Yeast is a common side effect of die off
At the microscopic level, the body is a complex ecosystem. So whenever infection gets killed -- especially long-standing infection -- there's some fallout from that as the internal ecosystem gets rejiggered.
There was a story I read years ago about the government aggressively poisoning mosquitoes on some island with a bad mosquito problem and this was followed by a wave of consequences where the mosquitoes died and then things that ate mosquitoes died and then things that ate those things died and so on.
Or kind of like the biblical plagues. I once saw a TV show that suggested plausible natural explanations for the series of biblical plagues and suggested some would have been consequences of the one that came before it.
So as one thing gets killed in the internal ecosystem of the human body, other things will feed on the detritus and there will be a few iterations of issues before it all gets fully resolved. This is true even if you know exactly what you are doing and do everything right, so although it's gotten easier over time as I've learned more, I still have to go through certain steps as I resolve issues because that's just how that works.
Yeast overgrowth is one of the more common side effects because yeast feeds on detritus, so it's a normal part of the healing process to get too yeasty.
Additionally, tissue damage and infection pretty much go hand-in-hand. So as old issues get repaired, it's common for there to be yeast overgrowth because yeast feeds on detritus and there will typically be microbial die off as part of the process, even if killing infection is not a primary goal.
This can be dealt with in basically three ways:
Avoiding certain foods: Yeasty foods include yeast-leavened bread but also include things like cheese and pickles. I don't eat tons of bread that is yeast leavened. Instead, I favor bread that is not yeast-leavened, like some flat breads, biscuits and English muffins.
I also read labels to determine what contains sugar. Lots of foods have sugar added, including things many people would not think of as a "sweet" food, such as many brands of crackers. White carbs will generally be worse than whole wheat, brown rice and the like.
Killing yeast: There are medications that kill yeast and there are some foods that help kill yeast, like salt and coconut oil. Coconut oil can be used topically to help kill a vaginal yeast infection and it will help soothe the discomfort from it. However, coconut oil gets absorbed through the skin so it is another way of supplementing coconut oil.
This can be a good thing if I am having trouble eating but has also at times meant that I overdid it because I took it orally and then also used it topically, like to treat a vaginal yeast infection. I began having headaches and other issues because of it and had to discontinue oral use when I was using it topically on a regular basis.
Some signs that someone is too yeasty:
I used to also get bad gum issues when I was too yeasty but it's been a long time since that happened. I can remember eating a sandwich or something and my gum problems flaring up really, really badly and this caused me to realize "It's yeast" and then I made an effort to avoid dietary yeast and take stuff to kill yeast.
Yeast is not all bad. It is one of the ways the body gets zinc, an essential nutrient. Some articles have suggested that too little dietary yeast may be a root cause of zinc deficiency, so I don't treat yeast as some kind of evil. The problem is when there is too much of it growing in my system.
Because yeast is fungal, it can mess with brain function in various ways beyond just making a person OCD. So being a tad "crazy" or not thinking right can be one indication I need to treat for yeast.
If it isn't too bad, I follow the above listed practices: avoid excess sugar, avoid yeasty foods and add more salt and spices to my diet. Here are some of things that I use to kill yeast:
I ate organic yogurt at least once a day and often twice a day. I usually started the day with yogurt as my main course for breakfast and often had a second yogurt following lunch.
Organic yogurt has more variety of probiotics than other yogurts typically have. Greek yogurt is another thing I have become fond of in recent years. IIRC, it is higher in fat and protein and lower in sugar than other yogurts.
I avoided yeast-leavened bread, with the exception of the occasional toasted egg bagel. I limited carbs generally, so I wasn't eating a lot of unleavened bread either just because bread is carbs.
Most days, my lunch consisted of a very plain raw salad -- mostly lettuce and a few other veggies, no dressing -- and grilled chicken (no breading). Dinner was often grilled steak (no breading) and grilled veggies, like yams and onions.
At the time, the salad with grilled chicken lunch was purchased from some eatery or other. I don't recall which one. And the grilled steak and grilled veggies was made at home on a George Foreman grill.
