I spent a couple months with 0 caffeine/sugar. It didn’t make much difference. I have a level of neuropathy throughout my body. I find it hard to believe diet changes are going to fix this. I was rather fit and in good health before I took Fin. I had a pretty good diet to begin with. I believe diet can help with hormonal issues. I just got new blood work and my T is going back up and E2 is going back down. Yet I continue to have many symptoms of neurological/brain damage. I don’t discourage good diet but I have my doubts that its going to fix the extensive damage that’s been done in my case.
I never said it was diet alone.
Which brand enema you used chi?
How can you make massive blanket statements like this?
The best diet for PFS is the water fasting. Maybe juicy fast… Simply don’t eat anything for at least 2-3 weeks. The first 3-5 days may be difficult but I’m convinced that fasting has the ability to repair very complex problems in your body, although these effects may take a few days/weeks to happen after ending the water fast.
I’ve ended a 3,5 week long water fast about a month ago. A few weeks/months later I will repeat it. There is nothing I’ve tried in the previous years that is comparable to water fasting in effectiveness. At the same time its simple and cheap but depending on the kind of your work and lifestyle it may be hard to incorporate it (for example if you are a physical worker).
Of course it is also important to eat a healthy diet in general even if you are not a PFS victim. Eating just worthless calories and fast food makes even non-PFS people weak and sick. You simply get fat and ugly on crappy food and you age more quickly as a result. Unfortunately I don’t believe that a single “PFS diet” would do the job for everyone. The nutrition needs of a person depend a lot on the lifestyle. For example: On days when I do a heavy training I may consume 5-6000 kcalories but on normal days only 2-3000 kcalories do the job (and its not only about calories, its even more about nutrients and the composition of the food). Even if we proposed a “PFS diet” the amount and composition of food may not be correct for everyone and some of the recommendations may be unsuitable for some people (for example for religious reasons or vegetarianism…).
I think I eat pretty solid/clean/healthy stuff but some would simply get bored of my diet quickly especially because I don’t cook anything. Not because of PFS, I never cooked even before PFS. I’m the person who could live on a few favorite foods for life. 
But at least I did something that many people are lazy to do: I made an effort to put together a clean and well rounded diet for myself. Here are a few general advices:
- Don’t eat junk (ordered restaurant food, especially fast restaurant food).
- Avoid processed foods as much as possible. I myself avoid cooked foods too as I’m lazy to cook and I consider it as “processed food” anyway. I “cook” only boiled eggs and sometimes I make some simple foods like fried onions. OK, OK, sometimes I cook some more complex foods too once in several months…
- Don’t eat bakery. Practice proves it to be harmful and you can completely live without it. The only thing I eat with a small piece of bakery is cod liver in its own oil (as it is a very oily meal). If you are eating some less fatty food (like bacon or meat) then instead of the bakery you should eat some veggies raw or steamed with it.
- Regularly eat seeds (buy almonds, walnuts, sesame, …). I have a mixture of 10+ different seeds all the time and I eat some every day. This is a very good source of so many nutrients and they are available basically everywhere, and they are also delicious. If you get bored of it then a tablespoon of honey can still make a few pieces of seeds into a very good snack. (walnut+honey -> awesomeness, pumpkinseed+dried goji berries -> awesomeness).
- Eat a lot of veggies. I often eat carrots, kohlrabies and other stuff even for snack (raw alone) during work. Veggies are very good stuff to eat along with other protein/fat dense meals. Most veggies are easily digested with both acid/alkaline forming foods.
- Eat a few pieces of raw whole fruits daily but not too much as it can make you fat. Eat whole fruits and not their (sugary) juice that has the fibers removed. Fruit juice is very good if you want to get a lot of fat quickly. Despite this many think that fruit juice is so healthy. Without the fibers the sugar from the juice gets absorbed very quickly into your body. Besides this by juicing you can easily drink the (concentrated) sugar of so many pieces of fruit that you would be unable to eat without juicing (simply because of volume of the fruit flesh/fibers). Juicing fruits sucks. If you want juice, then juice veggies - you can of course add some fruits too when it comes to flavoring.
