I have noticed that when I eat more proteins and less carbs, that I do feel better. Same as you mentioned, less gas, bloating, GERD, etc. I tried the low FODMAP diet for awhile when my GI doctor recommended it, and it didn't help much, but just lower carbs seem to do better 👍
I haven’t done low-carb but I have tried AIP (which does eliminate the higher carb grains and legumes) a couple years ago. I had looked at Keto but felt that AIP fit my allergy profile far better. It definitely had some of the same benefits that you listed - less fatigue, lost weight, less GI issues, no more GERD, ate healthier. But it is restrictive and hard to stick with long term. I want to go back to it in the near future but I’m currently focused more on dealing with my sudden increase in dislocations and subluxations. Hopefully, I can find ways to modify that work for me.
I hope you find something that works for you! Sorry to hear about the sudden increase in dislocations and subluxations. My least favorite part about hEDS is the unpredictability. You get one symptom managed, and then another bigger one pops up.
@@ehlersdanlosandi Oh, yes…the unpredictability. I was originally diagnosed at 11 because of multiple daily dislocations. After bracing and PT, my late twenties through early 40s were fairly calm. But with menopause, EVERY possible hEDS symptom and half of its comorbidities hit me with full force like a freight train. My OBGYN asked about my menopause symptoms and I just gave her a deer in the headlights stare because with everything else going on I couldn’t remember having any. 😂
So, of course I only have my own experience to pull from, and what worked for me isn't necessarily going to work for everyone; I have found that going full carnivore dramatically helped with pain...eventually. I have a supposition as to why this is the case, but I can't prove it. Among EDS's myriad health problems, one that frequently comes up is poor nutrient absorption. There are two TH-cam content creators, of course, who have seen dramatic improvements with intramuscular injections of vitamin C (which I have not tried) but plants contain anti-nutrients, which are designed specifically to hinder nutrient absorption. Animals adapted throughout history to fight this effect but what if people with EDS are particularly susceptible to anti-nutrients? Now, it's important to be clear: this wasn't a theory I had and I ended up being correct. I've tried whole food plant based, Mediterranean, Paleo, and low histamine diets before, and got pretty middling results. Whole food meat based was just yet another "Hell, I might as well, what have I got to lose?" shot in the dark. Initial weight loss and better focus were my first improvements and after four months were what I figured would be the entirety of the benefits but then pain and subluxations started dramatically improving around 5 months in. Now, where I used to see my DO twice a week to put my body back in place, I see her around once a month these days. I'm still coping with an invisible form (no skin blotches) of keto rash, but that's only been going on for like 6 weeks and I hear 10-12 weeks is usually the duration, so fingers crossed. The diet is boring, no doubt about it, but I've stopped looking at food as entertainment. I'm willing to trade being bored 20 minutes a day for tremendous symptom reduction the other 23 hours and 40 minutes. :). Hope you continue to do well!
Thank you for sharing your experience. May I ask how you are at the moment (still going strong on carnivore?) and what a typical day of eating / meal looks like for you? Thank you in advance.
@@carolina_is_free Doing really well, thanks. I’ve shifted from being very heavily protein to much more fat-still predominantly carnivore but a BUNCH of butter, ghee and heavy cream have entered into the mix. This was to correct the fact that I was apparently turning excess protein into sugar and my A1C was creeping up. There are phone apps that help you build meals and will tell you what the ratios are of calories from fat, protein, and carbs. I run about 70% calories from fat now and 25-30% protein. I do eat some vegetables (especially olives and avocado because they also have lots of fat) occasionally but generally per day I’m putting down about two pounds of fatty meat and a stick of salted butter. I melt the butter onto the meat or just slice it and eat it. Lots of eggs. I do eat some pork, birds and fish but they’re occasional. I also discovered beef bacon a while back and that’s wonderful because it is hugely fatty and doesn’t have to be cooked as thoroughly as pork bacon, so you don’t melt all the fat off. If you go to “Steak and Butter Gal” channel, or Laura Spath, they both do a lot of cooking and general “what would a carnivore plate look like” vids. I know it can be daunting to think of being so very limited in variety, but on the one hand, getting my stability back and my pain gone have MORE than made up for it, and also, once I stopped eating sugar, after a few weeks, I stopped craving sugar. I can walk right past a table full of donuts or cake or whatever else people bring in and leave on the community table at work, and I’m not even interested. On the couple of occasions that I have indulged (a coworker gave me a piece of pie made from the fruit in her garden and I just felt like it’d be rude to pass it up) I get to experience joint pain all over again, especially in my feet, so I have absolutely no doubt that sugar had been torturing me for all of those years. I’m back to being able to put on muscle, exercising like I did in my 20s, and I haven’t had a POTS episode since I started eating this way. Again, I tried so many other diets, and none of them seemed to touch my symptoms, whereas this has almost entirely eliminated them.
