How Food Intolerance Allergy Festers Inside Your Big Account

So a friend of mine was concerned she had food allergies. She decided to go for testing.

Part of the documentation she received featured this ‘fact’;

food intolerance is 60% of human illness

It also stated that there are supposedly three stages.

Stage One is where there is an immediate, but brief, episode upon first exposure. ‘Alarm’.

Stage Two is the lengthy phase during which your behaviour continues and unbeknown to you, your body slowly loses its battle against the ‘toxins’.

Stage Three heralds the arrival of severe reaction. And each time your behaviour recurs, you get well and truly klapped. ‘Exhaustion’.

The example they used was around cow’s milk. Where when young you simply vomited once. As you grew up you just burped. Then when older you now feel rubbish all day long and beyond.

I used to think all this stuff was pure quackery. Then I witnessed a dining companion have an attack in a restaurant after accidental exposure to nuts. Scary. So there may be something in it.

Anyway. I wondered whether parallels existed between this three-phase process to devastation and losing a valued account.

One time, something goes haywire. Ranting and raving follows. Then stops once the issue is ‘resolved’.

But it really isn’t.

Under the surface, the same thing keeps happening (or not, as the case may be). It festers. Slowly draining the will to live out of one party or other.

Then, the snap. Completely worn down, everything comes grinding to a halt. Contract lost, supplier shown the door.

For a few dollars, medical practitioners of various repute and ability offer simple allergy tests. The one my friend choose had a bizarre sounding Vega Test. Each hand holds an electrode and different foodstuffs get plonked on a tin tray between them.

The Exhaustion stage seems key here. You don’t know that your client is becoming allergic to you. They’ve appeared fine after the initial vomit. So what we perhaps need is our own test.

Imagine that earlier quote, re-framed.

little festering annoyances are 60% behind un-renewed contracts

Plausible?

Have you noticed anything unusual after carrying on drinking milk?

Something else it strikes me as worthwhile adding into that account review agenda.