I posted this at marksdailyapple.com and wanted to say thanks as you are the person that started this. I moved from Houston to Denver a couple of months ago so if you ever want to go out for a lunch or something let me know.
Anyone interested in something like this or someone doing studies might find this interesting. At 27 I was diagnosed with Psoriatic Arthritis and was bad enough for me to take Enbrel. C-reactive protein was around 8 and I had pain in my upper back, knuckles on rt hand and wrist, rt knee, rt foot, and was starting to get at my shoulders as well. Enbrel did an excellent job and I was back to 100% in 3 days....I cried when the pain went away.
This worked great for over 3 years and then I started to read about what I was injecting into my body. You hear about cancer and infections etc as it is a blatant warning but in my case I really didn't care as from what was happening to me in regards to pain it was simple to justify the medication. Every box comes with a little square that unfolds into the size of a page of news paper and it has two sides with charts and the lettering is really small so you don't want to read it. I ended up getting sick and got a new shipment of my wonder drug and I opened the package unfolded the paper and started to read........it made me think about the lack of long term studies as in "I am 30....do I take this forever?" and looked into diet.
I went for gluten free as I started to look at gut permeability and would be relativity easy for me to do. Gave up pasta/pizza etc. Carb level was still high as plenty of brown rice, potatoes, and other gluten free starches so still had roasted gralic mashed potatoes. I kept it up till I got a cold and got an excuse to "see if this works" and the pain came back quickly so back to the drawing board.
Under a search for diets for arthritis paleo came up in a couple of places so I checked it out. Started with Primal Blueprint and after reading purchased both cook books and went all in. I took Enbrel the whole time but changing the way I ate and did the whole lift something heavy twice a day and getting in 3hrs of relaxing biking with a sprint here and there. In a very shot time I started to loose weight in a dramatic fashion and had blood work done every quarter and numbers were starting to improve. HDL started a 38 and went to 68, Triglycerides started at 302 wend down to 72, Blood pressure started a pre hypertension and medication to 118/72 with no medication. The weight started at 265 and went down to 210.
During this time I studied more about this stuff in books like Nourishing Traditions, Paleo Solution, Paleo Diet and lots of reading stuff from good websites. Learning more about the "why" part of eating opened my eyes and really solidified that this is now permanent to me. My workouts changed and I gained 20 lbs of muscle as I came into a lucky situation with a perfect training partner with just working out twice per week. He was amazed at how I could do this on a "low carb" diet and for 7 months didn't have to change diet. Month 8 I started to carb up with white rice as it is a safe carb for what I do this for in terms of auto immune issues.
Here is a way of eating and physical activity and to look at the transformation in terms of health I started to gain the trust in my research and try stopping Enbrel. I got an ear infection about 9 months ago and have not had to take one ever since. I have a little bit in my wrist but I can press an 88lbs kettlebell over head and do high rep dips and push-ups so nothing in terms of lifestyle or comfort. C-reactive protein is now 5.2 and triglicerides are now 50. Forgot to mention that I have not had any supplements the whole time, no fish oil, protein powder, vitamins, etc.
Just something to throw out there with my little study of myself for anyone that is interested.
