Lymies: Eat Your Carbs

We cut out carbs so that they can’t “feed the bugs.” We go about treatment the way chemo patients do – we aim to kill the weakest links in our body so that only our strongest cells remain to multiply.

First of all, holy shit that is a lot of pressure! If you vi
sualize an infection in your body feeding off of anything from a cookie to a carrot than you are putting yourself under added stress that I bet you could live without, no?

Second of all, I did the low carb route and it sucked. It may or may not have helped to get me into remission, however, at one point I had to open my mind and my mouth to carbs for the sake of improving my thyroid and metabolic health.

Lymies: Eat your carbs, because while they may feed the bugs, they feed us, too. A lousy metabolism goes hand-in-hand with low-carb diets, at least according to:

– the Vermont Studies, where 2 groups of inmates were closely followed for 7 months (one group was overfed in carbs, the other was overfed in fats and the high carb group had therapeutic levels of the thyroid hormone T3 by the end of it, while the low fat group did not).

– Spaulding et al, who found that diets containing no carbohydrates caused T3 to plummet, similar to what would occur during starvation.

– Similar studies from UCLA, Yale, and any physiology 101 textbook.

Sometimes I psych myself out, because I don’t want to “feed the bugs” either, trust me! But I always feel better when I unlimit my carb-intake. I don’t have to put a limit on it, because I want to get at least 165+ grams in a day. And I am used to those brutal low carb diets so, by habit, it is just hard for me to overdo it on the carbs (although I bet some of you low-carbers are jaw-dropped).

I also picked immunity over attack in my treatment protocol. By this, I mean I ditched the antibiotics and aimed to get all my hormones, organs, inflammation markers and all that gold into therapeutic ranges and hoped that my strength and health would follow (so far, so good).

That is not to say that I do not occasionally take antimicrobials, because I do whenever I feel myself getting a cold or getting those “hangover” type Lyme symptoms. But I mega dose any more, and I am glad to be more focused on gut repair at this point. You have to judge for yourself (and experiment) to know if this would work for you, too.

Encouraging EVERYONE to get off antibiotics would be a mistake, I know. I do think that some of us are overdoing them, however, even though we are not seeing good results. There are SO many other things we have to work on to feel better than killing bugs. Like improving our immunity so our cells can kill bugs.

But we can get energy from fat, right?

Right. Sure. 9 calories per gram opposed to 4 calories per gram coming from carbs. Amazing! But not without consequence:

It is a lot more complicated than this, but fat takes more energy to metabolize and convert into usable energy than carbs do. Carbs are the easiest thing to source into energy, which is great for a weak and sickly person.

Another thing, the more fat we eat, the more we have to deal with oxidization. Most fats have high levels of poly-unsaturated fats (PUFAs) and these oxidize the quickest. Eaten in excess, our cell membranes start to use these fats and become more prone to oxidization themselves.  To learn a bit more about PUFAs in an entertaining way, check out this article on Ray Peat and his work.

Of course, there is no perfect study, no single answer with Lyme Disease. But I do think that we are making ourselves sicker by restricting our diets so that supplement popping becomes necessary just to survive. I went on and on as a low-carber because I thought the weakness I felt was just from Lyme. But adding carbs into my routine made me realize that I was making myself sicker.