What food/drink works best for me...

Over the course of my Lyme disease recovery journey I've found that what I eat and drink has the biggest impact on how I feel. When I eat well I have enough energy, I sleep well and have practically no pain.

When I eat poorly for a few days my energy levels decrease significantly, the quality of my sleep declines and pain, such as nerve pain in my feet, returns.

Because, at least for me, there is a strong correlation between what I eat and how I feel, I'm very motivated to eat well every day.

What I want to do in this post is run through the general guidelines that work the best for me. In my next post I will run through the specifics about what I eat in a typical day.

Note that I'm still learning a lot about nutrition and my diet is continually evolving. I'm tending towards much more of a plant based vegan type diet but currently I'm still having some meat and dairy products.

In general I stick to the following eating guidelines:

I eat (drink) lots of:


- Vegetables
- Berries (personally I eat a lot of blueberry's)
- Legumes (lentils, black beans, etc)
- (Water)... loads of it. I found often when I have food cravings it's really a sign that I'm thirsty and the cravings will go away after a large drink of water.

I eat a fair bit of:



- Lean meat (especially fish and chicken)
- Nuts (especially almonds)
- Brown rice
- Fruit
- Cottage cheese
- (Coffee) - not that I'm advising this mind!
- (Diet coke) - I definitely don't advise this and am in the process of giving up!

I eat (drink) occasionally:



- Cereal
- Bread
- Pasta
- (Wine and other alcoholic drinks)
- (Milk)

I try and avoid:


- White bread
- White rice
- Processed foods
- Chocolate
- Ice cream
- Other foods high in fat and sugar (e.g., donuts, etc)
- (Full Sugar soft drinks)

For me, giving up sugary/fat foods such as chocolate bars was hard. But it was only hard for a few days. After that the cravings wore off and now I don't even want to eat that food anymore.

Going green...

More than anything else food has had the biggest impact on my recovery from Lyme disease.

Minimising sugars and processed foods and maximising vegetables had the biggest positive impact on maximising my energy and minimising my pain. About a year ago, during a 2 week holiday, I took a break from eating clean and ate whatever I wanted. Which back then was a pile of sugar or fat laden yummy food and lots of beer and wine. What really struck me was that after a week or two of this my energy levels dropped right down and the nerve pain in my feet returned.

For me this was enough motivation to get 'back on the food wagon' so to speak, for good.

Since then I've experimented a bit but generally stuck to the basics: oats for breakfast, beans, brocoli, lentils and chicken for lunch, fruit or vegetables for snacks, and usually a delicious meal cooked by my wife for dinner. Although I generally ate fairly clean I wasn't 100% monk like in my dedication. I enjoyed a glass or two of wine and/or whiskey most evenings and sometimes had the occasional pizza, pasta dish, sneaky ice-cream etc.

With this diet I managed to slowly bring my weight down from 103kg to around 95kg at which point it seemed that the scales stuck and I reached a glass floor I couldn't break down through.

That was the case for most of 2012. In early Jan 2013 I made a decision to really eat clean and try and shed some serious weight (I'll talk about that more in another post). Long story short, in the 6 weeks since then I've slimmed down from 95kg (210lbs) to 87kg (192lbs). One aspect of my diet which has a huge effect on my energy and mood levels has been adopting more of a plant based diet. I first got onto this idea after reading 'Finding Ultra' by Rich Roll (photo below) and listening to some of his pod-casts (which I highly recommend)



A week ago I notched it up a level and headed down to the local health food shop and bought up the ingredients I needed for some healthy bars, green smoothies and fruit smoothies. Sunday was my first full day on this regime. That night I slept super soundly and the next morning I woke up with an incredible amount of energy. That whole day I had energy to burn. Normally I get to about 2:00pm and need a diet coke or two to keep me going to home time. But on that day I didn't think once about needing a diet coke. It was brilliant.

I've now been a week on the diet and am still feeling great. One very positive benefit is that I feel a lot more chilled out, a lot more relaxed about things. Last weekend in my mad plant based diet reading frenzy I began reading the book 'Thrive' by plant based diet athlete Brendan Brazier (photo below). One concept he talks about is food stress. He talks about the stress the body has to go through to get the nutrients out of processed food and how having a plant based whole food diet can really minimize this stress.



My results so far have really validated this idea. I also feel way fitter and am getting much more cut.

I'm looking forward to starting some recumbent and tower running races this year and seeing how I do.....

If you have any questions about starting with a plant based diet I'm happy to help out if I can.