- I eat a lot of boiled eggs (3-5 pieces per serving as I love them) and I sometimes eat them with a small slice (~10dkg) of smoked red meat or bacon or some healthier stuff like fried fish or chicken/turkey. From fish and chicken/turkey I often eat much more than 10dkg. This isn’t really an advice but I wanted to point out that I’m not at all a vegetarian. Its not vegetarianism that will heal you from PFS. I’ve already tried that. And besides that if you overeat fruits a bit you can get more fat easily especially if you are physically inactive.
- My diet includes some daily supplements: multivitamins to counter the occasional imbalances in the diet, 20-30,000IU D3, 2 tblspoons of maca powder, 200mg Q10, … It is very easy to eat a diet that may look healthy but deficient in many ways. This is why these can come handy. And this is why is it important to eat several different things. For example eating just healthy looking veggies and fruits would probably make you deficient in many ways after some time depending on what kind of fruits and veggies you consume.
These are the main building blocks of my diet and it varies how much I eat daily from this and that (I eat instinctly as I desire the food) but the above things are always in my daily intake in some amount. Aside from those I eat a lot of other things moderately, for example:
- Dairy: mainly kefir and joghurt, cheese (I love smoked cheese with boiled eggs).
- Avoid sugars in general, even when it comes to simple things like mustard, catchup or whatever you can buy. If you need sugar then replace it with honey.
- Cod liver in its own oil (1-2 times a week, A and D vitamin bomb with omaga3)
- Lot of other tiny things I eat/drink rarely and when it comes to my mind.
- I allow myself to eat some junk (like fast food or pizza) 1-2 times a week.
- There is some sweet snack too at home: organic and raw honey, 70+% dark chocolate, organic 100% grape juice that hasn’t yet turned into wine (must), … (but I eat these quite moderately and these are much cleaner than most of the sweets you find on the shelves of shops).
In general try to get your food from clean sources. If you have a market around with local seasonal (maybe organic) veggies then buy that stuff there instead of going into a supermarket. Try to select products (mustard, …) that contain the least number of ingredients and the least number of artificial stuff (like coloring agents) - although opinions may vary on how much does this help. Sometimes you can create your own clean stuff (mustard, baking powder, …) easily by researching the internet. In case of some food sources (like in case of dairy) it can be very important to get it from clean organic sources to avoid for example estrogens.
With the diet changes your overall goal should be feeling better and allowing your body to (re)build itself as needed. Another very important factor is how active are you physically. Without trainings your health will quickly reach rock bottom. Alone eating healthy is nothing. In fact, in my opinion incorporating trainings, physical activities is much more important than the damm diet itself. There is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE between the lean you and the overweigh you, and in case of PFS the difference/gap may be even larger (considering that fat seemed to be a quite good estrogen factory in my case).
Reaching a better body composition and getting off the fat has many benefits:
- You feel and look better.
- Less fat results in less estrogens and less other kind of estrogen induced imbalances.
- If you have more muscle then and you are physically more active then you can eat MUCH-MUCH MORE without gaining fat.
- If you have more muscle then its much easier and fulfilling to do trainings.
- Doing physical activities also have a lot of regenerative powers and positive hormonal effects if done well.
To lose your fat do a water fast. In the first 2 weeks of the fast you can lose as much as 1kg of fat per day. To gain muscle you need a good diet and correctly/honestly doing your daily trainings. Losing fat with diet changes and training is much-much slower and more difficult. For me with PFS it seemed to be impossible. If I ate enough to feel energized enough to do a training then I ate too much so I gained fat. But anyway, before the water fast my stamina was so rock bottom that I couldn’t do more than 15-20 minutes of (not so) “intensive” training and I felt like crap after it.
