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The reading I've done in the last couple of days on diet and RA have convinced me my intuitive system still works quite well. Yesterday I wrote about how, when I was a road bum, I was always healthy. I couldn't afford to get sick, so I didn't. I was also skinny. Skinny for me is to weigh around 160 pounds and every rib I got is easy to see.
I didn't look like someone coming out of a prisoner-of-war camp or a concentration camp, but my body fat probably hovered around next to nothing. Not only did I not get a lot to eat because I'm a lousy beggar, but I went on a lot of total fasts during that period that might last from 3-5 days to 2-3 weeks.
Once, I tried fasting for 30 days, but I fell short a day, and then got fairly sick for a few days after I broke the fast. I stopped fasting after I got up with the woman who was to become my second wife. I stopped writing poetry once we hooked up too, but poetry did not give up on me.
The conclusion I seem to be coming to is that I need to get extreme with my diet again. I weigh 220 presently, and I've lost ten pounds in the last month. I need to get real skinny again. If for no other reason than to get some of this weight off to relieve my knee and hip joints. This rheumatoid arthritis is not going away before I am does.
From all the articles I've read on the internet about diet and autoimmune diseases, so far, there is practically nobody (that's not trying to shamelessly sell hope) who believes RA is either caused by or is cured by diet.
I read the articles put out by all the big research hospitals like Hopkins and Mayo and the Linus Paulings Institute at the University of Oregon. They are not encouraging anybody to think that diet can cure RA, but they do acknowledge that fasting can help with the symptoms temporarily. That's good enough for me for now. I know how to fast.
Although rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases aren't caused by one's diet, some of these so-called experts seem to claim that the symptoms associated with these diseases flare up or seem to be caused by the reaction of one's immune system to certain foods, and the immune system treats them as if they were poison and tries to remove them from your system.
That's fairly easy to recognize with diabetes. Many people know somebody who has some kind of diabetes, and probably have heard that eating sweets can sometime make you sick, and other times something sweet is needed to balance the system.
The researchers whose papers I've been reading seem prone to accept that the symptoms of RA can be instigated by specific foods that the immune system of particular person will reject as an attack on it's body, and that the person isn't consciously aware what the cause is.
Reading about this possibility has perked me up. This is something I understand. This is something I can play with to find out whether it's that way with me. There is nothing different about it than what I'm doing already. Finding out if some food allergy is causing the symptoms of RA I experience is a process a poor person like me can do for themselves about as well as doing lab work to discover allergens.
The aforementioned fasting is the bottom line for finding out if any particular thing I eat is causing my RA symptoms to flare up. The idea is to fast for a while, and then start eating the suspected foods and see what happens.
That's exactly what I'm doing with these prescription drugs presently. Something, and it doesn't have to be the prescription drugs themselves, at least not the prescription drugs I specifically take to deal with the symptoms of RA. Presently, I'm attempting to discover where I'm allergic to ibuprofen. The internet says it's possible, the druggists at the Wal-Mart say they've never heard of such a thing.
There is nothing much to lose by my explorations. Nobody believes there is a cure for any of these autoimmune diseases. Since it's true that there is no cure for RA the only-est thang I can do is to find a placebo I can truly believe in, and then ride the wave of delusion as long as it has legs. '-)
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
