What were your favorite childhood foods before you had CFS? + a bit of rambling

[Deltrus]

Personally from ages 6-15 ish I was addicted to cheese + soda crackers, cream of mushroom soup, pizza, bread, milk + cereal. I can't eat any of those foods now or I will get pretty tired. I literally had cream of mushroom soup with soda crackers sprinkled on for lunch every 2nd day. Lots of it..

I'm mostly interested to see how many people had an actual good diet with vegetables, and still got CFS. And also how many people with a bad diet got cfs. Gut microbiome, food additives etc could interact with diet.

SIDE RANT: I really wish someone told me I could randomly develop a torturous disease through certain triggers. I would have eaten better, exercised, washed my hands constantly, stayed away from animals, stayed away from stress, stayed away from too many stimulants. The regret is pretty overwhelming. The saddest thing is that people still don't know about CFS, and there is no biomarker, so now we are gonna have kids that go through the same thing that I have, feeling horrible and getting worse over time. Years of not accomplishing anything, confused as to what is going wrong. In the end, I'm still confused, as there is no biomarker.

 

[helen1]

I know how you feel. If only we'd known, we woulda done things differently... What would we all have done differently, I wonder, and would it really have prevented this illness?

But a lot of fit and healthy people have come down with CFS so I don't think you'll find a correlation there. A popular theory of cause at the moment is the 'two-hit' infection theory. You might want to do a search for threads on that.

I had a pretty good diet as a kid and adult with loads of veggies and got lots of exercise before getting ill, though did have gut problems for decades.

Maybe creating a poll would give you more info on any correlation with diet? (not that I know how to do that.)

 

[Richard7]

Yeah: trying to work out how changing something would have made things different. I've spent a lot of time in that place.

But seriously I don't think that the issues you raise would have made a great difference. I recently read

http://www.medical-hypotheses.com/article/S0306-9877(15)00382-5/fulltext#s0090

and it is well worth the read.

But the take home is that in the outbreaks of ME the Royal Free hospital and Great Ormond St the patients were mostly OK because they were resting, but the staff were not because they were working.

So take all illnesses seriously and rest. Ignore anyone who says they are too busy to get ill, or that they put in 110% or any other such nonsense.


Oh, and my favourite childhood meal was lasagne with a salad and some ginger cake: which I asked for for every birthday from 7 -18.

The only "addictive" foods were probably oranges or raw carrots (if they were good and sweet) or cucumbers with salt.

But this was only when they were in season and tasted good. At other times afternoon tea would be mustard pickles and cheese on ryvitas or vita-wheats, or just peanut butter sandwiches perhaps.

According to family lore I was offered some raw carrot when I was 6 months old and immediately self weaned (i.e. thereafter refused to drink breastmilk.)

So I guess carrot was my gateway vegetable. I still have a 2 – 3 kilo a week habit and occasionally go on 1 kilo plus binges.

 

[ahmo]

I was brought up on real food, clean environment. Animal protein, veg, salad every dinner. And started exercising from adolescence. Too many all-nighters as a student, but that wouldn't send most people down the pathway of ME. Vegetarian, then macrobiotic for a couple decades. Nothing I did or did not can really account for my illness. Clearly emotional stress contributed to my earlier ailments, and to my collapse w/ ME./ But others would not have buckled under the same amount of stress.

More to the point, MS on both sides of family, RA, pyroluria, asthma, allergies. Of 4 siblings, I've got the bad genes.

 

[Mij]

I was brought up on home made healthy whole foods, my mother cooked from scratch. I continued good eating habits as an adult and loved to be active.

Good genes in my family, no illnesses.