I’ve been on the autoimmune paleo protocol (AIP) since March 2014 as a part of a functional medicine approach to healing leaky gut. As you may know, you have to eliminate quite a number of foods when you start the AIP: grains, dairy, legumes, nuts, seeds, eggs, nightshades (like potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant as well as spices like cayenne and paprika), vegetable & nut oils, and processed foods.

Yeah. It sucks. I won’t sugar coat it!

The good news is that you’re not supposed to exclude all of these foods indefinitely. You are supposed to do reintroduction tests to identify which of these foods are OK for you to eat and which ones you are sensitive to. 

I’ve done a couple of reintroduction tests. I’ve passed some and, much to my surprise, I’ve failed some. I couldn’t be sadder that I failed both raw tomatoes and hot peppers. Fresh salsa has always been one of my most favorite things to eat. Bah!

Egg yolks are fine for me, all the seed-based spices I’ve tried have been fine (cumin, coriander, mustard, anise, fennel, etc.), potatoes are fine, and best of all CHOCOLATE has been fine.

I probably would’ve cried if I had failed chocolate. I really feel for you if you are reading this and chocolate’s not your body’s friend!

How To Reintroduce Foods on the AIP

I’m going to share with you the exact recipe that I used to reintroduce chocolate, but first, I’d like to talk about a great new e-book by Eileen at Phoenix Helix called Reintroducing Foods on the Paleo Autoimmune Protocol: A Step-by-Step Guide with Recipes. She sent me a review copy and is also sponsoring a giveaway so that one of you lucky readers will get a copy, too!

In this e-book, Eileen begins by explaining what the AIP is exactly and then provides lots of handy tips for how to begin your food reintroduction trials. She provides some very helpful coaching tips for the whole process, some of the most valuable being related to keeping of symptom journal. She also provides a copy of a sample symptom journal spanning the better part of a year. I can’t tell you how much it helped me to read that! She also discusses the emotional side of food reintroduction, which is something that a lot of people on the “outside” just don’t get and can make you feel alone or misunderstood. I very much enjoyed her discussion of this topic in the book. 

One very important thing to remember when conducting a reintroduction trial is to test only one thing at a time. This means that you shouldn’t use a meal at a restaurant as a test, because you can’t control all of the variables and have no idea what was used to prepare your meal. If you have a reaction after meal eaten out, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to know exactly what caused it. 

That brings me to what I think is the major value of this book: the recipes section. Eileen provides you with delicious recipes to reintroduce each of the foods you originally eliminated. This will make your life SO much easier when it comes time for you to test a specific food. Each recipe was carefully selected because it only contains 1 of the foods that you’ve eliminated, and most of them can be made in a large enough batch to last you through the whole 5 day reintroduction period. Bonus! Plus, they are all very tasty recipes that you will actually WANT to eat. 

After reading Eileen’s book, I felt much more confident about moving forward with my food reintroduction tests, and I’m inspired to do a better job at keeping track of my symptoms. I plan to start a symptom journal as she suggests, and wish I had done it sooner. I think this is a valuable book for anyone following the AIP. It will be extremely helpful for you when the time comes for you to begin reintroducing foods. 

If you would like a chance to win your own FREE copy of Eileen’s book, you can do that right here.

My Chocolate Reintroduction Recipe

Now, let’s get to my chocolate reintroduction recipe! It is a thick, creamy, ultra-rich chocolate pudding and is adapted from my other fully AIP-compliant coconut milk pudding recipe that is flavored with cinnamon and vanilla.

As mentioned earlier, it’s very important to be 100% in control of the ingredients used in a food reintroduction test. That’s why I use the Luker brand bitter chocolate. It has 1 ingredient: cocoa mass. Normally, I try to buy organic chocolate, but I’ll tell you the truth: I haven’t been able to find a brand of organic bitter chocolate that ONLY contains cocoa mass. They all seem to have soy lecithin, a small amount of sugar, or even a very small amount of milk!