When Food Attacks: Custom Fit Nutrition

Page Gehrke couldn’t sleep at night, had maddening cravings and couldn’t seem to lose that last 30 pounds no matter how hard she exercised and ate right.

“Food felt like it didn’t work for me,” Gehrke said. “My ears would itch like mad, and I had congestion and insomnia.” 

An exhausted Gehrke visited Joy Supplee at on Mercer Island for a blood test for food sensitivity.

“The big thing they found is that corn is bad for me, and there was corn starch in the antidepressant I was taking,” she said. “Once I stopped eating my ‘red zone’ foods that cause me the most problems, I lost weight, I sleep through the night, I have no congestion and my ears don’t itch---it’s amazing to me how (Custom Fit Nutrition) changed my life.”

Bellevue resident Claudia Helm was also experiencing problems with food, but her sensitivity manifested as fatigue and dark circles, sometimes called “allergy shiners,” around her eyes.

“Last year in August I went to see Joy, and had the MRT testing, where they discovered that I reacted to a number of grains, like oats and rye, but also the chemicals in aged foods, like wine, so if I had a sip of wine I felt like I’d drunk the whole bottle---wine and cheese is a no-no for me.”

Within 3 days of staying off the foods and beverages that she’s sensitive to, Helm said she could see the difference immediately. “I lost 8 pounds in a week, and I felt like I had a ton of energy,” she said. “People kept telling me, “you look great,” so I had a great outcome.”

Supplee, who has bachelors and masters degrees in nutritional science, as well as being a registered and certified dietician counts Custom Fit Nutrition as her third career.

“I was in the Air Force and worked as a sheet metal manufacturing engineer for 15 years,” she said. “Then I decided to do what I had been passionate about since I was a child, watching my mother read “Mother Earth News” before it was cool.”

Supplee grew up eating fresh produce from her mother’s garden and learning to cook with whole foods. But it wasn’t until she learned in a college psychology class that food could effect mental and physical health that she began investigating her own family’s health problems in terms of what they were eating.

“I’m a very technical, analytical person, and nutrition is actually a pretty technical field,” she said. “Rather than building boxes out of metal, I’m helping people solve their health problems by analyzing which foods are good or bad for them, depending on their levels of sensitivity.”

Supplee started seeing patients referred to her by physicians at Mercer Island Primary Care in 2007, and moved into the Mercer Park Building with acupuncturist Lee Huang a couple of years later. Insurance companies also began to send patients who were having no luck ameliorating their symptoms to Supplee at her home office in Maple Valley, so she decided to open an office there and split her week between Mercer Island and Maple Valley. Her personal LEAP assistant, Peggi Witman, will be helping clients shop for the foods on their 'green' list, as well as helping them cook and hosting cooking classes to help clients navigate the new waters of a food-sensitive diet.

”98 percent of my clients have food sensitivities,” Supplee said. “Whether they come to me with fibromyalgia, migraines, irritable bowel syndrome, celiac disease, acid reflux, Crohn’s disease, diabetes, skin problems, ADD or arthritis, I know they’re having food issues and I can help them.” 

After patients fill out a symptom survey, Supplee found that the “Lifestyle, Eating and Performance Mediator Release Test’ or LEAP-MRT was the gold standard in charting what foods and food chemicals are causing a reaction of inflammation inside the patient’s body. The blood test charts out reactivity to 150 different foods, with the highest reaction in a red graph, milder reactions in a yellow graph and no reaction in a green graph. Supplee then helps the patient with recipes and web sites of substitutions for the foods that are on the red list that are immediately removed from the patient’s diet.

“Reds and yellows are all symptom-causers, so we start by adding in the lowest reactive foods on the chart, then continually add in low reactive foods to make sure they are safe. The average number of foods a given person is sensitive to is about 25. That leaves plenty of foods leftover to build a diet.”

'Supplee also teaches her patients strategies for reducing their food sensitivities over time. She notes that after having 44 foods removed from her own diet a few years ago, she’s down to only having to keep out 14 foods today.

A 14-year-old patient had been having migraines every day since age 3 when he came to visit Custom Fit Nutrition. “He’d been to see neurologists and every other kind of doctor, but they couldn’t find anything to help him, but when I found out what foods he was sensitive to, within 7 days he was migraine-free,” Supplee recalls. “I will never forget that he gave me a hug and said, “thank you for giving me my life back” that’s why I do what I do.”

2448 76th Ave SE

Suite #212, Mercer Island, WA

(206) 295-6810

http://www.customfitnutrition.net/