Kickas.org Forums Treatments, Drugs and Alternatives NSD and diet-related; Needing encouragement from my fellow NSDers

What, you don't like that lovely "mustard"? I guess somehow I relish the process along with the eating. This is making me hungry! I need to stop this . . . I'm on the apple diet today!

I've been in Frederick before -- to the large Church of the Brethren that is there -- for a variety of reasons -- college choir singing, Mid-Atlantic District Conference (Church of the Brethren), etc. The new Assistant Pastor (or maybe he's a youth pastor) there is a fairly recent graduate of Bethany Theological Seminary where I'm working on my M.Div and my husband teaches. Anyway.

I'd better get off this computer and get to work. I'm trying to do all the cleaning that never gets done during the academic semesters. But, I haven't been pushing myself too hard, especially with the aches and pains.

Have a happy day! Paula

I understand the "can of worms" and your reasoning.

Just wanted to offer my heartfelt support to you, and mention that you're one amazing woman.

I know I can, (repeat over and over like the Little Red Train).

hugs,
Klem

those crabs sound yummy

Hi Paula,

Sorry to hear in a flare... I have been there now and again pushing the limits with the diet a bit and paying some small consequences afterwards..... I agree it is rather easy to forget at times that you have AS when the diet works so well.

Here is a thread from Dragonslayer on "Flares" a bit.... may be of interest.

https://www.kickas.org/ubbthreads/showfla...true#Post129854

Me personally... first thing I do to try and combat is the 3 day apple fast... some times have luck, but if I cheated quite a bit, I may need a few fasts on successive weekends.

I also may bump up my probiotic supplements... but at times these seem to increase symptoms as well. So generally I go to very strict NSD and then begin to work on improvement (supplementing).

A last resort for me is a colonic. This does work everytime like magic for me... I ensure I have a probiotic infusion afterwards to replinish the friendly guys.

Best wishes to you on getting out of the flare!

Tim

It's not being "lax", it's the learning process. If you screw up enough you can REALLY motivate yourself to stick with it.

Screw up enough and you might find yourself looking forward to a fruit fast.

Are you taking your supplements, and taking them every day? I lay mine out a week's worth at a time on the counter in little cap cups. Morning and evening. If I don't take the calc./mag and multis for the B vitamins, all heck breaks loose in the cravings department. Sometimes I think I'm too tired, so I just MAKE myself take them before dinner instead of bedtime, for instance, but this has to be one thing that I do.
Started eating some vegetables with the first meal of the day, that helped too.
I'm having such physical stress right now I'm afraid what would happen if I DID screw up too badly. Scary. I don't want to go there. I don't like that life.

Now I may have small flares but I know I'll come out of them all on my own. That's a huge difference, letting the body heal itself.

44 hormonally and being a female can be a real rollercoaster of a ride, too. Sometimes you have to do some herbal things to get that situation sort of under control again.

Make sure you keep one special thing around for treats. I found some dried cranberries without the sunflower oil(which I seem to not do well with) at the store and it's like manna from heaven.

There are certain times of the year for everyone where they get into a bit of a funk because of past events in their lives, and they don't even realize they are doing it, and they will even try to mess things up a bit so they have a reason to feel bad. So maybe you want to do a little bit of introspection about what has happened at this time of year, and see if it's the anniversary of something. My husband does this like clockwork at several times of the year, and it frankly makes me want to scream sometimes, because he doesn't even realize he's doing it.

Good luck and all the best wishes in the world.

Hi Tim,

Thanks for sharing the thread from John.

I am on the 2nd day of an apple fast. I am hoping that these three days and strict adherence to the NSD will iron things out for me. I have to admit to not being thrilled with the idea of fasting on successive weekends, but that is something to keep in mind, too.

I am feeling significantly better than I did when I first posted -- although I still am having pain in my left SI joint/hip and feeling a bit stiff in general. I think that by posting my confessional and request for good thoughts has helped me to feel more accountable and resolved to see the 3 days through. There have been numerous times when I've started a fast and then abandoned it -- thinking that at least a little bit is helpful. But it definitely is time for a full three days!

I am interested, in case I would ever need it, in hearing more about the colonic and probiotics that you use. I have in my mind, perhaps incorrectly, that probiotics are dairy based. Am I right, and if so, is that a problem for those of us avoiding dairy?

Thanks, Tim! Paula

Hi Wind Rider,

I definitely feel that I'm still learning. Although I'm thinking that I will need to be pretty strict for quite awhile until my intestinal tract is healed, I have learned this time that I may on occassion have something starchy, but that I cannot allow or fall into a pattern of regular indulgences that allow starches to build up in my system. It IS not a good place to be when this happens!

What do you recommend in the way of magnesium and B vitamins? I've been taking 1100 mg of calcium via supplements. I'm supposed to have 1200 as pre-menopausal (although I haven't noticed any symptoms, yet), and hope that I'm getting the extra bit via diet, but the particular bottle I bought this time has less. I've also been taking a multi with, as I'm looking at it, 100% DV of the B vitamins but only 25% DV of magnesium. Anything that would help with cravings would be helpful. I tend to crave sweets -- mostly chocolate. Actually, there have been times, lately, when I've just wanted to have something in my mouth a lot. Then, of course, I overeat. It all becomes a vicious cycle. Hmmmm.

Your question about past events . . . I need to think on that more, but I have noted a pattern that every spring (for the past 3 springs anyway), I tend to pick up some pounds. Three springs ago was my first semester of graduate school. It just seems like the spring is interminable every year, and I love the classes I'm taking, but things get really intense, and then it's such a major relief when everything is over. I had one theology class this semester in which we read a book per week -- like 300 pages of Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God one week -- not light reading!