@@t1mpani That sounds great! I am glad that you found a way of eating that has helped you so much. I know how difficult it can be with all these pains & aches. Sometimes it's just because of the wrong nutrition. So it's mostly beef, butter and eggs for you? I like this kind of simplicity. It's worth a try. Do you experienced any kind of meat aversion when you eat keto/carnivore? That's my biggest problem - I don't like meat but need to eat more protein & fats. It's really difficult sometimes.
@@carolina_is_free Okay, TH-cam KEEPS deleting my reply, because the algorithm is stupid. We'll try this again: So if you don't "cheat" and just focus on your health for a couple of months by eating no junk, your palette will likely change. I used to love Oreo cookies and a couple of times since I started all of this I've tried one and it's absolutely terrible--I'm not trying to convince myself of that, the last one I threw the second half away as I didn't want anymore in my mouth. Cook meat low and slow (other than a high temperature sear of just the outside if you like) and you'll preserve not only the flavor but the nutrient value. If you're craving something sweet, eat something salty--basically retrain your brain to crave stuff it actually needs. Give it a solid 90 days, it takes awhile for metabolic health to turn around (and it'll keep improving the longer you go) but do that long at least, and if you still don't like it or don't feel good, well, it was a worthwhile experiment. Best of luck, I really hope you give it a shot.
Being that my dad is in the hospital, the foods are usually low- carb foods . So I’m probably going to try to stay with that, I may have a piece of pie for dessert every now and then but not every day or I may have a slice of pizza for lunch or dinner sometimes.,
Have you tried going low-carb? What did you like or not like about it?
I have noticed that when I eat more proteins and less carbs, that I do feel better. Same as you mentioned, less gas, bloating, GERD, etc. I tried the low FODMAP diet for awhile when my GI doctor recommended it, and it didn't help much, but just lower carbs seem to do better 👍
I found keto did help me lose weight, but it wasnt sustainable. Carnivore is much more helpful, as it gives me a lot of energy. At 76, its great!
I haven’t done low-carb but I have tried AIP (which does eliminate the higher carb grains and legumes) a couple years ago. I had looked at Keto but felt that AIP fit my allergy profile far better. It definitely had some of the same benefits that you listed - less fatigue, lost weight, less GI issues, no more GERD, ate healthier. But it is restrictive and hard to stick with long term. I want to go back to it in the near future but I’m currently focused more on dealing with my sudden increase in dislocations and subluxations. Hopefully, I can find ways to modify that work for me.
I hope you find something that works for you! Sorry to hear about the sudden increase in dislocations and subluxations. My least favorite part about hEDS is the unpredictability. You get one symptom managed, and then another bigger one pops up.
@@ehlersdanlosandi Oh, yes…the unpredictability. I was originally diagnosed at 11 because of multiple daily dislocations. After bracing and PT, my late twenties through early 40s were fairly calm. But with menopause, EVERY possible hEDS symptom and half of its comorbidities hit me with full force like a freight train. My OBGYN asked about my menopause symptoms and I just gave her a deer in the headlights stare because with everything else going on I couldn’t remember having any. 😂
@Mischele Pentz the one good thing about EDS is that it seems to make other health issues seem inconsequential!
So, of course I only have my own experience to pull from, and what worked for me isn't necessarily going to work for everyone; I have found that going full carnivore dramatically helped with pain...eventually. I have a supposition as to why this is the case, but I can't prove it. Among EDS's myriad health problems, one that frequently comes up is poor nutrient absorption. There are two TH-cam content creators, of course, who have seen dramatic improvements with intramuscular injections of vitamin C (which I have not tried) but plants contain anti-nutrients, which are designed specifically to hinder nutrient absorption. Animals adapted throughout history to fight this effect but what if people with EDS are particularly susceptible to anti-nutrients? Now, it's important to be clear: this wasn't a theory I had and I ended up being correct. I've tried whole food plant based, Mediterranean, Paleo, and low histamine diets before, and got pretty middling results. Whole food meat based was just yet another "Hell, I might as well, what have I got to lose?" shot in the dark. Initial weight loss and better focus were my first improvements and after four months were what I figured would be the entirety of the benefits but then pain and subluxations started dramatically improving around 5 months in. Now, where I used to see my DO twice a week to put my body back in place, I see her around once a month these days. I'm still coping with an invisible form (no skin blotches) of keto rash, but that's only been going on for like 6 weeks and I hear 10-12 weeks is usually the duration, so fingers crossed. The diet is boring, no doubt about it, but I've stopped looking at food as entertainment. I'm willing to trade being bored 20 minutes a day for tremendous symptom reduction the other 23 hours and 40 minutes. :). Hope you continue to do well!