Search for a site that exists for the purpose of calorie counting. Calorie counting itself is bullshit but if you log your consumed food then you can easily spot foods that are a lot of bad calories (for example high sugar) and most of these sites also indicate other nutrient content too for the foods (usually protein/carb/fat content). So don’t count calories but for gods sake, just make a log of what kind of crap you eat and this will help you to adjust your food intake. To improve your body composition (shed of fat) read about how to adjust your protein/carb/fat intake (search for fitness/bodybuilder sites about this topic). Even the protein/carb/fat content is something that lies a lot as there are different kinds of proteins, carbs and fats but taking a look at your summarized daily values can help a lot in spotting the worst parts of your crappy diet. While dropping the worst pieces of your diet using the calorie counter site you can also put together your favorite foods and food combinations. I recommend searching fitness sites for good recipes when it comes to cooking.
Unfortunately there are no magic pills and magic formulas and rules to follow when it comes to shedding fat and gaining muscle (and a better body composition).
- Try to use the best ingredients to possible in your food, eat less (processed) crap.
- More proteins and less carbs are generally better when it comes to the “less fat and more muscle” topic. Eat some of those proteins and most of the carbs around the day of time of your training.
- Never overeat. Eat a bit slower, this helps you eliminating hunger before stuffing yourself full physically. Physically filling your gut full is bad anyway.
- A few weeks are enough to find out how much you need from certain food combinations to feel energized and to avoid getting fat with your current lifestyle. If you are physically inactive then depending on your genes you will most likely be either fatty as a result of your food intake you will be always hungry/tired because of your low calorie intake (those lazy girls who try to lose weigh without any physical activity by torturing themselves with low calorie diets). 1-2 hours of daily physical activity can help your body to bear with more food intake well.
- If you eat different foods together then these foods can have complex interactions in your gut and the sum of their calories and the sum of their nutrient value may be a bit altered as a result of interactions. For example high fiber veggies slow down or prevent the digestion of carbs/nutrients coming from other foods consumed with the veggies. This can be good or bad in different scenarios (for example its good when sugars are absorbed more slowly but may be bad in case of some other nutrients). My point with this is that often trying to calculate the overall value of some foods is impossible, this one reason why calorie counting sucks hard. You will have to find out the hard way how you body works and how to balance out your diet with the amount of physical activities to be able to feel good and to have the body composition you want. Well, if you want to look like Schwarzenegger then you will of course have to follow a much more stricter diet and training plan… For me and most of you the goal is probably minimizing fat, and maybe to gain some extra muscle to be able to eat more and to be able to keep the fat off more easily. More muscle, easier trainings, faster metabolism, and lots of other benefits from these.
If it comes to diet, then there are so many junk sites and blogs out there… Previously I recommended searching fitness sites when it comes to food composition and recipes. And besides those I have a favorite site: whfoods.com
In my opinion the site is quite ugly and its menu is pretty badly organized, it can be quite hard to navigate. To easily find things on the site its better to write “whfoods” into google and then the google result immediately gives you the links to the main parts of the site:
whfoods.com/sitesearch.php
whfoods.com/foodstoc.php
whfoods.com/nutrientstoc.php
whfoods.com/recipestoc.php
whfoods.com/foodadvisor.php
whfoods.com/genpage.php?tnam … e&dbid=265
This site gives very good advices about eating in general and has a list of healthy foods with their description and nutrient content. You can also search the foods that contain a specific nutrient.
Again, a healthy diet is just a basic building block and don’t expect wonderful PFS recovery from it, especially if you are ruined and physically inactive. By eating healthy you are rather investing in your future. You become what you eat. Combine a healthy diet with water fasting periods to boost (or turn around) your recovery process. The big gun is the fasting, not the diet.
