Anti-Candida Diet in a Nutshell
Posted by: citizen1ita on: September 11, 2009
- In: Health/Diet
- Comment!
Over the years I’ve tried the typical anti-candida diet, which is extremely strict and difficult depending on the particular diet. There are a few out there with some variations. Here’s my opinion on the subject. However, don’t go just by what I say, go by how you feel and what your doctor advises. For me, I just did the best I could. When I felt too sick to eat certain things, I would cheat and eat white rice. Sometimes that’s all I could do. The best anti-candida diet I have found out there, and the most strict one I’ve seen, is by a lady named Bee Wilder. Her website is completely dedicated to candida and following her strict recommendations. For many, her diet has worked wonders. For me, I did the best I could and ultimately found relief once I realized that the problem was bigger than just candida and was diagnosed with h. pylori. PLEASE CHECK FOR H. PYLORI IF YOU THINK YOU HAVE CANDIDA. H. PYLORI NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED RIGHT AWAY. If you have candida, you just may have h. pylori too. I read somewhere that candida carries h. pylori, or vice versa, either way they go together a lot of the time. But according to my doctors, you can follow the diet as strict as you can but if you have h. pylori you need to be taking stuff to kill it. Same goes with Candida. You’ve got to be killing it off. It’s up to you whether you want to believe that diet alone can cure your candida. For me, the supplements (listed in my post, “What worked”) and the diet were what worked for me.
The basic diet I followed including some recommendations from Bee’s website, Healing Naturally:
Higher protein (fatter meats better) including eating quite a lot of organic eggs
higher good fats including adding real butter to just about everything, extra virgin olive oil. I started taking olive oil by 1/2 to 1 tablespoon after meals (I’d just plug my nose and down it). Working up to 3 tablespoons a day. Make sure and take a good enzyme that includes lipase to digest fat.
low glycemic veggies like asparagus, greens, zucchini.
Bee’s electrolyte drink helped me immensely! It’s basically 8-16 oz purified water with 1/8 to 1/4 tsp good celtic sea salt and the juice of half a lemon. I drank this all the time and I’m sure it helped with the nausea.
I also ate rice when I felt the need to.
I cut out gluten about 99% but at times it couldn’t be avoided. This is my point about doing the best you can. And look, I’m negative for systemic candida now.
At times I even “cheated” with beans even though they are a high starch because I just couldn’t eat meat all the time. Sometimes I suffered for it other times, not. The thing that has ALWAYS made me feel better is eating organic eggs. Always ate them “soft” scrambled too, not overcooked to keep the nutrients. That’s just me. If you check out Bee’s website she has a whole lot of information (an overwhelming amount) about the goodness of eggs. She recommends raw eggs and in particular a “raw egg drink” recipe she has on her site. I tried it a few times and it was tasty, but never got over the raw egg thing enough to drink it consistently. Though it never made me feel sick. I did decrease the amounts of coconut oil and eggs in the drink.
A note on Coconut oil. Some people feel that coconut oil is a crucial part of the anti-candida diet. For me, I just couldn’t tolerate it much. Do what you can. Bee recommends working up to 5-6 tablespoons of coconut oil a day BEFORE going on any natural antifungal like oregano or garlic, but I never got even close to that and was able to eventually take the supplements in my “What Worked” post that included oregano, etc. If you’re going to try coconut oil, do a very small amount at a time at first and work up to more. Like 1/4 to 1/2 tsp with meals. Bee recommends this also.
I started taking the basic nutritional supplements listed on Bee’s website. Basically I added 1000 mg of vit C 3 times a day (I believe this helped a lot with the die-off) vit E, a good Cal/Mag supplement 2 times a day, A good B-complex 2 times a day, in addition to taking ginger for my tummy. If you want to see a more detailed list of supplements check out her website.
I would personally recommend checking out her website. If you want to join her support group she may be able to help you. I was on her list for a long time and she always answered my questions. But, if you don’t follow her diet strictly she will get onto you for that. She has her reasons, and many are good. I do not personally agree with everything she advises. But she did help me some.
I definitely agree with her article on how to start curing candida in steps.