So glad to hear you're doing well and found something that works for you!
Thank you for sharing your experience. May I ask how you are at the moment (still going strong on carnivore?) and what a typical day of eating / meal looks like for you?
Thank you in advance.
@@carolina_is_free Doing really well, thanks. I’ve shifted from being very heavily protein to much more fat-still predominantly carnivore but a BUNCH of butter, ghee and heavy cream have entered into the mix. This was to correct the fact that I was apparently turning excess protein into sugar and my A1C was creeping up. There are phone apps that help you build meals and will tell you what the ratios are of calories from fat, protein, and carbs. I run about 70% calories from fat now and 25-30% protein. I do eat some vegetables (especially olives and avocado because they also have lots of fat) occasionally but generally per day I’m putting down about two pounds of fatty meat and a stick of salted butter. I melt the butter onto the meat or just slice it and eat it. Lots of eggs. I do eat some pork, birds and fish but they’re occasional. I also discovered beef bacon a while back and that’s wonderful because it is hugely fatty and doesn’t have to be cooked as thoroughly as pork bacon, so you don’t melt all the fat off. If you go to “Steak and Butter Gal” channel, or Laura Spath, they both do a lot of cooking and general “what would a carnivore plate look like” vids. I know it can be daunting to think of being so very limited in variety, but on the one hand, getting my stability back and my pain gone have MORE than made up for it, and also, once I stopped eating sugar, after a few weeks, I stopped craving sugar. I can walk right past a table full of donuts or cake or whatever else people bring in and leave on the community table at work, and I’m not even interested. On the couple of occasions that I have indulged (a coworker gave me a piece of pie made from the fruit in her garden and I just felt like it’d be rude to pass it up) I get to experience joint pain all over again, especially in my feet, so I have absolutely no doubt that sugar had been torturing me for all of those years. I’m back to being able to put on muscle, exercising like I did in my 20s, and I haven’t had a POTS episode since I started eating this way. Again, I tried so many other diets, and none of them seemed to touch my symptoms, whereas this has almost entirely eliminated them.
@@t1mpani
That sounds great! I am glad that you found a way of eating that has helped you so much. I know how difficult it can be with all these pains & aches. Sometimes it's just because of the wrong nutrition.
So it's mostly beef, butter and eggs for you? I like this kind of simplicity. It's worth a try. Do you experienced any kind of meat aversion when you eat keto/carnivore? That's my biggest problem - I don't like meat but need to eat more protein & fats. It's really difficult sometimes.
@@carolina_is_free Okay, TH-cam KEEPS deleting my reply, because the algorithm is stupid. We'll try this again:
So if you don't "cheat" and just focus on your health for a couple of months by eating no junk, your palette will likely change. I used to love Oreo cookies and a couple of times since I started all of this I've tried one and it's absolutely terrible--I'm not trying to convince myself of that, the last one I threw the second half away as I didn't want anymore in my mouth. Cook meat low and slow (other than a high temperature sear of just the outside if you like) and you'll preserve not only the flavor but the nutrient value. If you're craving something sweet, eat something salty--basically retrain your brain to crave stuff it actually needs. Give it a solid 90 days, it takes awhile for metabolic health to turn around (and it'll keep improving the longer you go) but do that long at least, and if you still don't like it or don't feel good, well, it was a worthwhile experiment. Best of luck, I really hope you give it a shot.
Being that my dad is in the hospital, the foods are usually low- carb foods . So I’m probably going to try to stay with that, I may have a piece of pie for dessert every now and then but not every day or I may have a slice of pizza for lunch or dinner sometimes.,
That's the best way to do it, in my opinion. Low carb most of the time, but still live your life and have some pie and pizze every now and again! 😊
I'm sorry to hear about your dad, I hope the staff is being kind and caring towards him!