Four years ago, I joined Weight Watchers and lost 40 pounds. I hadn't been diagnosed with AS yet, but I know that I had been having symptoms since well before that (I'm really thinking that salmonella poisoning back in 1990 may have been an environmental trigger for me). When my weight was down for about a year, I was absolutely symptom free. Then that first year of grad school, I started gaining again, and 2004/05 was one in which I had definite disease progression with the addition of iritis (which actually, finally, helped with a diagnosis.) I have no doubt that overeating in addition to eating all the wrong foods contributes to flaring.

Well, anyway, I've gone on and on. I am interested, though, in your recommendations for supplements.

Thanks! Paula

((Paula)) Hope you are improving with your apple fast. I hear you with the chocolate cravings. If I could get those under control, my diet would drastically improve. I remember apple fasting helping with those cravings.

Fight the good fight, finish the race, keep the faith! And God speed.

Hey Paula (that is a song I think )

The two probiotic supplements I take are not dairy based. I trialed a few probiotics supplements and these two seem to work the best for me. Eric posted a while back that he was taking quite a bit of probiotics... at about the same time I bumped up my dosage by two and seeing good results.

Two brands I take....
Natren's Healthy Trinity (expensive)
Enzymatic Therapy (inexpensive)

Probiotics help with digestion, repair of GI, keeping alkaline balance in GI and displacing the klebs.

Tim

Grad school and 300 pages of just one book a week? You are allowed to be stressed !

Magnesium Malate, the chelated type, 200 mg. I have to cut the pills in half (easy to do) so it's a 100 mg dose because the full pills seems to make my guts work a little too fast. I also have to be very careful with my kidneys. The problem is the calcium supplement I take for the added phosphorus, "Posture-D", also contains some added magnesium in the form of magnesium oxide, and the multivitamin had some added magnesium, so I was getting close to 100 % the recomended amount just from supplements and my system said "oops too much" .

Check this out from PubMed on the connection between magnesium and high fructose diets http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query...682873&dopt

(I wonder if that is going to be a clickable link... I tried...)

Of course they did the study on men (sigh...) but first they did the study on rats....anyway, diets high in fructose sugars combined with low intake of magnesium screwed up mineral balances of calcium and phosphorus in the blood...." High fructose depressed calcium balance: the effect tended to be more marked when dietary Mg was low."

Because we are not eating grains but more fruits and vegetables, the lower starch type diets can be, by default, higher fructose.

Check this out also,
Phosphorus

The paragragh on Calcium and vitamin D explains how everything interacts. If your blood calcium levels gets too low the thyroid tells the kidneys to use vitamin D to make calcitriol get the intestines to suck more calcium and phosphorus out of wherever they can find it...including the bones if intake is too low to meet needs. But your brain for some reason intreprets this "I'm mineral hungry" feeling as needing more SUGAR for a quick energy boost. We are used to getting those from grain carbs. Women are particulary vulnerable to the sugar cravings right before "that time of the month." But they aren't sugar cravings, they're mineral cravings and fat cravings in disguise. Hence the chocolate cravings.

Phosporus is not hard to get enough of, I just used that page because it's got a good explanation and links and now there's been all this talk again lately about vitamin D and sunlight being really essential to help the body function.

As for the B vitamins, here's one example page to check out!
Dietary Supplement Fact Sheet: Vitamin B12

Read the paragraphs on "when is vitamin B12 deficiency likely to occur?" and see how it mentions "people who have an underlying stomach or intestinal disorder that limits the absortion of vitamin B12...." and it mentions sprue (celiac, or gluten intolerant) and chrohn's diseases (!!!!) and older people who have altered stomach acids from taking drugs to treat acid reflux. Lower stomach acids can lead to increased bad bug flora," because[bold] gastric acid [/bold]helps release B12 from the protein in food and this must occur before the B12 binds with intrinsic factor and is absorbed in your intestines".

Be low on B12 and you can become anemic. Now researchers are also suspecting that B6 and B12 affects homocysteine levels, which are being blamed for overall body inflammation.

This is why the jokers on another popular arthritis support websight who insist there is no connection between diet and disease and bone metabolism drive me absolutely wild with disgust. I'm not a nutritionist, I'm not a biologist, but I would have to be missing half of my brain before I'd make such a stupid statement.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
But back to the B vitamins,
I knew I had read somewhere eons ago that B vitamins help carb/sugar cravings.
I am at this point suspecting that the regular ol' multivitamin I have been taking thinking I had all my bases covered might instead be insufficient for my needs, so I'm looking for something with higher amounts that does not contain weirdo ingredients that clash with the other supplements I'm taking, and I'm still in the label reading phase.

So if anyone could recomend something that doesn't contain STARCH?

Sorry to go on so long. Now that I have the ability to open more than one window on a computer without crashing I might become a novelist!

(just fixed your links - mig)

Wind_Rider,
Freeda makes a B complex in various strengths that has no starch. I use the Quin B Strong B-25, which includes folate and B-12, the most likely B vitamins to be deficient in malabsorbtion in the intestines. The label states that it is free of gluten, lactose, artificial color, artificial flavor (that's for sure), animal derivatives, sugar, STARCH, gelatin, and yeast. In addition to the B vitamins, it also contains cellulose, calcium chloride, calcium stearate, and silica. You can order online at their web site:

www.freedavitamins.com

You can get 100 tablets for about $7, which seems reasonable to me. This company is widely recommended to people on the SCD, and they are on a reduced starch diet. I have never heard of anyone on the SCD having an intestinal problem with the Freeda vitamins, although some have had urinary tract irritation from the B complex vitamins. Hope this helps your search.
Jan