A bit of history first

August 13th, 2008 John Hill Posted in My life, Paleo Diet |

This is the first post in “My Life” category, so I think it’s logical to use this post to tell a little about my history.

Past 12 years have been ugly. I have had depression/anxiety/burnout like symptoms most of the time. I have had brain fog, memory problems, lack of motivation, inability to do physical exercise without getting low mood for days afterwards, loss of ability to smell, overhelming lethargy, …

Doctors have ruled out all the common possibilities like diabetes, celiac disease, allergies and hypothyroidism. As a diagnosis they can only offer me the catch all depression/stress, or even the infuriatingly useless “you are just born that way”. Sure, I tried antidepressants. (Un)fortunately the effects were not that great. I didn’t feel as much anxiety, but rest of the symptoms were still there.

There was a time about 4 years ago when I was almost ready to give up (I still get chills thinking about those times). Fortunately one doctor could give me advice that helped me through that winter. She suggested vitamins and trace nutrients based on my symptoms. She also suggested low glycemic index diet (low GI diet). That helped a lot! Sometimes I felt almost “normal” and I continued taking the vitamins & nutrients for about 3 years. I also ate just a little potatoes, rice, pasta etc. high GI foods (+ I kept my diet as healthy as I could, so no junk food, coffee, candy etc.).

I still felt there was something missing. Why would I need more vitamins? Was there something wrong with my digestion? Was my physiology somehow different than normal human beings? I started to rule out various digestive problems. One of the possibilities was celiac disease (CD). It was ruled out by both blood test and biopsy. People on CD forums (www.celiac.com) suggested that I might want to try gluten free diet anyway as there were people who had improved that way even without “official” CD diagnosis.

That changed my life! First time in decade I felt like an intelligent human being who had goals, dreams and ideas. It was just amazing. I still almost cry when I think about the first month on gluten free diet. Unfortunately the effect was fading away little by little. I was buzzled. Was it all just one big placebo effect?

I continued searching for answers. I had been eating only small amounts of gluten anyway as I had been already on low GI diet for years (it seemed to help somewhat). I experimented with high gluten diet and found out that I felt miserable. I had to stop after just couple of weeks of wheat bread and pasta diet.

I was now fairly confident that what I ate had major effect on how I felt. Next I ordered full set of stool sample tests. The tests provided one very interesting finding. I had two parasites: Dientamoeba fragilis (DF) & Blastocystis hominis (BH). Doctors really don’t know too much about these, but common opinion seems to be that BH is mostly harmless and DF might be linked with irritable bowel syndrome. I managed to find a web site that contained a lot of information about just these two parasites: www.badbugs.org. There were some stories about people with kind of similar symptoms as I had been having. DF also seemed to eat carbohydrates, like wheat! That would explain why I felt better on low GI diet! My doctor agreed that we definitely had to get rid of the parasites.

I had two antibiotics (cost was about $400!) and I felt good. Tests said that both parasites were gone. I thought that I had finally conquered my illness. Unfortunately switching back to normal healthy diet (containing wheat, rice, potatoes etc.) soon brought back the symptoms

Now it seems that DF & BH were just a side finding and had nothing much to do with my symptoms. Now what? I was quite sure that low GI had something to do with my problems and that grains (wheat, rye, …) were also involved. My doctors had already suggested paleo diet, but I had ignored it as just one modification of low GI diet. (for more info about paleo diet see paleodiet.com)

Paleo diet still was something to try, so I switched to full paleo instead of just limiting (without complete elimination) some foods. Once again, I felt great!

This brings us to today. I have now been about two months on paleo diet and I still feel great. I have been able to exercise and improve my fitness (I now run faster with same heart rate. Previously whenever I tried to improve my fitness nothing much happened). I also have some goals that motivate me and sometimes ideas spontaneously pop into my head. My resting heart rate is also record low. All in all, I feel alive.