Skip to main content

Neck Pain Gone: My Expensive Diet Keeps Paying Off

As of this month, I've been wheat-free (for the most part) for a year, and as of February, low-carb for one year. I'm also approaching another important anniversary: on February 8, it will have been one year since I saw a doctor for a medical problem. Coincidence? No.

Up until mid-February last year, I saw my chiropractor for aches and pains in my neck and shoulders. A couple of weeks after my last appointment, I was well enough to skip the treatments for good.

I recently thought of seeing my chiropractor again for a minor neck injury. While lifting weights, my neck felt strained, but being stubborn, I kept on and ended up in pain. There was a knot on my spine and a dip just above it, like a vertibrae had tilted on the x axis. It was painful to look left, tilt my head or do the Indian dance move where you slide your head left and right.

Having had good results with my neck and shoulder healing on their own after I changed my diet, I decided to see if this injury would do the same. It's been two weeks, and it's nearly healed, just as I expected. The lump/dip is mostly gone, I can turn and tilt my head, and the head slide isn't nearly as painful as it was. All I used was aspirin, arnica cream, and yoga exercises. I've skipped weightlifting to give my neck the chance to rest. Had I seen my chiropractor for, say, two visits (yeah, sure!), it would have cost me $90, plus vacation time from work. (The arnica cream was around $7.) The $13 extra I'm spending at the grocery store on nutrient dense food like meat, eggs, protein powder, full-fat cheese and veg and skipping the wheat and other high-carb foods pays off once again.

If you're living on a diet of cheap calories, are you sure that's a cheap diet? If you can live on food like cereal, noodles and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches without stomach problems, cavities, aches and pains, acne, midafternoon slumps, or a gaggle of other health problems, or having to buy ever-bigger clothes, more power to you. (And if you can, what are you doing here?) Otherwise, the costs of medicines, doctor bills, sick days and bigger clothes should be considered along with your grocery budget.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
Read more

Why I've stopped eating fermented foods

I'm finally getting answers about weird health problems that have kept coming and going over the years for no reason I could ever explain: pounding heart, bloating, insomnia, heat intolerance, intolerance of high-fat meals, and getting winded easily even though I'm physically fit. These health problems all came roaring in at once this spring when I did a huge landscape project, pushing through it even while I had a cold. The yard looks fabulous, but I ended up with A three-week cold Post-viral syndrome for another few weeks An ongoing cough  Insomnia (tired but wired late at night) A puffy face, especially in the morning and after eating foods I’d previously tolerated (including SIBO yogurt) 6 pound weight gain TATT (tired all the time) Being easily winded Having a hard time cooling off Being sensitive to sunlight Grok (X’s AI feature) said this could be mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS). Mast cells are immune system cells that put out pathogen-fighting and other substances ...
Post a Comment
Read more