yogurts, aged cheeses. Tomatoes and citrus fruits are also high and if you’re interested in looking up specific high histamine foods, simply google high histamine foods and hit the images button and there are a whole bunch of infographics available for ya!

Okay, so you’re experiencing seasonal allergies and you want to get rid of them without drugs, where do you start?

Step 1 is to favour single ingredient whole foods, hit 10k steps daily or 70k for the week and prioritize your sleep so you’re waking up rested and alert each and every day. If that doesn’t resolve your symptoms…

Step 2 is to experiment without gluten and/or dairy. If that doesn’t resolve your symptoms fully…

Step 3 is to identify and reduce how many histamine containing and liberating foods that you’re eating.

It’s worth mentioning that for step 3, you don’t necessarily need to decrease your histamine food intake to zero, that’s almost certainly not needed, but reducing it at least to a degree should help. Also, you might just need to be more aware of histamine foods during allergy season because of all of the pollen particles floating around and the rest of the year you may be able to tolerate a higher histamine diet just fine.