Physical activity is very important! For the reasons I mentioned above. If you are so ruined that you are unable to refresh your body withing 2-3 weeks to be able to perform at least 1 hour of correct training then you should definitely try a few weeks of water fasting. Among other things it removed my fat, multiplied my stamina and I regained my ability to gain muscle. With 3,5 weeks of water fasting I could remove about 15kg of fat and in the next month that followed I put on about 10kg muscle. Now my upper body looks like when I was 16-17 years old when I attended several different kinds of trainings at high school…
Some people think that going to the gym for an hour and just walking up and down there allows them to eat a big bunch of crap and sugary snack all day. Maybe these people go the to gym for their consciences’ sake but doing so is a very big waste of time. Going to the gym and doing some honest/correct training allows you to eat the multiple of the food (if it comes to the right food) and also some snack. In my opinion a good training must contain at least one shorter 5-10 minute period that is intense and make you sweat (along with some higher heart rate). I mean something like running at 12-14km/h for 10-15 minutes, or doing complex full body movements. If you sweat at least a bit then its probably enough and fine. I incorporate at least 2-3 of these short intense periods into my trainings. Many sources suggest that this is something that speeds up metabolism and has a very good calorie-afterburn effect for about half day. If you do such an exercise twice a day (for example in the morning and evening) then you are quite good as you help keeping your metabolism on a higher rate. In fact, doing exercises themselves burn surprisingly few calories (intensive running at 12-14km/h for 10 minutes is about 200kcals, 1 hour weightlifting is about 500kcals and 500kcal intake is just eating a bar of chocolate!!!). The afterburn and metabolism speed up is much more important, this is why you should focus on quality trainings and not just “walking up and down” style trainings! Repairing/growing your muscles after a heavy training is also something that can consume a lot of energy! Depending on the kind of the training you don’t even have to go the gym to reach some nice heart rates! You can put together a nice fitness training that you can do at home. With this you can spare time and effort that would be taken by going to the gym and then going home! If you are just starting with your trainings then don’t do it too vigorously in the first 1-2 weeks! Rump it up slowly! A few minutes of warming up before the training is very important. Stretching the muscles after the training is also very important if you don’t want to die the day that follows!
That’s it from me. I’ve played enough smartass here. In this post you can find some good directions and you can save a lot of time you would (or wouldn’t) spend on research but despite this you still have to invest significant time and effort to get the job done by tweaking your diet and overall lifestyle that makes your life/health better and speeds up the recovery of your body. My goal with this post was showing an example and to point out that there is no single diet/lifestyle that works for everyone and there are probably a lot of possible diets that would work for someone. When it comes to diet you have to experiment with yourself. The same is true for physical activity. Something works for you, something works for your friend, something for both or neither of you. Eat that damn food and check how it feels the next 3-4-5 hours then make your own conclusions… If you eat a big bunch of potatoes with a large piece of juicy meat and you feel like a dead zombie for the next 5 hours then its time to do your homework and search for the reasons with google, some food combinations are simply bad, that’s it. After eating your favorite foods regularly for 1-2 weeks you may be able to conclude how fat-generating is it for your body (with your current lifestyle and physical activity).
Sorry, I mangled the html tags in this, mcibofh didn’t write the statement, Chi did.
Hey robotmouse, just wanted to say thanks for your post. I didn’t reply but I have been referring to it and will continue to. It’s good to know others are thinking about what they eat too.
My big problem is preparing foods for work which are healthy, whilst also having enough calories in my diet in general. Cutting out bread, pasta, sugar, rice etc. is so limiting, when I’m already a vegetarian. The good news is that it’s forcing me to buy lots of vegetables, nuts and berries.
My go to snack food is carrot sticks and hummus. I can guarantee at least 400-500 calories by finishing off a pot of hummus this way, so I’m 1/4 of the way to a reasonable calorie intake. After that it’s all about veggies, oils, nuts, and berries.
