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by nate·7y ago·view on hn ↗
This has been a rough couple years personally and professionally for me. My dad almost died last March from multiple pulmonary embolisms. My mom had breast cancer for the second time. The Highrise drama. But the real weird underlying thing has been this constant chronic pain and other symptoms. I could barely move my left shoulder without a ton of pain. I stopped pushing doors open with my left arm for example to deal with it. I also couldn’t walk up stairs without pain. My knees were awful. I chalked it all up to either stress or just mid life getting old. Then I started getting a ton of fluid in my ears. I thought it was some allergy that I just couldn’t fully combat with antihistamines. It made me feel like I head a head cold. Cloudy. A little dizzy. And this just went on for a couple years.

I thought 40 was just my inevitable peak and it all sucks from here. Life took on a real grey hue.

Well. My wife made us go on some “anti inflammatory” diet. No gluten. No dairy. No sugar. No alcohol. Low carb. No snacking. I moaned about it for days.

After 5 days my body was dramatically better. All the joint pain disappeared. The fluid in my ears is either gone or drastically more manageable right now.

I’m still on a similar diet today but not as strict. And I remain feeling really good. I can’t believe I was living with all this chronic pain this long and could have just changed up my diet.

So I drop this story here because I bet there’s some other folks out there that could see some impact in their life just being a bit more aware of their diet.

For me I have no idea what the real cause is. Sugar? Alcohol? Dairy? I’ve heard from others they have a sensitivity to a food and had similar symptoms. I took a food sensitivity test at everlywell.com which mentions a high sensitivity to brewers yeast. So maybe it’s that. Maybe my body just needed a detox to reboot. Who knows. But I feel great.

(The diet I went on was in an ebook from a healthy heart Facebook group https://m.facebook.com/groups/thehappyheartproject/) but it isn’t magical or mysterious. You can just figure it out yourself by staying away from the things I mentioned above for 5 days.

4 comments
I'm always glad to read of another person getting multiple benefits from low/ish carb eating. I live with chronic pain from a spinal infection and also happen to have disordered eating issues. Low carb was _an_ answer to both of those problems. It's not magic, I won't hail it as the one solution to myriad problems but my inflammatory markers, blood sugar markers (reversed t2d), weight (lost 200lbs) and ability to live with a modicum of normality (was bed bound) don't lie.

For anyone that likes complex problem solving and wants to start down the low carb road, I cannot recommend Ivor Cummins'[1] and Dr. Jeff Gerber's[2] work on diabetes and cholesterol enough.

[1] https://twitter.com/FatEmperor

[2] https://twitter.com/JeffryGerberMD

With the restricted diets, compliance is extremely hard to achieve in a lot of cases. If you go to social events, work in an office, etc., it will always come down to being offered restricted foods and having to forcefully reject them. For many folks food becomes a religious thing and they decide(maybe not consciously) they'd rather die than change.

Fortunately my issues to date seem to be controlled with heavy vitamin D3 supplementation, so I don't have to do a hard restriction on anything.

Did you ever add any of those back to see if you could pinpoint a single food group? Or maybe it's a combination of all of them.
Anecdata here, beware. Research on diet impact is not simple. Have you ever been diagnosed with anything ?