"Diet" and joint pain

I can only talk from personal experience. After sitting for a long period, I used to need 10-15 steps before I could move my legs normally. I had stopped doing weight training because my muscles would take too long to recover.

My family history is filled with people who had arthritis problems, so I thought it was just normal I would be affected, since I am 48 years old.

When i changed to a low cabs diet, all of that went away. I still have normal muscle fatigue after work outs, but the joint pain is all gone and muscle recovery is the same it was in my 20's.

It seems that for a big part of the population, Carbs cause inflammation which brings joint pains. It took about 1 month after I fully went low carbs, before I realized I no longer walked around like an 80 years old man.

Whole30.  Yes, it is essentially paleo, but it does not need to be 'low carb' at all.  You just have to choose your carbs wisely (enter winter squash and sweet potatoes).

The entire plan is designed around reducing inflammation.  It's only 30 days and many people see drastic improvements.

http://whole9life.com/category/whole-30/

Cayenne - 2013-03-31 9:45 AM Is that essentially Paleo? I see the ketosis thread an that really concerns me. In the 70's, I was on Atkins for a few months and lost a ton of weight but ended with seizures due to the really low carbs I was eating. I used the ketosticks daily. I don't remember about joint pain since I was a teenager

I went ketosis when I needed to loose weight, stayed in it for about 6 months. Now I only do Low carbs and I'm maintaining my weight. I did not have any problems while in Ketosis, so can't comment on your past experience.

The inflammation problems have not returned in low carbs, I stay away as much as possible from grains and sugars. They were the two culprits of my inflammation problems.

I don't follow Paleo, I think it is a great way to live, but I can't give up dairy. Personally I have not found any connection between dairy and inflammation. 

Food intolerance absolutely causes inflammation.  People assume that such inflammation is only in the gut, but it actually transfers to anywhere in your body that is compromised.

The only way to truly know if you suffer from food intolerance is to have blood work done.  I'm doing this through Lifetime Fitness now.  They send you to a participating lab and screen your blood for the 40 most common food intolerance like wheat, gluten, dairy, eggs, nuts, sugar, etc.

Once your results are ready, one of the RD's on staff helps you interpret the results and gets you an action plan.  As it turns out, intolerances are most commonly caused by a disturbance in your gut bacteria, also called gut flora.  Often, taking the correct probiotic (there are hundreds are kinds) can correct the gut imbalance along with cutting the offending foods out.

The good news is that often you can add the foods back in after your gut flora is balanced again.  So it's not necessarily a death sentence for your favorite foods.

People do elimination diets but aside from being really time consuming as you eliminate one food at a time for weeks at a time, it's still just a guessing game.  It's so much easier to just find a wellness (often holistic in nature) center near you that does the testing.

I agree with this!  I've completed a couple of Whole30s.  Just started one on March 31.  Not so much because I have health issues, but I don't want any either.  You don't eliminate things one at a time but all at once.  Grains, dairy, legumes, alcohol, sugar, etc. go out the window.  What you basically eat is protein, veggies including sweet potatoes and winter squash but no corn, fruit, and healthy fats (avocado, coconut, olives, olive & coconut oils).  After 30 days, you reintroduce foods one catagory at a time to find out how they affect you.

Some people do.  Most go the 30 days to "reset their body" and figure out what foods are affecting them especially if there is a health issue; hence the name Whole30.  You are eating whole foods for 30 days.  If you are experiencing a lot of joint pain, it would be worth it to find out what is causing it because more than likely it is something in your diet.  I don't eat a lot of winter squash because I don't care for it much (except butternut), but I do eat quite a lot of sweet potatoes.  I've done a half marathon eating this way and am in my last weeks of training for an Olympic tri.

I've been eating this way for almost 2 years now and I kind of chuckle when people comment on it being strict or ask 'what do you eat?!'.  I eat so much awesome healthy food now that it's  hard to remember what it was like to think how restrictive it looks to anyone eating the standard american diet!

I've only done two HM's, an Oly and two sprints on this plan before I was injured about a year ago.  Now I'm just working my way back into endurance conditioning starting with cycling.  I can't really speak to doing IM's eating this way, but people do.  In fact, Nell Stephenson is highly competitive IM distance racer and she eats this way 24/7. She does include some non-plan foods during events and some training (like gels).  This is her website: http://paleoista.com/

But, even if you don't want to live this way all the time, 30 days is enough to see some pretty remarkable changes in most people.  I was already 'paleo' when I did my first Whole30 so I didn't expect to see much difference and I was blown away by how much it improved my sleep quality, my recovery time, my energy levels and smaller things like my skin or my memory.  It blew my mind.  Now I stick as close to Whole30 as I can (with occasional treats for special occasions) because I much prefer how I feel when eating this way.

I just found out from an xray in Jan that I have severe disk space narrowing in two places on my back causing a lot of pain in the past year (being on crutches and then in a boot for months made it worse).  They are calling it OA, but I'm ignoring the diagnoses for the most part.  I cleaned up my diet and I'm working on my core (Pilates) with the hope that in a few months, I'll be back to full speed as well.  I can run without pain in my back, but it still hurts my foot and I can't swim at all without pain.  Plus, when I stray from the straight and narrow diet for too long, the pain gets worse.  So I'm a believer!

I hope you find that it helps you, too.