You are welcome. I’m glad you like the post. I tried to give some general advices/guidelines for those who are not that lazy and considering some diet change but being as strict as I am isn’t that important in my opinion (because physical activity has much more influence, I argue about this later in this post). Most people would probably benefit A LOT simply by dropping their most junky foods and by eating sometimes some more nutrient dense non-junky foods (like seeds, veggies) to avoid deficiencies. If someone eats junk all day (breakfast, lunch, …) then he could start by replacing one junk meal with some better things, later eating just one junk meal a day, then some time later eating just one junk meal in every 2 or 3 days (like I do). Replacing most of your meals with clean stuff can be enough.
@all: What is clean (non-junky) food? On junk I mean stuff that contains unnecessary simple sugars or sweeteners (aspartame, …) and artificial stuff like flavor enhancers, coloring agents, transfats,… Most processed foods and complex foods/ingredients (like “fast soups” and prepared sauces, mustard, ketchup, …) on the shop shelves and fastfood restaurant products contain junk. These craps are poisoning your body that works less efficiently as a result and your body wastes more energy on cleaning up some of this junk. And of course a lot of this junk remains in your body for longer periods and create complex health problems in the long run. If you buy a whole onion or a carrot or “clean” (not sugary, colored) mustard, or a piece of unprocessed organic bacon then these probably have much less poison in them… And eating McDonalds stuff regularly is probably much-much worse than eating the same amount of organic white bacon with onion and bread… BTW, eating some carb rich food (like honey or bread) is OK and can be beneficial in my opinion around some heavy trainings. In fact, sometimes I eat the bacon+onion+bread combo on my junky days and this isn’t even that junky or bad. If you eat it around some heavy physical activities its quite OK! (And onion rocks anyway!) My only problem is that buying good quality bread can be difficult and onion creates a bad mouth smell, this is why I often replace bread with something else (like boiled eggs) and eat onion in the evening before bedtime.
Counting calories and concentrating on “really healthy” stuff can kill out the joy of eating. Counting calories is pointless for many reasons I’ve mentioned previously in my posts and eating healthy is basically about eliminating the junk from the food, investing some energy on buying some clean ingredients into the fridge for the week (veggies/fruits/seeds). You can create even a burger that is much healthier, less junky, and more delicious than the McDonalds one but unfortunately some people (like me) don’t like preparation/frying/cooking… BTW, have you eaten vegetarian subway sandwiches? They are very delicious and despite the bakery stuff you can easily put together one and eat it before/after training and it is very easy to prepare. (I eat it around training because of the bakery ingredient.)
You can eat carbs around the training period of the day (before training or shortly after training). Rice, bread, whatever. Without enough carbs you can not perform well on trainings and without carbs your body can not regenerate for the next day. Carbs are important. The problem is if you fill yourself with carbs and then you are sitting in an office and the carbs are floating there in your body for nothing… Somewhere I’ve read about a study that checked the relation between diabetes and traditional japanese diet (that contains a lot of rice). Japanese people were usually very healthy and lean (before the appearance of fast food restaurants there) despite the high rice intake. The conclusion of the study was that japanese people who moved somewhere else and kept their old “healthy traditional diet” could still have high chance of acquiring diabetes because moving somewhere else usually changed their lifestyle (like less physical activities - office work). Physical activity probably has much higher influence on insuline resistance problems than carb intake. Heavy physical activity makes you less insuline resistant and pushes up your carb needs a lot. Eating higher GI foods is not so big problem if you do that during physical activity. If you work hard all day then you can eat a lot of carbs without penalty but most people usually sit in one place and despite their nearly zero carb need for this lifestlye they eat much more carbs their body needed for sitting. And surprise: weigh gain and diabetes kicks in after some time…
- Not all calories are the same. Besides this the speed of calorie absorption and percent of actually absorbed calories depends a lot on the composition of your food. For example if you consume simple evil carbs with other fiber dense foods/veggies then the fiber dense food can make even the evil carbs “less evil”. Some fiber dense foods can make the absorption of carbs/cals less quick and they may inhibit the absorption of some of the calories and/or nutrients. For example carrots can inhibit the absorption of a lot of important nutrients too! (This is why I eat carrots half hour after a nice meal and I eat the next meal half hour after my carrot snacks. And anyway, eating carrots immediately after a meal can make you feel bad and very-very filled.)
