Another copy of a recent post I have commented to at forum.lowcarber.org about Atkins

Post from KristyRusi,

So 2 days after my induction “day 16” i’d lost an additional 1lb bringing my total to a 13pounds lost. Then on “day 17” i gained the pound back, and now today, “day 18” i’ve lost the same pound again. But the weird thing is that today i’ve been experiencing the symptoms i had during “day 5-9” of induction. Feeling foggy headed, my ears feel like they won’t pop and ache, my head is killing me and i’m extremely tired and have zero energy. I have pretty much changed NOTHING about my diet from induction to now, other than starting to add a bit more fat to each meal. For example i make the same omelet i made in induction only now i will add 2 tbsps of butter instead of 1 because i’ve heard it helps you stay in ketosis to have the extra fat. Does this mean that perhaps i had gotten OUT of ketosis and now i’m going back into it or is this just a deeper level of ketosis or what’s going on… i thought after that miserable induction Flu those days were in the past? It’s pretty cripling to feel like this and i get NOTHING done.. i’ve started having to drink broth again for sodium to ease the headache, but it’s as if i’m ammune. I feel like that kid in that viral video of him waking up after the dentist… “isss…. thiiisss….reall…liffee?” head all bobbling as well lol. Also my neck has the worst pain and cramping even worse than before in it i can’t turn it left or right without sharp bad pain. I will say i’ve been suffering from insomnia for nearly 5 days now, only sleeping maybe 4-5 hours in a 24 hour period. I’m just “not sleep” i had very high energy and good spirits and felt very clear headed until yesterday, and this afternoon after finally falling a sleep i woke up feeling like garbage. What’s going on?… Thanks for all the advice in advance.

My comment:

Hi KristyRusi,

The key to what’s going on here and both what you’re experiencing and what other people experience with what they seem to call “Atkins flu” is enzymes. As you may be aware, our body produces enzymes in order to help break down the food that we eat into something that the body can use more easily. Enzymes are produced by the pancreas and basically come into salts. Digestive enzymes which do exactly what their name suggests; they help us break down food so that it can be absorbed and transported and then utilized by the cells in our body. It also produces metabolic enzymes. These are used within the cells of our body where they help the cells to reproduce and replenish itself. But the pancreas isn’t the only source of enzymes. Many of the foods that we can eat contain with them exactly the enzymes our body needs to break them down. However, processing those foods in any way destroys the enzymes. And it’s true to say that the greater amount of processing the food goes through, the less amount of enzymes will end up in what we eat. So therefore, food that is eaten raw will come with all the enzymes we need to break it down.

That’s just a bit of a background. What’s it got to do with Atkins flu and the way your feeling is simply like this: Our Western diet which consists of highly processed food still needs to be broken down. The only thing that can produce the enzymes to break it down is the pancreas. If the pancreas is having to work overtime in order to produce digestive enzymes, its capacity to produce metabolic enzymes will be greatly reduced. That means that there is lot of undigested food passing through our digestive system. This then becomes a breeding ground for all sorts of harmful bacteria, viruses and many other things that will slowly build up within our system causing all sorts of different health problems.

Now when we start on a low carb diet, the fact that we cut out so many complex carbohydrates, sugars and at the same time reduce the amount of food that we eat, has both benefits and short term consequences. The first of those benefits is that our need to produce digestive enzymes greatly reduces simply because we’ve cut out or cut down carbohydrates which require a lot of, to use the term, “enzymic energy” to be dealt with. At the same time, those digestive enzymes that are produced and work more efficiently and more effectively on the foods that we do eat which will result in less undigested food passing through our intestines creating a more healthy environment within them and at the same time getting rid of unhealthy bacteria and so on. This therefore allows the pancreas to produce more metabolic enzymes which then go to work in the rest of our body and start clearing up all of the garbage, viruses, bacteria and other harmful substances that are built up over the years.

It’s this elimination process or the detoxifying that causes us to have, what people describe as “flu-like symptoms”. This can happen a number of times through the first part of a low carb journey. How many times and how severe the symptoms will depend on a large number of factors. Principally, these will be things like the type of foods that we previously poisoned our bodies with, whether we were smokers or not, whether we had long-term courses of antibiotics, whether we have been on medications as in some cases there can be quite a lot of, what one might call, “residue”. Even something as mundane as what type of job we have done and what poisons and other chemicals we might have absorbed during the course of doing it.

So that’s the why.  Can anything be done about it? Well yes, much! As the detoxifying process is already going on in our body, it will be a shame to cotale that in any way as we would need to go through the same thing again later on. So the best thing to do is to aid that detoxification. Firstly by drinking more; secondly by moving more which will have the advantage of moving toxins out through the lymphatic system more quickly and also causing us to sweat a bit more profusely again getting rid of toxins. Another thing we can do is actually increasing the amount of enzymes that we actually eat either though increasing the amount of raw, living foods that we eat, chewing our foods thoroughly but avoid using chewing gum and strangely enough, by eating less as up to 75 to 80% of our energy input is used to digest food.

While this part of a low carb journey may not be the most comfortable thing to go through, you can look upon it as a good thing simply because you’re now getting rid of  all the garbage that has built up in your body throughout the years of eating low quality food.

Hope that helps,

Mark