Getting Started
So you have a health issue and you want to mitigate it using diet and lifestyle. Where do you start?
I recommend starting a Food and Symptom Journal to try to start understanding your baseline "normal." In theory, you should do that first and establish a baseline "normal" for YOU before you mess with stuff. In practice, no one ever seems to start a journal until after they start trying stuff because they are hurting and desperate and doctors can't seem to fix it.
It's best to start with supplements, not dietary changes per se, because it is the only way to add a nutrient in isolation. Dietary changes always involve multiple factors and it's harder to track and figure out what caused X if you don't already have some experience with adding nutrients in isolation.
There are exceptions. For example, in some cases the thing you most need to do is remove something from your diet rather than add something nutritionally. Like maybe you are allergic to something and didn't realize it.
If you have a reason to think you have a B vitamin deficiency, that's a really good place to start. Some bullet points pulled from B vitamins:
Treating health issues nutritionally doesn't work like treating it with medication. People who are used to turning to medication will need to actively work at resisting the temptation to treat supplements or dietary changes like prescription or OTC drugs.
The very first issue you are likely to run into is the desire to find some recommended dosage for your supplement and your assumption that it will always stay the same. This is not true and trying to treat supplements like "One and done -- THIS is the right dose for me!" will tend to get you in trouble, especially if you have had a longstanding deficiency and so are starting at a fairly high dose.
From an article written by a physician, here is an excerpt about a patient who suddenly began having serious and mysterious health issues that were traced to excessive supplement use:
So you ask around or something and maybe figure out you need more. And now you think THIS is the right dose and then you get into trouble when it becomes too much.
What works best is reading up on any supplement you are taking to try to generally improve your knowledge of what it impacts and what a deficiency looks like and taking it to treat symptomatically. In other words, take more when your body tells you that you need more.
Usually, the pattern that emerges is this: People who are deficient need a high loading dose at first and then need to ramp it down to a maintenance dose. You will never stop needing that specific nutrient entirely but you may stop needing a supplement as you get healthier and learn to eat in a way that works for your body.
As best I understand, this pattern works because if you have a serious and long-standing deficiency, you are shorting your body in two areas:
It takes time to rebuild damaged tissues. For example, it takes two days to manufacture new blood cells.
So at first your body can use a lot of extra. Then as things get rebuilt and the missing bits and pieces in your body get replaced or repaired, you stop needing so much.
If you have been seriously deficient for a long time and/or if you have some genetic quirk or other issue interfering with things, it can take months or years to fully repair everything. So you may need a high dose for more than just a few days. Or you may not.
You may need a high dose for a few days followed by a more reasonable maintenance dose for many months or even years while your body sorts everything out.
Repairing longstanding issues will not be quick. It takes time.
But if you are doing the right things, you should see gains pretty much immediately.
So initially when things go wrong with your supplement protocol, a good guess is you probably didn't get enough and you need more. Later, after you have become convinced that "more is always better," you will learn you are wrong and probably need to actually lower the dose to resolve unexpected side effects suddenly cropping up.
Keep journaling. Keep reading up on solid research articles into how various nutrients impact the body. If available, keep talking with knowledgeable people. You will eventually sort out how to adjust the dose as needed.
Repair work typically involves multiple nutrients and taking the right things together can give you much more bang for the buck, but you first need to understand what individual nutrients do in isolation. So try one new thing. Give it a week or two to see how you react to that. Then add new things later, ideally one at a time.
I recommend starting a Food and Symptom Journal to try to start understanding your baseline "normal." In theory, you should do that first and establish a baseline "normal" for YOU before you mess with stuff. In practice, no one ever seems to start a journal until after they start trying stuff because they are hurting and desperate and doctors can't seem to fix it.
It's best to start with supplements, not dietary changes per se, because it is the only way to add a nutrient in isolation. Dietary changes always involve multiple factors and it's harder to track and figure out what caused X if you don't already have some experience with adding nutrients in isolation.
There are exceptions. For example, in some cases the thing you most need to do is remove something from your diet rather than add something nutritionally. Like maybe you are allergic to something and didn't realize it.
If you have a reason to think you have a B vitamin deficiency, that's a really good place to start. Some bullet points pulled from B vitamins:
- B vitamins are water soluble, so they do not build up in your system. This means you cannot poison yourself with them the way you can with fat-soluble vitamins or with minerals.
- That doesn't mean there will be no negative side effects, but compared to other supplements, these are easy and safe to work with as an early thing to learn from and make mistakes on.
- I am also not aware of any other provisos commonly required for other supplements, such as bioavailability problems, restrictions on what you can take with them or recommendations for what you should take with them to properly absorb them.
Treating health issues nutritionally doesn't work like treating it with medication. People who are used to turning to medication will need to actively work at resisting the temptation to treat supplements or dietary changes like prescription or OTC drugs.
The very first issue you are likely to run into is the desire to find some recommended dosage for your supplement and your assumption that it will always stay the same. This is not true and trying to treat supplements like "One and done -- THIS is the right dose for me!" will tend to get you in trouble, especially if you have had a longstanding deficiency and so are starting at a fairly high dose.
From an article written by a physician, here is an excerpt about a patient who suddenly began having serious and mysterious health issues that were traced to excessive supplement use:
Eventually we worked out what happened with Shannon: In 2013 ... her physician started her on over-the-counter Vitamin D supplementation at 5000 international units (IUs) daily. Five years later, she was still on this dose... (HN discussion)So if "one and done" doesn't work, what does? Well, typically, what happens is you start with a moderate dose and maybe you even think it's a high dose but it's not enough.
So you ask around or something and maybe figure out you need more. And now you think THIS is the right dose and then you get into trouble when it becomes too much.
What works best is reading up on any supplement you are taking to try to generally improve your knowledge of what it impacts and what a deficiency looks like and taking it to treat symptomatically. In other words, take more when your body tells you that you need more.
Usually, the pattern that emerges is this: People who are deficient need a high loading dose at first and then need to ramp it down to a maintenance dose. You will never stop needing that specific nutrient entirely but you may stop needing a supplement as you get healthier and learn to eat in a way that works for your body.
As best I understand, this pattern works because if you have a serious and long-standing deficiency, you are shorting your body in two areas:
- Important inputs for specific bodily processes.
- Important building blocks.
It takes time to rebuild damaged tissues. For example, it takes two days to manufacture new blood cells.
So at first your body can use a lot of extra. Then as things get rebuilt and the missing bits and pieces in your body get replaced or repaired, you stop needing so much.
If you have been seriously deficient for a long time and/or if you have some genetic quirk or other issue interfering with things, it can take months or years to fully repair everything. So you may need a high dose for more than just a few days. Or you may not.
You may need a high dose for a few days followed by a more reasonable maintenance dose for many months or even years while your body sorts everything out.
Repairing longstanding issues will not be quick. It takes time.
But if you are doing the right things, you should see gains pretty much immediately.
So initially when things go wrong with your supplement protocol, a good guess is you probably didn't get enough and you need more. Later, after you have become convinced that "more is always better," you will learn you are wrong and probably need to actually lower the dose to resolve unexpected side effects suddenly cropping up.
Keep journaling. Keep reading up on solid research articles into how various nutrients impact the body. If available, keep talking with knowledgeable people. You will eventually sort out how to adjust the dose as needed.
Repair work typically involves multiple nutrients and taking the right things together can give you much more bang for the buck, but you first need to understand what individual nutrients do in isolation. So try one new thing. Give it a week or two to see how you react to that. Then add new things later, ideally one at a time.