- Not all carbs are the same. As an example veggies contain a lot of carbs but these are usually the better (complex) carbs and they are mixed with a lot of fibers. Eating these is quite “harmless”. Eat mostly these during the day and eat “heavy simple carbs” (like honey, rice, bread, fruits - like grapes) before/after your training. More watery veggies and fruits usually have less carbs and calories (pepper, salad, raspberry).
- Not all fats are the same. There are very bad and evil oils/fats (like transfats) and there are some very healthy ones (like omega3s). This is why the “total fat intake” counter of some calorie counting sites is totally useless. I simply eliminate foods that contain a lot of bad fats (transfatty fastfood) and I don’t really care about the fat content of my healthy foods (oily seeds, fish oil). This is my simple strategy when it comes to my fat intake.
Again, don’t count calories. You don’t know the actual calorie need of your body and you don’t know how much calorie is actually absorbed by your digestive system from an actual food combination. Eat something that is not junky, contains nice carbs/fats, and eat food combinations that don’t make you feel ill/sleepy/tired and don’t generate too much fart! If you are training a lot, then you can eat A LOT - on some heavy-training days when I have 3-4 hours of total training my calorie intake can be nearly 5,000kcals (sometimes on some brutal snacky/seedy days 10,000) and I still don’t gain fat (not because of my very good genetics but because of the regular physical activities and the already good body composition). A heavy training increases your energy intake a lot and intense cardio and after-training regeneration has a huge long term calorie burn effect.
@all: Physical activity is very-very important!!! In my opinion it is more important than eating clean!
As I mentioned previously its the best to invest in both a clean diet and physical activity. Still if I had to choose between them I would choose physical activity. Doing no physical activity is slowly giving up your health and killing yourself no matter what you eat! Your body simply needs it. Period. Practice proves this statement. Take a look at some physically active older people and compare them with inactive people from the same age group. Active people look much younger and healthier (and in fact - they are indeed younger physically)! If you don’t do any physical activities then you will become “bones and bacon” in the long run and even your existing muscles will be more fatty and soft. Good (less fatty) body composition can be reached even with junk food if you do enough training but if you are totally inactive you have good chances to become “bones and bacon” in the long run even if you are eating totally clean food.
You have to create a balance between physical activity and food intake. If you do nearly zero physical activity (just breathing, thinking, maybe moving from your bed to your chair, using the car even to go out to the toilet, …) then you ARE out of balance. According to some sources (and in my opinion) you should do physical activities at least twice a day (morning/evening), this is the bare minimum to counter the bad effects of a whole day office work.
With zero physical activity you will generally feel like shit (even if you don’t have PFS). If you have PFS then you may be screwed up seriously (so that you can not do enough exercises and you can not gain muscle or lose fat). In this case you should try water fasting that solves at least fat loss for sure and you have good chances that it solves other serious problems too (like in my case - very good physical recovery and good stamina). Even if you don’t have PFS if is very hard to lose fat. Its much easier to keep the fat off if you already have a good body composition with enough muscle. But if you are already in trouble (with a lot of fat) then do yourself a favor and drink water only for at least 2-3 weeks. Long ago when I didn’t have PFS it took me about 2-3 years to lose 10 kilos of fat without diet change by doing heavy trainings 2-3 times per week. With water fasting you can lose the same amount of fat in 2-3 weeks even if you are fucked by PFS. Both the muscular and the overweight body compositions are “self generating” and everyone knows that turning a fatty body into a muscular one is a challenge but water fasting is a “surprisingly easy” and fast shortcut: I lost 15 kilos of fat and gained 10 kilos of muscle within 2 months. I wrote “surprisingly easy” because its much faster (and maybe easier) than going on the “normal diet + heavy training” route but not eating for several weeks requires a terribly great willpower. On the other hand for some PFS guys the traditional “normal diet + heavy training” won’t work (like in my case).
