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(In voice of Jerry Seinfeld) Candida! So what’s up with that!
Seriously though what is up with the candida thing. I’m not talking about vaginal yeast infections or oral thrush, and I’m not talking about the deadly systemic infection that can and usually does kill people with aids or other severe immune system disorders. No I am referencing that pesky undiagnosable disorder that is responsible for a laundry list of symptoms. It’s all over the web. It’s responsible for everything that ails you. There is no accurate test to diagnose it. Regular doctors scoff at the mere mention of it and roll there eyes. Naturopaths are more than happy to sell you bottles of herbal antifungals to kill it. But remember if you don’t get better its not their fault you must be some weak willed slob who ate a piece of fruit or some jelly toast. I have been told that it could take years on a no sugar low glycemic diet to get results. I tried for months. I just couldn’t do it. How do you guys out there feel? Has anyone been told they have it? Does anyone think its a real thing? Does anyone think they have beat it through diet? I am interested to hear other people’s honest opinions. I just don’t feel like I can do another restrictive diet for a disease that I’m not even sure I have and whose symptoms can be pretty vague and similar to so many other disorders including adreanal fatigue. So….Candida! What’s up with that!
I have a recurring candida rash on my hands. I tried a no sugar, low glycemic diet, as well as a whole host of supplements, and I still had it for about… four or five months. It spread from the back of one hand, to the back of another, then to the center palm of both hands, down my wrists in some cases. IMO, the no sugar/carb diet that’s supposed to “kill” candida, only serves to make the candida even more sensitive to sugar. Every time I fell off the wagon and ate something I shouldn’t have, the itching would make me INSANE, the rash would spread… But once I started to just eat the food, regular meals, stopped worrying about carbs or sugar or anything else, it cleared up pretty quickly. It did come back with my last menstrual cycle, but it was much milder, and went away within a couple of weeks.
So… in my experience, the info out there about candida is well-intentioned, but for all intents and purposes works just like a low calorie diet. As soon as you fall off the wagon, the candida comes back even worse than before.
I also have dandruff, which I also attribute to some form of candida or yeast-like fungus. It got killed off the last time I bleached my hair out to dye it purple, but came back within a couple of months. It hasn’t gone away completely since I stopped dieting, but it isn’t unbearably gross like it used to be, so I’m hoping it might go away eventually?
Anyway, I do believe in candida, but I think it’s yet another symptom of a low metabolism rather than some signal of bad gut health, or something that can be killed if you only eat a restricted enough diet for a long enough period of time.
Thanks for the reply. I agree with your observation about the low sugar diet making you more sensitive when you fall off the wagon. I have had to work my way back into eating “normal” foods. I also agree that having a good metabolism goes a long way to healing and preventing health issues. Supposedly candida thrives in a “colder” environment and low body temps and low metabolism go hand in hand. I have chronic psoriasis. It used to be bad which led me to search out some form of alternative cure. That’s what led me to the whole candida thing. At one point I even tried starving it out through a long term water fast. My psoriasis got much better temporarily but soon came back. I realized that no matter how much you starve yourself you are always going to have sugar in your blood. I then tried paleo. That again worked very well for a while. After almost a year of that I just sort of crashed. I ran out of energy,I felt like shit,and generally lost all motivation to keep up with all of the special foods and cooking involved with paleo. Now my psoriasis is worse than ever my metabolism is trashed etc. So recently I went to a naturopath and he brought up the candida thing and prescribed a diet that is highly restrictive. Not only is it low glycemic but on top of that he gave me a food allergy test that rules out half of the foods I can eat. Plus he wanted me to but two hundred dollars worth of supplements. In short I just walked away and have decided to just let it all out for a while. Eat what I feel like when I feel like and damn the consequences.
Yeah, I could definitely see my “candida” (or whatever you want to call it), being diagnosed as psoriasis. One thing that helped, although it’s probably not very natural (mine itched SO bad, I was finally willing to do anything), was Vagisil. Kind of weird to be rubbing vagina cream all over your hands, but especially the 3 day kind, worked pretty well. Just to bring it down to a dull roar for a while so I could start raising my metabolism. And, as long as I’m at a pretty consistent 98-99.5 degrees, it doesn’t bother me at all. My temp drops right when my period starts, though, and then it still tends to flare up. But even then, it’s WAY better than it used to be. So, I would definitely recommend to just eat the food, and to try to listen to your body. At first, I ate TONS of sugar because that’s what my body wanted, and it made the rash/psoriasis worse, but as time went on and I’ve tried very diligently to never let myself get super hungry and to eat three meals a day plus snacks, it doesn’t respond to sugar anymore. Only to my body temperature.
