Is there a Diet that works for Chronic Pain?
If you are stuck in a downward spiral of helplessness, fear and catastrophic thinking, there is very little that diet can do for you with regard to chronic pain.
I’m a strong believer in the fact that a healthy diet can keep our immune system healthy and helps it fight off viruses and infections. But ask me whether or not a particular diet can help cure chronic pain and I’ll give you one straight answer - and that is, most probably not.
Let’s look at this logically. There are millions of people who live off a junk-food diet. A lot of them do not suffer from chronic pain, although, admittedly, they are at risk of developing heart disease and other complications.
Then there are these thousands of people attempting to reduce severe chronic pain through diet, and results don’t seem to be very promising.
A typical breakfast of mine. Helps keep me full till lunchtime and get over my morning crankiness…
Tweaks to my diet was one of the things I tried when I was in pain. I cut out coffee, most sugars and ate lots more fruit and vegetables. Nothing wrong with that. But it wasn’t until I discovered the TMS approach that I started seeing results, and eventually, became 100% pain-free (I had been suffering from chronic shoulder pain, sciatica, leg pain and nerve pain!)
The anti-inflammatory diet and chronic pain
Some people try an anti-inflammatory diet as a way to decrease inflammation from the body, and hence reduce pain. Typically, they cut gluten, acidic food, and sometimes even meat.
And yet they forget about another source of inflammation that is far more powerful than the food you put into your body - chronic stress, anxiety and general unhappiness. You can feed your body with all the good nutrients that you need, but if there is constant emotional turmoil, then this will still create inflammation and tension in the body, which results in chronic pain.
Thankfully, I realised this before I turned vegetarian (no offence meant to vegetarians, but I cannot help being a meat lover!). When I started to identify those emotions that were keeping me stuck in pain, I began to see results. When I started to react differently to pain, and learnt the mindset shifts needed to overcome TMS, everything started to make sense for me. I became pain-free within 5 weeks (you can read My TMS Success Story here).
When I learnt this, I re-introduced coffee (in moderation) because I simply love it, and I am no longer concerned that it will have any effect of pain.
Why does diet seem to work for some?
A good diet will automatically make you feel better on an energetic and emotional level. It can help reduce fatigue (a feeling that is to blame for increased anxiety and irritability), which in turn, results in your being able to sustain a better mood. The clue lies in this very sentence - if diet can help you feel emotionally better, then it is quite obvious that pain may diminish as a side-effect.
But you need much more than diet to feel better. You also need a great work-life balance, to be living in accordance with your values, and not somebody else’s, and you need to step out of victim mentality and believe that you are not doomed to be in pain forever.
If you are stuck in a spiral of helplessness, fear and catastrophic thinking, there is very little that diet can do for you with regard to chronic pain.
And, if you are already pursuing the TMS approach but you still believe that diet can significantly change your pain levels, you are even sending a contradictory signal to your brain; on one hand, you are ‘believing’ that your emotions have everything to do with pain, and on the other hand you are believing that your pain can be ‘physically’ corrected through what you eat.
If you get very strict with your diet, to the point that you fear that any deviation from it will cause your pain levels to return, then you are doing the very opposite of what you need to do to fully recover.
I drink alcohol once or twice a week to unwind, and because I love beer and whiskey… In moderation, the emotional benefits of good tasting food and drink may outweigh the negatives.
P.S. You NEED to learn how to unwind in order to eliminate chronic pain!
One of my friends calls dieting for pain as ‘falling down the rabbit hole’, and shared how he had become so fixated with dieting that he was actually making his pain worse. He was depriving himself of certain foods he loved and fearing that any ‘exception’ will cause a flare-up.
Is Diet a Placebo?
Another reason why diet seems to work for some people is what we call the Placebo Effect. Some chronic pain sufferers put such faith in their new eating regime that they start believing on an unconscious level that they will recover.
As Henry Ford once said, “whether you think you can or you can't... you are right”. If you put your faith in something, there is a great possibility that it will work, because you will be eliminating your biggest enemy - doubt - and you will be generating more positive emotions.
The same can be said with regard to other treatments for chronic pain, such as physical therapy or massage therapy. Yet unfortunately, after seeing some improvement, most sufferers will still experience pain again, if they haven’t weeded out their fear of pain completely, if they feel depressed and anxious, or if they are stuck in an unhappy situation.
This of course, remains my personal opinion due to the lack of scientific data showing the exact effects of diet on pain levels. It is also the opinion of anyone who has adopted the TMS approach and recovered fully.
Treat yourself to good food!
Eating a healthy diet is an act of self-love, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it. But yet again, we all know that there are many different opinions of what a healthy diet entails - some swear by veganism, others swear by keto, gluten-free diets, etc etc.
Personally, I love to strike a good balance by eating a varied diet that includes meat, fish, vegetables, and that is low in sugar and not too rich in carbs. It makes me feel more energetic and in balance, and saves me from experiencing too many hunger pangs. And so I stick to this, more or less.
But not because I believe it will save me from chronic pain. Nope, the TMS approach is far more powerful, and not only can it cure your pain completely, but it can also help you get clear on what you want from life, and start chasing your dreams!