Here is the strategy I’ve used to balance out my training and food intake:
- Losing all fat. (I used water fasting for this.).
- I put together a nice clean diet for myself and I ate whenever I was hungry whatever amount of food I needed. No stupid rules like “not eating in the evening after 6pm” and shit like this. Actually I sleep much better if I have a big meal after a training before sleep but you should test out for yourself what feels good for you. Later I optimized my daily food intake by consuming most of the carb rich foods around my morning and/or evening training. Again, from the clean food I ate the amount I felt necessary, no calorie counting. (I actually counted calories for about a month just for curiosity but I haven’t based anything on this - except in the first few days)
- Since I lost all of my fat I could easily find out whether the amount and intensity of my trainings is in balance with my comfortable food intake. If there is no balance then you gain fat. With nearly zero fat (after water fasting) you can notice negative changes within a week long time window and you can adjust your trainings. If you gain considerable (“grabbable”) fat somewhere then you should compensate with longer and/or more intense (more effective) trainings and not by cutting from the amount of food you feel comfortable with. Starving is not the way to go in the long run.
The above technique works like a charm for me and I knew that even before PFS. What PFS (and basically this site) taught me is that losing fat is very easy with water fasting. Its a very quick shortcut, a nice trick besides having healing effects. If you already have a lot of fat it can be difficult to lose it without water fasting even without PFS (as fat gaining is quite self generating for most people), however if you succeed in turning it around and you build up some muscle mass then it can be quite easy to keep the fat off. I’ve heard about water fasting before but I thought that its a traditional shitty habit, a myth, and couldn’t imagine that spending weeks without food is possible, but it is possible and useful. Even if you don’t gain anything else - you can lose your PFS related fat and pseudo bitch tits (that I hated so much)!
Some people say that if you lose your fat with fasting, then after the fasting you gain back even more fat and you end up in a state that is worse from what you have started with slower metabolism and easier fat-gain (yo-yo effect). In my opinion this is only half of the truth. Here is the other half: Depending on the amount of your daily food intake, the amount with which you feel yourself comfortable through the day, your body will aim for a weight. This is definitely more than the weight you reached with fasting. If you spend your time with eating and sitting in a chair after your fasting period then your body will probably reach the aimed weight by building fat tissue. Inactive people rarely build muscle… However the period after fasting is a very good chance to go for some training and build up the target body weigh from muscle (like I gained 10 kilos of muscle in a single month after fasting quite easily). Doing trainings and gaining muscle as a skinny guy is much easier than doing the same as a fatty guy. Besides this the well done daily trainings speed up your metabolism after the fasting quite quickly (few weeks).
Everyone knows that stupid diets alone without physical activity don’t work when it comes to weigh loss and health but lazy people want these without doing any physical activities! This simply doesn’t work! Some companies probably have very good income by selling useless diet advices and supplements for lazy people.
On top of this I’ve tried several diets (mainly vegan diets with different food compositions) and they haven’t improved my PFS symptoms within few month periods. Well, maybe losing weigh will work with specific diets (but without physical activity it may be rather muscle loss than fat loss), but later keeping off the fat and remaining healthy and fresh in the long run will not especially because people tend to go back to their original diet and to the original amounts of food without training! If you are not genetically gifted and you lose weigh by constantly starving yourself with low calorie diets (and magic pills that make you feel “full” and stuff like this) without doing physical activities then you are simply torturing and slowly killing yourself. A low calorie diet is a torture (I actually tried it). You feel shitty and very tired all day and with PFS you may rather lose muscle mass than fat. (In contrast with water fasting where zero calorie intake switches your body to complete fat burn after a few days even if you are physically inactive.) A constant low calorie diet without physical activity is a very good recipe to create a bad body composition and people who try to lose weigh with this are probably mentally weak and sooner or later switch back to normal food intake without physical activity (with a slowed down metabolism). Probably there is nothing magical about the yo-yo effect. The simple truth - the key - is that zero physical activity doesn’t work. Period. If someone is lazy, then he will become sooner or later (but rather sooner) ill, tired and fat.
