Actually, for me, while lactose may be a bit of a problem, my issue is the casein in milk more than lactose. Cream and half/half don't affect me when I have them in very small amounts. When I did testing for celiac, I also tested dairy, corn, and a few other things. I was told (one can never be sure this was accurate) that casein might be just as destructive to my system as gluten and the doctor said I should avoid it just like I do gluten. When I was a baby I had terrible problems with dairy right from the beginning (constant colic), and my mother finally learned I did better with goat's milk. For my entire childhood I instinctively avoided milk products because it always upset me so I was negatively conditioned to avoid milk. I never liked ice cream or cheese much for that reason.

If eggs don't bother you, maybe you could supplement your protein intake with liquid egg whites or egg white protein powder.

If you want to try a high protein approach for weight loss, there is no requirement to include any dairy or protein powders at all. As Calianna suggested, egg white protein is excellent.

If you want to try other dairy alternatives, Goat Milk and A2 milk products have become more common in stores, and both have protein powders now too. Our Trader Joe's has large, reasonable priced goat's milk yogurt, a couple of brands of goat's milk. A2 milk and yogurt is now at Costco https://bellwetherfarms.com/campaign/coscto-a2yogurt/

One of my favorite high protein, low fat sources is shrimp. I keep a bag of it and stir-fry vegetables in the freezer, pour into sauté pan, a hot filling meal in minutes. Many other high protein, lower fat, dairy free choices. Happy to share the infographic food lists with you in my journal.

I am an example of someone whose dairy intolerance was caused by my wheat sensitivity. This is now an explored angle to our gut health.

Losing weight and better fitting pants made me realize the low carb wrap I'd brought for lunch -- not a daily thing -- was painlessly bloating my stomach. I had already found cheese on Atkins didn't give me trouble, and I wasn't eating bread anymore.

By avoiding the cracker, I avoided the symptoms I got from cheese and crackers. The doctors always blamed the dairy, back a couple of decades. Now the concept of gluten sensitivity is scientifically accepted.

I never did have a problem with dairy. It was the gluten harming my intestinal lining that developed my problems, not dairy itself.

This probably doesn't apply with people who do better with goat milk, especially a life-long difficulty. But we can also acquire issues -- whether misdiagnosed or missing the forest for the trees -- which will go away.

With better health, I've recast my whole outlook on food. Now each one has to prove itself!

I was writing about an acquired sensitivity in my other "home" related to my "oral allergy syndrome" or stone fruit /pollen allergy. In my forties or so, I developed a dramatic hive reaction to "stone fruits". I still avoid the obvious stone fruits, but don’t carry an EpiPen, fearful of a tiny bite hidden in something else. The Ebb and Flow of my allergies over 73 years is crazy.

A few decades ago, a friend told me that her mouth would itch when she ate stone fruits. Her doctor told her that it was an insufficient enzyme in her saliva that was causing it, and that if she continued to eat stone fruits, slowly increasing the amount she ate, over time she would have enough of that enzyme again to eat that fruit without her mouth itching.

I thought at the time that it must be an allergy to have the itching mouth develop as soon as she took a bite of the fruit. I don't know if this is the same as the "oral allergy syndrome" or not, or if "insufficient enzymes" was just a go-to diagnosis 30-some years ago if they didn't know what else to call it.

She died almost 2 decades ago, and she had never said anything about it after the initial discussion, so I don't know if she was ever able to eat stone fruits again without the itching or not.

I occasionally will eat some cherries when they're in season and get that itching. I don't eat many of them though, 2 or 3 in a day at the most. After the first few times I eat a couple of them in season, I usually don't get the itching any more. (But never took note of how they affected me otherwise - digestive, increased congestion, etc.) It's confined to my tongue and the roof of my mouth. A quick google tells me that it's related to tree pollen allergies, and I definitely have that. Not only do I get congestion/sneezing/drowning in drainage from tree pollen, I also get a maddeningly itchy soft palate, eyes, and Eustachian tubes (all places that are impossible to scratch) from the tree pollen. I also get the feeling of pin-pricks on my skin when I go out on a high pollen day. The pin-prick feeling on my skin quickly turns to itchy skin. (In addition to antihistamines, I found that using a couple layers of thick moisturizer on every bit of exposed skin helps to block the pollen from my skin to minimize that reaction - I prefer to use minimal antihistamines because I get drowsy so easily even without them)

This year it wasn't nearly as bad as usual - not because the pollen was lower, but there had been a source of some kind of mold in our garage, and apparently that combined with even the early tree pollens was enough to set off the allergic reaction beginning in Feb when the junipers start to produce pollen. It would just keep getting worse all the way through the end of oak season. But this year - after getting rid of the physical source of the mold in the garage, it never even started until Oak season began, and was much more manageable than usual.

I haven't tried eating any cherries this year though - maybe I'll get a few to try and see what happens.

There's definitely an "allergen load" issue. As a cat blogger, I covered ways people who were allergic still had pet cats. The strategies ranged from a raw food diet (for the cat) to a HEPA filter in the bedroom. Others trained their cat to put up with baths, which they normally do not need.

These strategies reduced the part they were allergic to. Also, it can happen that they stopped reacting to their own cat.

What this means to me is how we wound up in a gas station convenience store for late breakfast yesterday. Things have been demanding and we'd finally wrapped up some crucial errands. But summer crowds were filling up all the places, and we just wanted to go home. So we stopped for coffee, and decided to each get ONE indulgence with the coffee. He got a chocolate muffin and I got the protein bar with the least bad ingredients, compared to a real candy bar.

Fun in the moment, as usual, but shortly after, we both felt "bothered" by our choices, all the way home. Got home, got to eat real food, the bad feeling went away.

We both felt that we used to feel so poorly the extra obnoxiousness of such "foods" was probably lost in the fog of not feeling that much better when we felt "better." I had the low carb choice, but it was still junk, of course. But for DH, for whom this was once a favorite, it was an amazing contrast that renews our determination to not even be tempted.

So many people are getting symptoms of how poorly they eat, when it comes right down to it. But they don't know that's what it is.

Now that both DH and I have been eating so well for so long, maybe we can detect the way our body is saying -- as my cats often do -- "Excuse me, a mistake has been made. This isn't food."

I didn't know there was such a term as "allergen load" but that's definitely what has been happening.

I've been using HEPA air purifiers in multiple areas of the house for several years now. They've helped some - not enough to eliminate the allergic reaction completely though.

Handling the filters while cleaning or replacing them results in enough allergens being released into the air to set off a day or two of sneezing and congestion, before the filters manage to filter enough the air to minimize the allergens again.

Still, it's far better than it had been for the last several years.

I like to turn protein into chocolate cake by making a keto lava mug cake with melted butter, cocoa powder & stevia to taste with an egg or two stirred in. You can make it cakier by adding some protein powder and extra eggwhites.

I find it easier to get more protein by using 2-3 different ones in the same meal - eggs with extra liquid eggwhite, add some yogurt, cheeze, leftover meat, poultry or fish. It is not as overwhelming as a huge slab-o-meat or litre of yogurt to get my ~50g of protein for brunch.