1. eliminate sugar from your diet
2. eliminate gluten and yeast
3. gradually add more higher fat meats and good fat to your diet
4. Stay on the diet until you feel at least a little better, one or two months
5. Take the antifungals (like the ones in my “What Worked” post or a good oregano oil supplement. As far as oregano oil, Young Living Essential Oils is a very trustworthy brand and you get a lot for your money. However you have to buy the capsules and make them up yourself.) only once you’ve been on the diet for at least a while, like a month or two. The point is, if you take them too soon you may experience a worse die-off reaction than you would if you just let the diet work for a while first. This was definitely true for me. It was several months I was on the diet before I got the positive for h. pylori and starting taking those supplements which were for h. pylori but also worked to kill candida too.
A last note on probiotics. Some say that you are wasting your money to take them before you’ve used the antifungals. But, in my opinion, and my doctors, you might be better off taking them right away because it’s good to constantly be building up that good gut flora. The one I took is in my “What Worked” post.
I took Threelac a few times over the years and the first time I tried it I thought it made a big difference, but it didn’t totally cure me. Maybe if I had kept with it back then it would have eventually worked. Who knows. It’s worth trying. It never made me worse. Later I tried it again and never saw much of a difference. If you want to try it I know a lady who sells it cheaper than most and offers free shipping and a money-back guarantee. Contact me if you want her info.
4 Responses to "Anti-Candida Diet in a Nutshell"
November 25, 2009 at 8:39 pm
have you heard about the 80/10/10 diet for candida?
its a diet with high carb (from fruits) and no fat and not protien. sugar feeds candida because it stays in the blood stream due to fat. if there is no fat, the sugar doesnt stay in the blood stream and should not feed the candida. what do you say about this?
November 26, 2009 at 1:03 pm
This 80/10/10 diet looks like it might be good for someone obese who desperately needs to shed pounds fast, but it doesn’t seem like something that would be safe to be on for a long period of time. At least from my own perspective from what I’ve studied over the years. Hopefully this Dr. Douglas Graham at least believes in ingesting good healthy fats such as olive oil, coconut oil, butter, avacados, nuts, flax oils, fish oils. The saturated fats in these oils are actually good for you and do not make you fat. (What makes you fat are “bad” carbs like the white flours, bad oils and sweets.) Good fats actually nourish your body in every way and provide protection for your nerves, your hormones, and help BALANCE blood sugar. You definitely need good fat if your planning on eating a lot of carbs. Fat slows the absorption of sugar so that you don’t have constant blood sugar spikes which cause all sorts of problems: hormone imbalance, hypoglycemia, diabetes. Basically this diet is the opposite of the diet I (and most people) believe in for candida. Candida feeds on sugar and carbs so it’s only common sense to decrease or eliminate those from your diet. I would have to read more about this 80/10/10 as far as its use in a candida diet plan. There is also the issue of metabolic type and most people who suffer with candida are protein types meaning they do better with a higher protein/higher good fat and lower carb diet. This you should be able to tell just by noticing how you feel after you eat. Do you feel better/more balanced when you eat a meal with good healthy protein such as chicken and veggies, or do you feel more balanced/nourished when you eat a meal that’s mostly grains like pasta, and veggies? Do you feel better when you eat higher fat meats like dark meat or lean meats? Myself, I feel much better with the higher fat, high protein meat. Personally, I could not survive on a vegan diet of any kind, unless I did it as a short detox. Put it this way: I followed a candida diet based on this principle, with very little carbs and no sugar, and increased fats where I was taking extra tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil and butter with meals and eating lots of eggs, and my levels of candida went way down to the point I tested negative for candida twice. And I didn’t get fat. Also, any person who eats a lot of fruits might say they have more energy at first if their normal diet was fried food and greasy fast food burgers and processed foods. Eating raw produce is good but that elevation in energy is because of two things: one, cutting out a lot of crap, and two, increased sugar causes a sugar “high” that seems at first like higher energy until the blood sugar drops. Look into “The Metabolic Type Diet” and other candida diets like The Yeast Connection.
citizen1ita
September 29, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Were you not supposed to go on a maintenace dose of 3lac
after you finished the 6 months?
Do you think that would have made a difference.
I just started on 3lac and hoping for the best.
September 30, 2009 at 4:11 pm
I never followed a consistent protocol with the Threelac. I would try it for a while. It would work, then sometimes would seem to make things worse or not work, though this could have just been die-off and I maybe needed to decrease it or increase it to see further improvement. So, I wouldn’t go off of my experience with it since I didn’t use it for a set period of time. That does make sense that you may want to stay on it for a while for maintenance, that is, if it works for you and your candida symptoms have gone away or improved. Hope it helps you!