First time in remission with ketogenic diet

[healthybunny55]

To @ryan31337 and @ChrisD (and a few others I have to find their posts) - thank you for your stories and information on this diet. When I was very desperate and losing everything these last few weeks your information and results gave me the hope and chance to get control of the ME and my life again. You've both played a part in saving me from moderate/housebound severity and losing my career. We've all been living through hell, and it's us staying together and helping each other that gets us through this.

This post is rather old, but I wondered whether you are still keto and if the improvements continued? Thanks a lot.

 

[Frunobulax]

So far keto is pretty much the only thing that helps me consistently. Perhaps bumps me up from 20 on the bell scale to 30-40. Whenever I start eating carbs for more than 2-3 days my energy level plummets.

But it's not "just" keto, I also avoid lectins and oxalate. Doesn't leave a lot of variation in my food, but that's acceptable.

 

[L'engle]

I can't really do keto safely, at least for the time being, but I am trying to replace some carbs with fat and move to carbs that digest more slowly.

I'm changing my breakfast from quick oats to rolled oats, which seem to keep me from being hungry longer.
Also adding beet root powder and mct oil to my morning cocoa, which is just goat's milk and organic cocoa powder with no other sweetener.
Cucumbers with feta cheese instead of another serving of carbs later.

I tended to think I had a good diet because it is better than most peoples', but that isn't really saying much. I avoid added sugar but craving unrefined carbs pretty much amounts to the same thing.

I end up eating bananas when I need potassium. That adds up as well for sugar, though I don't eat them when they're overripe and the glycemic index is highest. I find overly sweet foods and drinks sickening anyway and don't like most other fruits except berries and the odd apple if it's very good.

 

[L'engle]

But it's not "just" keto, I also avoid lectins and oxalate. Doesn't leave a lot of variation in my food, but that's acceptable.

The food that keeps you healthier is worth eating every day. Variety is less important.

 

[forestglip]

Thought this was interesting. A couple's son had severe bipolar disorder. And they also happen to be billionaires, so presumably they had access to some of the best doctors money could buy. And the doctors told them it was treatment resistant and that he will certainly have to live with it for the rest of his life.

He tried a ketogenic diet and he is now in remission. They started Baszucki Group to fund and promote research and education into metabolic treatments for psychiatric treatments.

Launched in 2021 by Roblox founder and CEO David Baszucki and best-selling author Jan Ellison Baszucki, Baszucki Group leverages private giving, impact investing, advocacy, storytelling and community building to drive foundational change.

A primary objective of Baszucki Group is to transform mental health outcomes, beginning with bipolar disorder, by supporting initiatives at the intersection of metabolism, psychiatry and neuroscience. Our investments in democracy, conservation and our communities are synergistic with our life sciences initiatives.

Article published in San Francisco Chronicle:

At 4 a.m. the Friday before Christmas, I lay curled up and crying on my bedroom floor, convinced my son was no longer alive.

Matt, then 21, had been a star in elementary and high school, but he began experiencing insomnia and panic attacks. After a manic episode led to a hospitalization at age 19, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Two further hospitalizations and 10 different medications failed to provide stability.
That December of 2017, escalating into mania, Matt had left home, cut off contact, and wandered the streets, eventually taking a bus from the Bay Area to Southern California. From his increasingly alarming Snapchat and Instagram posts, we knew he had no money, and that he’d slept one night behind a dumpster and another in a lifeguard tower. As dawn broke that Friday morning, his social media channels had gone silent and his three sisters hadn’t heard from him in 18 hours.

Matt’s struggle was not uncommon. Nearly a quarter of American adults now take psychiatric medications, and adolescents are in crisis. Doctors broadly agree that current treatments are inadequate and often lead to intolerable side effects, and adults with severe mental illness die on average 10 to 20 years earlier than the general population.

Matt is alive and thriving today, but our family’s harrowing five-year journey proved that medication and therapy alone couldn’t make him better. We had to push back hard on experts who said bipolar disorder was a chemical imbalance that couldn’t be healed with diet. Preliminary research is proving those doctors wrong, and more people deserve to know this.

My husband and I are philanthropists from Silicon Valley, a region built on faith that innovation can solve the most intractable problems. But like millions of other parents of children diagnosed with a mental illness, we had come to feel helpless. With all our knowledge and resources, we had not even managed to keep our son safe.

On that terrifying morning, I tried to woo Matt back with food. After dragging myself off the floor, I sent him an email from an account I knew he hadn’t yet blocked, asking if he might like restaurant gift cards for Christmas. He responded right away: “McDonald’s Starbucks Subway Burger King!!” The door opened to more communication, and my husband was able to retrieve Matt at a Starbucks the next day, leading to a fourth hospitalization.

After that, Matt stayed on his medications and did everything he could to get well. He was treated by 41 clinicians and prescribed 29 meds before his psychiatrist pronounced his illness treatment resistant. Luckily, that’s when I met the host of a mental health podcast who had gone on a ketogenic diet — low in carbohydrates, high in fat and moderate in protein — to treat his medication-induced weight gain, only to find that his lifelong bipolar symptoms resolved.

Through research, I learned the story was not unique. I found increasing evidence pointing to the promise of keto for treating a range of brain-based disorders, not only bipolar disorder but depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and autism. The strongest evidence that keto can help the brain comes from clinical trials in epilepsy dating back 100 years, demonstrating reduction or even elimination of seizures.

Any dietary approach that restricts carbohydrates can induce nutritional ketosis. That includes Atkins-like diets based on animal protein, but also intermittent fasting and versions of Mediterranean, vegetarian and, with the right supplements, vegan diets. When dietary carbohydrates are limited, the body produces ketones as an alternative fuel source. Published studies show that ketosis stabilizes brain networks and also reduces inflammation.

Ketogenic diets remain controversial, and the internet is rife with claims warning of long-term damage to health. But countervailing evidence is accumulating in cardiovascular disease, Type 2 Diabetes, kidney disease and cancer.

A “metabolic” approach to mental disorders is catching on at leading institutions. Stanford University established a “Metabolic Psychiatry” clinic in 2015, founded by Dr. Shebani Sethi, who recently led a 4-month clinical trial of ketogenic diet for serious mental illness. Preliminary results show remission of psychiatric illness in 80% of those who adhered to the diet, as well as reversal of metabolic syndrome in 100%. Additional trials are under way, with a recent French cohort showing weight loss and psychiatric symptom improvement in all patients, with nearly half no longer meeting criteria for mental illness after treatment.

In January 2021, after nearly five years of battling bipolar illness, Matt started a ketogenic diet under the guidance of Dr. Chris Palmer, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist. That spring, Matt needed only quarter of the dose of medication he’d needed the year before to fend off mania. Within four months, his mood was stable, and his intellectual vitality had returned. He graduated from college and now works full-time in tech, produces electronic music, and is back to top form in weightlifting, chess and piano. He continues to slowly taper his medications, with no signs of the mania or depression — or even anxiety, insomnia, or brain fog — that plagued him for five years.

Nutritional ketosis may not work for everyone, but doctors and families deserve credible information about a dietary intervention that could, at the very least, beneficially complement existing psychiatric treatments. Prescription pharmaceuticals are commonplace and widely accepted by patients, physicians and insurers. A dietary prescription should also be on the table.