Snacks were challenging because I am normally a carb fiend, so limiting carbs was really cramping my style in that regard. I think I snacked a lot on things like dry roasted nuts and seeds.
Dry roasted because a LOT of American brands use peanut oil and I try to avoid peanut oil, so I favor dry roasted options when available. At the time, I may have had a large supply of pumpkin seeds that I roasted on a cookie sheet in my oven myself and stored in a glass bowl with a snap-on lid.
(Pumpkin seeds are good for helping you sleep at night, so I tended to eat them as my late night snack. IIRC, like milk, they are a good supply of tryptophan.)
I limited white potatoes which are normally a staple of my diet. Like bread, it's too much carbs if you really have an intractable problem and are trying to root it out.
This meant no pizza, many types of cheese were off limits, yeast-leavened bread was a big no-no and most breads generally were avoided because they are high carb. I wanted to avoid sweets and other sugary foods, including fruit juice.
I found drinks to be a bit of a challenge. I was able to have unsweetened tea, black coffee, plain water and diet soda. No milk or fruit juice or assorted other sweet drinks.
If I really needed vitamin C for some reason, a fresh orange was a better choice than a glass of orange juice but I mostly avoided fruit. Fruits tend to be fairly sweet.
My diet was fairly restricted for three to four months after, I think, twenty-two months of withdrawal from something like nine or ten prescription drugs of various sorts. My brain was fried, my gut was a mess and my body just didn't feel right and I was too yeasty.
I can't really say how I came up with this idea. I don't recall if I read it somewhere or just decided "This is what I am going to do!" and I don't know how I came up with the length of time in question. It's just a thing I did at the time and it helped enormously to get my body more functional after a serious and lengthy health crisis involving a lot of medication.
I have never tolerated seafood well though I used to eat catfish (a riverine species) semi-regularly and I occasionally ate shrimp. Then I spent a year at death's door and had two contrast-dye CAT scans, a ton of medication and an allergic reaction to chemicals in my first wet lab for a college chemistry class I had to drop because of it.
During that year, I kept throwing up after eating popcorn shrimp from, I think, Popeye's but I was so sick that it took me a while to conclude that I was throwing up because of the shrimp. I was just generally sick and miserable that whole year and I didn't yet have a clear mental model of "I do x and it triggers y." I was just very sick.
Some weeks after the incident where the chemistry class wet lab landed me in the ER, I had dinner at a nice restaurant with my husband and he ordered shrimp as part of his meal. I ate a single shrimp off of his plate and ended up back in the ER and spent a week bedridden at Christmastime and that's the last time I ever ate shrimp.
So when I did my yeast cleanse diet, I did not eat any seafood because I could not eat seafood. I'm less severely allergic these days, but at that time I was extremely allergic -- I once broke out in hives because I walked through the kitchen where someone was cooking shrimp -- and I simply couldn't eat any seafood at all.
I also don't tolerate eggs well. I can eat them but can't eat them too often, but eggs are fine with regards to being a high protein, high fat food that fits in well with a yeast cleanse diet and I did eat them sometimes, just not frequently because I have to limit eggs.
I typically had yogurt for breakfast and sometimes bacon and eggs to go with it if I was especially hungry and able to stomach a big meal early. I often can't. I've never been a big breakfast eater because I have chronic gut issues.
Maybe something like once or twice a week, I indulged myself and had a toasted egg bagel with butter. No jam, jelly or other sweet toppings. Real butter is fine. It's mostly fat.
As stated above, most days I ate yogurt for breakfast, a dry salad with grilled chicken for lunch, yogurt as a mid-afternoon snack, grilled steak and grilled veggies for dinner and dry roasted seeds and nuts for snacks.
I ate that way because I was not only trying to avoid dietary yeast, sugar and carbs, I also was accommodating assorted other food intolerances.
In theory, it's fairly simple: No yeasty foods, no or very low sugar, low carb. In practice, it's a bit more complicated because I had to find foods I liked, could eat regularly, etc that fit within that set of restrictions.
There was a story I read years ago about the government aggressively poisoning mosquitoes on some island with a bad mosquito problem and this was followed by a wave of consequences where the mosquitoes died and then things that ate mosquitoes died and then things that ate those things died and so on.
