C
Carter Burke
Guest
My biggest regret with my own recovery is NOT doing a proper exclusion diet right at the beginning.
I flirted with exclusion diets and cutting out allergens - I cut out sugar, gluten, dairy, lectins (recently) - I think my food addictions hijacked my brain and stopped me doing the right thing a long time ago though.
I've read a lot of good things from people doing an exclusion diet which involves only eating white rice and chicken for 2-3 months, then slowly reintroducing foods and charting symptoms.
My diet's been so limited - basically brown rice (/brown rice pasta), chicken and onions/carrots, but amazingly, even this diet contains high levels of fructose/fructans which I now find out 45-95% of CFS patients have problems with!
So I've just moved on to white rice and chicken, and cut out almost all fruits and all fruit juices. Cut out onions, carrots and garlic for now. (They also recommend cutting out pro and pre-biotics.) And I'm going to see if this affects my recovery/symptoms over the next few months to see if this is one for me.
It's worth looking Fructose Malabsorption up if you've not already and checking out the kind of foods that are considered safe - good wikipedia page on it. I'd recommend a very strict exclusion diet at some point anyway just to see if you start to improve faster on it after a few weeks/months. There are plenty of safe fruits and vegetables too, they're just the kind of things I NEVER eat. (Kale, cabbage, etc.)
It's emphasised on many pages that fructose problems are very common in CFS, but the diet itself is NOT the cure...
The cure for CFS is always going to be rest. If fructose malabsorption (FM) is a problem though, treating it with the appropriate diet might just remove a significant burden. A common symptom of FM is fatigue and weakened immune function - as with most food intolerances/allergies.
Just another thing to try out if you're feeling like you've exhausted your options. Apparently F-Mal is twice as common in CFS as lactose intolerance. Just one of those things I hadn't heard discussed much.
I flirted with exclusion diets and cutting out allergens - I cut out sugar, gluten, dairy, lectins (recently) - I think my food addictions hijacked my brain and stopped me doing the right thing a long time ago though.
I've read a lot of good things from people doing an exclusion diet which involves only eating white rice and chicken for 2-3 months, then slowly reintroducing foods and charting symptoms.
My diet's been so limited - basically brown rice (/brown rice pasta), chicken and onions/carrots, but amazingly, even this diet contains high levels of fructose/fructans which I now find out 45-95% of CFS patients have problems with!
So I've just moved on to white rice and chicken, and cut out almost all fruits and all fruit juices. Cut out onions, carrots and garlic for now. (They also recommend cutting out pro and pre-biotics.) And I'm going to see if this affects my recovery/symptoms over the next few months to see if this is one for me.
It's worth looking Fructose Malabsorption up if you've not already and checking out the kind of foods that are considered safe - good wikipedia page on it. I'd recommend a very strict exclusion diet at some point anyway just to see if you start to improve faster on it after a few weeks/months. There are plenty of safe fruits and vegetables too, they're just the kind of things I NEVER eat. (Kale, cabbage, etc.)
It's emphasised on many pages that fructose problems are very common in CFS, but the diet itself is NOT the cure...
The cure for CFS is always going to be rest. If fructose malabsorption (FM) is a problem though, treating it with the appropriate diet might just remove a significant burden. A common symptom of FM is fatigue and weakened immune function - as with most food intolerances/allergies.
Just another thing to try out if you're feeling like you've exhausted your options. Apparently F-Mal is twice as common in CFS as lactose intolerance. Just one of those things I hadn't heard discussed much.