The restrictive diets are NOT worth it. I don’t think people understand how uncomfortable it can be to have a rash on your skin that’s as painful/burning/itching as this can be. If they did, maybe they would come up with a better treatment than to simply make the rash MORE sensitive to what you eat.
You may have to give it several months, though. So, don’t give up if it’s not gone in, say, 2-3 months. It may take a longer than that, depending on how screwed up the paleo/low glycemic crap got you.
Matt did a video on candida here: http://180degreehealth.com/2012/04/rethinking-candida
Also, from The Vegan Solution FAQ:
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I’ve been avoiding most starches and sugars because I’ve been told I have candida. Is it okay for me to eat these foods? Am I just asking for candida to bloom again and cause problems?When candida is starved it supposedly sends out ?roots? or filaments deeper into the digestive tract and beyond. Thus, starving candida can make candida blooms infinitely worse when you return to eating copious quantities of carbohydrates ? which most eventually will. When you starve candida of glucose, you also starve yourself of glucose. It’s best to nourish yourself well, get good sleep, and optimize your immune system to keep these kinds of things in check. You may experience a profound initial bloom in candida, but this too should resolve itself in due time. Just be persistent and continue to eat lots of the anti-stress, anti-bacterial foods like sugar, salt, and coconut oil in particular.
Sometimes candida is mistaken for bacterial overgrowth of the small intestine, which can cause problems initially as well. As a short-term palliative, until your speed of digestion picks up the pace, raw carrots have natural anti-microbial properties and can help to properly sterilize the small intestine.
—Yes probably even weirder for a guy to be rubbing vaginal cream on himself :) lol
I hear you. Once you quit the restrictive eating it seems like you just want to go ape shit on all of the sugar and stuff you couldn’t eat before. When you have something like severe psoriasis,it can get very scary when that causes a massive flare up. I can understand the people that get alarmed with the weight gain but the psoriasis is an immediate an very uncomfortable feedback to any of the “wrong” things I eat. Fortunately, like you said though, it is calming down and not reacting to sugar as much and my appetite is calming down now that I’ve had my fill of the forbidden foods. I’m pretty sure that I will always have psoriasis to some extent. I am working hard at trying to build a peaceful and accepting attitude towards the things I can’t change about life. I do feel like if I can raise my metabolism a lot of my health issues will level out a bit. I really feel like I made a mess of things these last few years. This whole disease is hard enough on your psyche let alone feeling like a big looser for breaking down and eating some jelly toast or something. Every time I would make progress with my skin only to have that progress reversed I would start second guessing everything I ate. It really started messing with my head and causing lots of stress. And stress I believe is more of a factor in psoriasis than food is.
Thanks for the link Rob! This is all confirming my beliefs about all of this. If Candida exists as the condition that I am supposed to have, then I have probably have just made it worse. If it really isn’t the root of my problem then I have created health problems that I didn’t need to have. Either way I am much more of a mess now than when I went down the rabbit hole. It’s also interesting how many more anti candida sites and books etc are out there now compared to when I first started learning about it. The anti-Candida market has virtually “bloomed” lol. Everyone seems to be on the band wagon now. I have almost all of the symptoms from the candida list. Of course the candida symptoms list is virtually identical to the list of adreanal fatigue symptoms which is almost identical to the list of malnutrition and leaky gut symptoms and so on and so forth. Almost everyone in the modern world is experiencing some of these symptoms in one way or another so people look at these lists of symptoms that are so non specific and go,” oh my god, I have candida”. The real kicker is that a lot of the herbal antifungals that I have been talked into really tear your gut up and exacerbate leaky gut as well as destroy good microbes. So in the end until someone can definitively prove to me that I have this condition, I am just going to do everything possible to raise my metabolism and restore my health in a sensible way and hope that in the end my body does the rest.
Catie,
I don’t think what you had was psoriasis. It really does sound like it was more of a fungal infection. Psoriasis usually builds up into flaky patches that shed off. Your fungal infection may have indeed been caused by Candida albicans or any one of a number of other fungal organisms. Usually fungal stuff is associated with more intense itching and burning. The funny thing is my psoriasis used to never really itch very much until after the whole anti-candida protocol. Now sometimes when I eat too much sugar it drives me crazy with the itching. Now that I have re-acclimated myself a little bit it’s hit or miss. Sometimes I can eat way more sugar than I know is good for me and it won’t bother me other times I’ll have sugars that I think are better for me like fruit and it will itch like crazy. Chocolate cake, no problem, bowl of cherries and a slice of watermelon, look out!Rob – is this “Matt did a video on candida here: http://180degreehealth.com/2012/04/rethinking-candida” no longer viable?
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