Or kind of like the biblical plagues. I once saw a TV show that suggested plausible natural explanations for the series of biblical plagues and suggested some would have been consequences of the one that came before it.
So as one thing gets killed in the internal ecosystem of the human body, other things will feed on the detritus and there will be a few iterations of issues before it all gets fully resolved. This is true even if you know exactly what you are doing and do everything right, so although it's gotten easier over time as I've learned more, I still have to go through certain steps as I resolve issues because that's just how that works.
Yeast overgrowth is one of the more common side effects because yeast feeds on detritus, so it's a normal part of the healing process to get too yeasty.
Additionally, tissue damage and infection pretty much go hand-in-hand. So as old issues get repaired, it's common for there to be yeast overgrowth because yeast feeds on detritus and there will typically be microbial die off as part of the process, even if killing infection is not a primary goal.
This can be dealt with in basically three ways:
- Slow down the repair process.
- Avoid or limit yeasty foods, sugary foods and carbs.
- Take things that kill yeast.
Avoiding certain foods: Yeasty foods include yeast-leavened bread but also include things like cheese and pickles. I don't eat tons of bread that is yeast leavened. Instead, I favor bread that is not yeast-leavened, like some flat breads, biscuits and English muffins.
I also read labels to determine what contains sugar. Lots of foods have sugar added, including things many people would not think of as a "sweet" food, such as many brands of crackers. White carbs will generally be worse than whole wheat, brown rice and the like.
Killing yeast: There are medications that kill yeast and there are some foods that help kill yeast, like salt and coconut oil. Coconut oil can be used topically to help kill a vaginal yeast infection and it will help soothe the discomfort from it. However, coconut oil gets absorbed through the skin so it is another way of supplementing coconut oil.
This can be a good thing if I am having trouble eating but has also at times meant that I overdid it because I took it orally and then also used it topically, like to treat a vaginal yeast infection. I began having headaches and other issues because of it and had to discontinue oral use when I was using it topically on a regular basis.
Some signs that someone is too yeasty:
- They may SMELL like yeast. (This may be easier for someone else to notice.)
- Vaginal yeast infection.
- Obsessive thoughts.
I used to also get bad gum issues when I was too yeasty but it's been a long time since that happened. I can remember eating a sandwich or something and my gum problems flaring up really, really badly and this caused me to realize "It's yeast" and then I made an effort to avoid dietary yeast and take stuff to kill yeast.
Yeast is not all bad. It is one of the ways the body gets zinc, an essential nutrient. Some articles have suggested that too little dietary yeast may be a root cause of zinc deficiency, so I don't treat yeast as some kind of evil. The problem is when there is too much of it growing in my system.
Because yeast is fungal, it can mess with brain function in various ways beyond just making a person OCD. So being a tad "crazy" or not thinking right can be one indication I need to treat for yeast.
If it isn't too bad, I follow the above listed practices: avoid excess sugar, avoid yeasty foods and add more salt and spices to my diet. Here are some of things that I use to kill yeast:
- Salt -- get more good quality salt in your diet.
- Diet tonic water.
- Hot peppers.
- Coconut oil.
- Other spicy things, like onions and garlic.
I ate organic yogurt at least once a day and often twice a day. I usually started the day with yogurt as my main course for breakfast and often had a second yogurt following lunch.
Organic yogurt has more variety of probiotics than other yogurts typically have. Greek yogurt is another thing I have become fond of in recent years. IIRC, it is higher in fat and protein and lower in sugar than other yogurts.
I avoided yeast-leavened bread, with the exception of the occasional toasted egg bagel. I limited carbs generally, so I wasn't eating a lot of unleavened bread either just because bread is carbs.
Most days, my lunch consisted of a very plain raw salad -- mostly lettuce and a few other veggies, no dressing -- and grilled chicken (no breading). Dinner was often grilled steak (no breading) and grilled veggies, like yams and onions.
At the time, the salad with grilled chicken lunch was purchased from some eatery or other. I don't recall which one. And the grilled steak and grilled veggies was made at home on a George Foreman grill.
