An Easy Way To Control Your Autoimmune Disease part 1
I know, you look at that title and say, “Yep. Sure.” And I’m not going to tell you that you’ll be cured if you follow my advice. Nope. I WILL tell you that I’ve been doing a full-fledged experiment for over three years now, and it’s working for me. It’s all about the food you eat. That’s the part that’s easy. Just change the way you eat. The hard part……..changing the way you eat. Nope. No magic pills here.
Just over three years ago, my husband had stage four cancer. He’d been fighting it for eight years. During that eight years, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism first, then diabetes, then fibromyalgia (a misdiagnosis), and then multiple sclerosis. We were both desperate to say the least. I had already been researching ALL kinds of supplements and natural healing……..being that the doctors weren’t doing much for us. Then I stumbled upon a link that had to do with ketogenics and cancer. It appears that back in the 1920’s, Otto Warburg who was a leading cell biologist, discovered that cancers cells couldn’t grow without glucose fermentation (you can Google ‘Warburg Effect’ to get all the science behind that). To put it in very easy terms, if the cancer cells weren’t being fed carbohydrates they couldn’t grow. Of course it’s never quite that clear cut and easy, but at that stage we’d tried everything else, so what the heck!
It was really terribly unfortunate that, when I finally stumbled across this information (that not a single doctor had ever brought up), my husband was already on a feeding tube and pretty far gone. Being the eternal optimist, I figured he just might go into remission again and have a chance to try the ketogenic diet. In the mean time, I thought it a good idea to try the diet out myself and learn as much as possible. I really threw myself into it! For those of you that already followed the link above, you might think that way of eating sounds a bit like the Atkins Diet. You would be correct! Although Dr. Atkins was looking for a way for his patients to lose weight and control diabetes, somewhere along the line money became more important than the research and it just became a weight loss diet. Anyway, I had tried Dr. Atkins’ diet back in the 1990’s, lost a good amount of weight, then as most people do I went off the diet and gained all the weight back plus. I didn’t understand any of the science behind it, nor did I spend any time researching to understand the concept. Let me just say, although there are a lot of similarities to the Atkins diet, that’s NOT what this is. Keep reading……..
The ‘cancer protocols’ keep your daily carbohydrates to less than 20 grams a day. That’s equivalent to 2/3 cups of mashed potatoes or a large flour tortilla. Yep. There’s what most people call “the hard part.” Let me tell you though, when your husband is dying and you’re sick in every sense of the word, it doesn’t seem that daunting to give up bread and potatoes. So, my diet experiment began March 18, 2014. I followed the cancer protocols strictly for the first three months, while making my husband a liquid version. Within a month, my three-year depression lifted like smoke. How weird was that!?! I went back to my research to figure out if there was a close correlation to the diet…..and yes….research has been done using the ketogenic diet for people with untreatable depression (inother words no medication worked) with a lot of success. They already knew a century ago that the ketogenic diet controls seizures, so making the leap that it might help people with other brain disorders wasn’t much of a leap after all. Although my intention wasn’t to lose weight and I didn’t pay a bit of attention to calorie intake, I lost 20 pounds the first month. Nice side effect. During this time, my husband was going through daily radiation and chemo. I had been severely fatigued and barely able to drive him every day on day one. By day 15 I had more energy than I’d had in several years. By day 30 my depression lifted and I was feeling and sleeping better. I was also exercising again and my pain level was decreasing daily.
If you’re on Facebook, you can check out my Keto, Paleo, Primal Experiment to look back and follow my journey. After the first few months, I changed over to just low carb (less than 50 grams a day) as part of the experiment. At about nine months I tried Paleo. That SO didn’t work for me! If I can keep the carbohydrates down, it probably would, but that wasn’t part of the experiment. Primal works for me, but I find it too restrictive in some ways. So at the end of a year, I decided that straight Keto, without the cancer protocols, is easy and effective for controlling all of my autoimmune diseases. No more medications. I lost 40 pounds without trying. No more diabetes. My MS was controlled with no more relapses. All with food choices. Almost a miracle!
Unfortunately, my husband was already too far gone when we began our experiment. His cancer did remit for a few month, but when he was well enough to begin eating real food again, he went off the diet. In fact he went kinda crazy eating all the foods he had missed, and ALL of them were high in sugars and carbohydrates. I hesitate to just blame the wrong foods, but the cancer flared back up and spread so very quickly I’m not sure what else could have caused it. He was hospitalized a year after our experiment started and passed two months later. I give him full credit for leading me to this experiment though. It’s worked very well for all of my autoimmune conditions for three years now.
So before you decide to go on to the next part of this series of articles, ask yourself some questions: How much am I willing to change to feel well again? How hard am I willing to work to get some of my old self back? How much or little support do I need to make changes? Am I willing to ‘stick to my guns’ regardless of what my family, friends, or even my doctor says? Am I so sick of being sick that I’ll follow the science and give it a fair try? That’s what I’m asking you to do…….give a change in your way of eating a fair try. Spend some time reading about it. I’m not selling a book or trying to make money from you, I’m just sharing what’s worked for me for over three years. If you’re ready to give it a try, part 2 is coming right up!
