Yeast is Normal flora but sometimes grows overboard
Yeast overgrowth can be caused by eating too much sugar, genetics, ph changes, antibiotic therapy, dieting, stress…pretty sure that about covers everything life has to offer! I have a body yeast seem to love…couldn’t be my sugar addiction, could it? I really have to watch sugar and take probiotics regularly.
Symptoms of candidiasis are vague and vast. Itching anywhere (vag, ears, anus), bloating, brain fog, weight gain, constipation/diarrhea, depression, and anything you want to blame on the little fungus.
Treatment consists of a diet (explained below) and some probiotic therapy. I do use pharmaceuticals like nystatin, diflucan, or ketoconazole if necessary. The only natural thing that seems to have some efficacy is garlic….pure allicin or garlic oil capsules can work too. I usually combine a drug/herb protocol with the diet.
The Candida Diet
If you’ve tried to stay on it, even the words “candida diet” make you shudder. Yet, every day thousands of people go to search engines and type in those two infamous words hoping to find relief from Candida Yeast Overgrowth.
What is the Candida diet?
The diet itself seems simple. You can eat all the protein you want and lots of green vegetables and salads. What could be so hard? You may know the answer to that question already. It’s not hard -it’s impossible! Partly because of what you can’t eat, but mostly because You can’t slip-up once! Not even a little bit!
The idea behind the candida diet is to literally starve the yeast organisms living in your body. Starve them to death! Think of a bottle filled with grape juice containing a cake of yeast. But this particular bottle of grape juice has had all sugar removed. Will it make wine? No it won’t! Because the yeast needs some form of sugar to ferment. Sugar is the sustenance of yeast. This is how fully you must maintain the diet. Give your yeast no sugar of any kind.
The Candida diet only works if you can fully and completely eliminate sugars in all their forms. Grains (cereal, bread, pasta, muffins, etc.), fruits, dairy foods like milk and cheese and even sweet vegetables like carrots contain too much sugar. The carbs in these foods are quickly converted into sugars that will feed your yeast overgrowth.Let’s say you have eaten this diet perfectly for 3 months and at a birthday party you take a small piece of cake (just to be social). Up to this point the yeast in your body had been well on its way to dying off but now it has just been fed! Congratulations! Your yeast is now alive and reproducing again. You are now back to day one on the Candida diet. Will you start over again from scratch?
This is the “impossible” part. You simply must remain perfectly on the diet for 6 months to eradicate your yeast overgrowth. Sometimes 3 months plus a drug/herb protocol is enough…but diet only therapy is 6 months.
Also, there is concern that eating only protein sources and green vegetables is not a healthy diet for you long term. It’s one thing to eat “low carb” but another to eat almost none as demanded by the Candida diet. I start to allow fruit (one piece per day) or some carrots/beets at the 3 month mark.
You will lose weight and detox with this strict diet. I have tried it myself…it about killed me (not literally but I lasted about a month before deciding to do pharmaceuticals)! Good luck and remember your health will benefit…
Rgds
Dr.J