Snacks were challenging because I am normally a carb fiend, so limiting carbs was really cramping my style in that regard. I think I snacked a lot on things like dry roasted nuts and seeds.
Dry roasted because a LOT of American brands use peanut oil and I try to avoid peanut oil, so I favor dry roasted options when available. At the time, I may have had a large supply of pumpkin seeds that I roasted on a cookie sheet in my oven myself and stored in a glass bowl with a snap-on lid.
(Pumpkin seeds are good for helping you sleep at night, so I tended to eat them as my late night snack. IIRC, like milk, they are a good supply of tryptophan.)
I limited white potatoes which are normally a staple of my diet. Like bread, it's too much carbs if you really have an intractable problem and are trying to root it out.
Yeast Cleanse Diet
Basically, my goal was to avoid dietary yeast/fungus, sugar and carbs as much as possible. So I ate protein, healthy fats that I tolerated well and low-carb vegetables.This meant no pizza, many types of cheese were off limits, yeast-leavened bread was a big no-no and most breads generally were avoided because they are high carb. I wanted to avoid sweets and other sugary foods, including fruit juice.
I found drinks to be a bit of a challenge. I was able to have unsweetened tea, black coffee, plain water and diet soda. No milk or fruit juice or assorted other sweet drinks.
If I really needed vitamin C for some reason, a fresh orange was a better choice than a glass of orange juice but I mostly avoided fruit. Fruits tend to be fairly sweet.
My diet was fairly restricted for three to four months after, I think, twenty-two months of withdrawal from something like nine or ten prescription drugs of various sorts. My brain was fried, my gut was a mess and my body just didn't feel right and I was too yeasty.
I can't really say how I came up with this idea. I don't recall if I read it somewhere or just decided "This is what I am going to do!" and I don't know how I came up with the length of time in question. It's just a thing I did at the time and it helped enormously to get my body more functional after a serious and lengthy health crisis involving a lot of medication.
I have never tolerated seafood well though I used to eat catfish (a riverine species) semi-regularly and I occasionally ate shrimp. Then I spent a year at death's door and had two contrast-dye CAT scans, a ton of medication and an allergic reaction to chemicals in my first wet lab for a college chemistry class I had to drop because of it.
During that year, I kept throwing up after eating popcorn shrimp from, I think, Popeye's but I was so sick that it took me a while to conclude that I was throwing up because of the shrimp. I was just generally sick and miserable that whole year and I didn't yet have a clear mental model of "I do x and it triggers y." I was just very sick.
Some weeks after the incident where the chemistry class wet lab landed me in the ER, I had dinner at a nice restaurant with my husband and he ordered shrimp as part of his meal. I ate a single shrimp off of his plate and ended up back in the ER and spent a week bedridden at Christmastime and that's the last time I ever ate shrimp.
So when I did my yeast cleanse diet, I did not eat any seafood because I could not eat seafood. I'm less severely allergic these days, but at that time I was extremely allergic -- I once broke out in hives because I walked through the kitchen where someone was cooking shrimp -- and I simply couldn't eat any seafood at all.
I also don't tolerate eggs well. I can eat them but can't eat them too often, but eggs are fine with regards to being a high protein, high fat food that fits in well with a yeast cleanse diet and I did eat them sometimes, just not frequently because I have to limit eggs.
I typically had yogurt for breakfast and sometimes bacon and eggs to go with it if I was especially hungry and able to stomach a big meal early. I often can't. I've never been a big breakfast eater because I have chronic gut issues.
Maybe something like once or twice a week, I indulged myself and had a toasted egg bagel with butter. No jam, jelly or other sweet toppings. Real butter is fine. It's mostly fat.
As stated above, most days I ate yogurt for breakfast, a dry salad with grilled chicken for lunch, yogurt as a mid-afternoon snack, grilled steak and grilled veggies for dinner and dry roasted seeds and nuts for snacks.
I ate that way because I was not only trying to avoid dietary yeast, sugar and carbs, I also was accommodating assorted other food intolerances.
In theory, it's fairly simple: No yeasty foods, no or very low sugar, low carb. In practice, it's a bit more complicated because I had to find foods I liked, could eat regularly, etc that fit within that set of restrictions.
