Here it comes: the special sugar-free, anti-yeast diet I've mentioned so many times. It is the centerpiece of the entire anti-yeast plan.
I don't mean to sound harsh here, but it's important that you understand this: Without the diet, you won't get the results you are hoping for. You can take the medications and the supplements, and they may or may not help. You may feel better for a while, and then find your symptoms have returned.
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| Diets For Yeast Infections |
If your health problems are yeast-connected, you must eliminate sugar from your diet for at least three weeks and probably indefinitely.
It's not easy, but once you start feeling so much better, you'll be willing, even eager, to make these sacrifices.
The plan hinges on complete elimination of sugar and yeast from your diet for at least three weeks, and then you'll become your own detective by gradually reintroducing specific foods and recording your results.
You'll want to keep a diary to jot down your progress and the results get from your detective work.
I like to think of this as a four-step process:
First Step: Elimination - This is unquestionably the hardest part. You will eliminate all sugar and foods containing sugar, processed foods that often contain sugar and chemical additives, fruit, and all yeasts and fungi for the first three weeks.
Second Step: Challenge - Now that you're feeling much better and you've probably eliminated a large amount of yeast overgrowth from your digestive tract, it's time to challenge yourself, by experimenting with complex sugars, fruits and yeast to see what affects you. It'll feel a little like a backward step, but it's important to understand what foods trigger your symptoms so you can avoid them.
Third Step: Reassessment - If after a month or two on the anti-yeast program, you're still experiencing problem, you'll need to track down your hidden food allergies to further refine what you found out about your food sensitivities.
Fourth Step: Maintenance - Now that you know your triggers, you can lighten up a little on the program. You can fine-tune your personalized program because you know what works. If you've passed the fruit challenge, you can add moderate amounts of fruit to your diet, probably not more than three or four pieces a week. You might be able to tolerate bread a couple of times a week without triggering symptoms. A piece of birthday cake may not send you into an immediate tailspin, if you've been very careful.
Now for the details:
STEP 1: ELIMINATION
Prepare your supplies and reorganize your kitchen and your way of thinking about food.
Think about what you'd need to do if you were taking a three-week ocean voyage on a sailing ship. Before starting your trip, you'd have to get enough food. I'm not asking you to buy all of it and store it in pantry and refrigerator, yet here are my suggestions for getting started.
Clean out your cupboards:
- Go through your kitchen, pantry and refrigerator and get rid of the sugar, corn syrup, white bread and other white-flour products, soft drinks, most ready-to-eat cereals and all the sweet, fat-laden stuck foods. Foods and beverages containing these nutritionally deficient simple carbohydrates encourage yeast overgrowth and promote poor health. To overcome your candida-related health problems, you'll need to avoid them.
- Replace them with more vegetables of all kinds, including those you may not usually eat. Also, go to your health food store and buy grain alternatives, including amaranth, buckwheat and quinoa.
- Get rid of processed and prepared junk foods, which have hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated fats, as well as those containing food coloring and additives. Add modest amounts of olive, walnut, flaxseed, sesame and other unprocessed, unrefined oils.
- Shop mainly around the outer edges of your supermarket. Look for fresh and frozen vegetables, fresh meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, tofu, olive oil, pure butter and sardines packed in sardine oil. I especially recommend organically grown foods which haven't been chemically contaminated. You'll find these foods in many health food stores and in some supermarkets.
- You'll also need to eliminate fruit for these first three weeks. In general, fruit is good for you, but in your condition, it's simply too high in sugar when you're fighting yeast overgrowth.
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| Diets For Yeast Infections |
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