Even if someone is genetically gifted and doesn’t gain weigh from stuffing kilos of sugar and chocolate into herself - zero physical activity is a killer. And try this: grab the ass or arm of a lazy “genetically gifted” skinny girl, and then grab the same body part of another fit “fitness girl”… There is a difference! A skinny person can still be fatty! And that is probably one of the worst case scenarios!
I don’t understand some of the pessimism. If there is a diet that will relieve some of the pain we feel, why wouldn’t we talk about it? If the majority of forum members agree that cutting out x helps, why wouldn’t you want to try it out? I think everyone should obviously adjust their expectations. The ultimate cure will most likely come from the studies.
Now, my thoughts. Has any forum member NOT benefitted from cutting out gluten? I felt that this would be pretty universally agreed upon, that cutting out gluten would help. I mean really cutting it out, not just trying to.
Furthermore, a crazy strict paleo diet of just fruits, veggies, and non-processed meats, has there been anyone who has tried that for an extended period of time and not felt somewhat better? Granted doing either of these diets would be hard on your social life, so there is an obvious tradeoff. Some might say dealing with the pain/discomfort is worth it to be able to go drinking with friends, and who am I to say that is not right.
I am nowhere near recovered. However, compared to one year ago, my body feels so much less pain/discomfort everywhere, particularly in the prostate/pelvic floor region. I’m able to think more clearly, sleep a little better, and am somewhat better sexually compared to last summer. I honestly feel like I’ve hit the wall as to what can accomplished through diet. BUT, if you want to make each day a bit more bearable and are able to figure out how to still be social in these circumstances, try at least to be gluten free. If you try it and you honestly feel it has no effect I would love to hear that. It might mean my body is just getting better on its own.
Nate can you describe your pain in the pelvis more? Was it in your penis at all?
I wouldn’t say I felt any pain or discomfort in the penis unless you count shrinkage and the discomfort that comes with that. I did have general numbness in the penis.
The first year after my crash was just the worst. I wasn’t doing anything diet related or taking even a multi vitamin. It’s hard to describe and hard to even know the exact part of my body that was uncomfortable. But I’m guessing it was prostate/pelvic floor, or maybe perineum. Just lying down even it would feel quite uncomfortable for a few days at a time. I would sometimes just lay down and massage the taint area, which would make me feel a little better.
All I can say now is that I don’t feel that feeling anymore really. And during temporary recoveries, that area just feels more full and alive, like more blood is flowing down there.
I can’t stress it enough that cutting out gluten and then later all grains and alcohol, in my opinion, helped relieve some of the pain that I have felt with PFS and I hope everyone gives it a try at least.
I also forgot to say I take a multivitamin. I’m not sure why, but something in it gave me some degree of relief from the pelvic discomfort. Every time I stopped taking it, I’ve always felt worse down there.
Speaking of diet and what people are choosing to eat, I think a high carb, low fat diet could be most beneficial.
This is the opposite of some fads like the keto diet.
Im talking about healthy carbs though from fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
Also low dairy, low red meat, if you drink milk, 1 percent or less fat.
One positive take away from the @cdnuts protocol I know he mentioned,
spinach in a blender.
Except I would make small quantities at a time otherwise its going to settle and get nasty.
Something like the nutribullet or a single serving blender.
2 cups of spinach, 1 banana (for taste and thickness) and 25 grams of unflavored whey protein.
It can be used as a meal replacement and will give your digestion somewhat of a rest.
Obviously people have also tried extended water fasting, but anything over 3 days to me seems a little extreme.
I think eventually this could become part of a protocol to get health back on track.