How much of the above food is premade ( @ a grocery store,restaurants,comes from a can/glass)?
Did you know that shredded cheese has starch? Did you know that many things have added starch, things you just would not think have starch?

Have you managed to test your foods for starch with iodine? Have you tried the fast as is recommended?

It's been almost 3 weeks...how are you doing?

Hello,
I don't know the actual effect of starch free food and doubt to continue for whole life. For my sake, I am suffering with AS for 31 years with flares one or two yearly for 3/4 months( Severe pain for 40/50 days)with frequent IBD and Uveitis.So taking NSAID continuously and frequently Methotrexate on and off which is really helpful for me. Apart from few joints fusion in lower back,I am working. I want to give away NSAID....
This AS is very torturing...Sometimes I feel so sad....

The mayo and pears are starch free. I stopped eating apple. First apples were testing okay, only to be black after 15 min. So stopped. The sausages I had before were stopped. I now have 100 % meat sausage. Whitener is starch free. I now mostly eat salads with starch free mayo. Also a bit of prawn. essentially don't eat desserts as they have starch/corn.

At three weeks into the diet, I honestly can say that there is no appreciable difference. Neck/back/ and fatigue are essentially the same as when i started the diet.

By now, i would have expected a slight improvement, if the klebsiella story is true, since by now, there numbers should have come down.

Are the casing of the sausage natural, what type of sausage?...most sausage have spices.

Have you stopped pepper and spices? if not what type of spices are you using?

Have you tried olive oil, grape seed oil or almond oil for your salad? what is in your salads?

have you looked for hidden starch? by reading labels...I just learned that when it states artifical and natural flavorings..hmm...it's MSG. Always something new to learn.

Are you eating enough drinking tons of water? from the list I see here..I don't think so.

Have you had your hormone levels checked....Guy or Gal it might be worth it.

Have you looked @ or bought Carol Sinclair's book? I only ask as it may keep you from getting bored.

What exactly is your pain level again? are you keeping a pain diary. if not may I suggest for food ingested and pain level: http://fatsecret.com/

it's easy and for phone or computer

Tons of ??

One aspect to successful treatment through diet is "healing your gut". I don't know the relative importance to influencing the intestinal flora, but I do know it is very important. I suspect this factor plays a strong role in making different people's optimal "NSD" so varied.

For a personal example, take eggs. Eggs are a common suggestion for NSD, because they have essentially no starch. When I ate 2 or 3 eggs per day for 5 days in a row, I felt *bad*. Never had noticed problems before with the occasional boiled egg sandwich or deviled eggs, but after eating multiple every day... the effect built up, leading to cramping and unhappy digestion in general, which led to increased AS inflammation. It more than cancelled whatever improvement I should have gotten from going from low-starch to NSD. Eventually after getting frustrated with my progress, I ended up getting a food intolerance test, and found that egg whites showed up as a "low" reaction. So did some other things that were allowed by NSD guidelines, and a few were classified as "medium" reactions.

The lesson is that one can't afford to eat something that irritates your digestion as a staple food. I can get away with a bit of egg white in an almond cookie without ruining myself, but someone who is highly intolerant to egg whites can not even get away with that without causing digestive inflammation (I am married to such a person). Other foods I've given up on as being irritants (at least for the time being) include garlic and onions.

I just thought of one other thing that could help. For me, diet has been better at preventing inflammation than removing existing inflammation. A day of full water-fasting works a bit better at dampening existing inflammation. I've never done longer fasts like some here, because I'm already too skinny.

Testing for allergies is also something I did. It may be helpful to test. If looking for gluten issue, remember you have to be ingesting it and you may still test negative if you are only sensitive. If all tests well consider your self lucky....... This little guy is allergic to almost all foods except some baby food.

http://www.andersoncooper.com/2012/03/22/a-boy-allergic-to-food/

Today, I have started a course of antibiotic, co amoxiclav (only because I have a weeks supply of it and it is anti kleb). I want to see if it , in combination with a low starch diet, can work.
Today, I also had a bout of bad diarrhoea. I have IBS diarhea, but this diet has made it somewhat worse. I suspect it is because of the increased amount of fruits that I am eating. I do not ascribe the diarhea to the antibiotics, since i have only taken one tablet yet, whereas antibiotic related diarhea will need more doses than that.

Hiya,

My husband Jon also tried antibiotics for about 3 months. He was trying to speed up his progress on the NSD. He followed the roadback.org protocol which is low dose pulsed antibiotics in the tetracycline family. You may like to read a little bit about it here if you haven't already seen this:
Rheumatic.org
rheumatic.org FAQ
Or visit the roadback site - they have a message board I think.

Jon took 100mg doxycyline 3 times a week for 3 months and it really helped him heaps. The reason for the low dose and pulsing ie not taking every day is to reduce the likelihood of developing resistance to the antibiotics.

It would have been interesting to see how much more progress Jon had on the doxy but he had to come off it as it started causing him severe stomach pains and also he developed a bad candida infection which then took 9 months to get rid of! So please be cautious when taking antibiotics as they aren't without risks. I would suggest cutting out white sugar while taking them and perhaps taking a good quality no starch probiotic too in the hopes of keeping candida at bay. As you are probably aware antibiotics kill off more than just the bad guys and when space is left it can make room for candida to flourish. This can be quite damaging to the gut.

You may well be right about the fruit messing with your gut. There was another member - Inflammator I think - who also had a bad reaction to fruit. I think he found green grapes to be the culprit.

All the best

Thank you Kiwi.

I intend to take it only for a week, I have not got any more tablets anyway.

I am surprised that they recommend pulse therapy. From what i know of antibiotics, one needs to use a continuous dose to kill the bugs, because half killing them can easily result in resistance. i.e. the surviving bugs teach the others how to survive the antibiotic ( e.g by transferring genetic information). That is why most docs would recommend that one finishes the course of antibiotcs, even if one feels well ...

Thank you for your info. I may have to cut down of the grapes.