Ok, I am looking at things I can do to help with the symptoms. I am reading a lot online about all kinds of wild and crazy ideas but most of them seem to be centered on certain things.

Gluten, Dairy, Red Meats, Pork, Sugar.... you know the staples that I live for.

Gluten? really? Like all things cakes, pasta and bread? Are you kidding me???

Dairy I could almost be OK with but of course pasta.... pasta requires cheese!

I am willing to try almost anything. But you cannot take my pasta!

I've thought about trying the no gluten diet, but I dont know if I can manage to stay away from bread...chocolate...ice cream (actually havent had a problem with staying away from ice cream...got a sensitive tooth) and I had a serious craving last night for pasta. Made a bunch of spaghetti, used up the last of my Parmesan cheese (eek! gotta go to the store!) and made myself some frozen biscuits because I was out of garlic bread.

I'm with you, I cant stay away from the pasta. I loves my noodles!

Most of what I've read and tried revolves around increased protein and DHA as well as anti-oxidents (especially blueberries / juice) and less sugars. For me yogurt, nuts, fresh vegetables and low fat meats seem to help. Sugars and fatty foods seem to make my symptoms worse. Maybe it's just psychological in that I feel that I'm doing something positive to help myself heal.

Walking seems to help too, as long as I don't over do it. The difficulty for me is that I can walk 2 miles one day and feel great and walk the same 2 miles and pay for it with increased symptom severity.

I hate to say it, but so much of this recovery feels like a crap shoot. The only thing consistent is the inconsistency.

My Neuro doesn't even recommend the diets due to the difficulty of following them. She felt M.S. was difficult enough without adding the turbo-strict diet to the mix. If she saw super results with them, then she would recommend it. But it seems to be a crap shoot and a very difficult one to boot.

(Otherwise I find cherry cheesecake to make me feel a lot better!!!) HA!

My neuro just suggests eating lots of veggies and berries, and cut down on sugary snacks. He lectures me every visit about weight reduction due to the fact that I am very overweight.
I'm trying to use kefir to see if it helps cut down on the frequency of IBS attacks.
One day at a time...

you can still have pasta on GF diet, make no mistake about that. My daughter has a severe case of celiac and gets very ill if she eats anything that has gluten, or has been processed on a machine that shares gluten products. It has taken years of study and learning, but she makes all of her own food and WOW! she can make some tasty dishes.

Cupcakes! pasta! and so forth. She uses tapioca flour or rice flour and while oats are allowed she doesnt use oatmeal or corn meal. im telling ya, the dishes are impressive.

I am pretty close to the "makers diet" and it takes us back to eating whole foods, raw foods, and food that we see come from the earth, not stuff that jumps off an assembly line. I dont know if I would say I saw a dramatic improvement of stuff, but I certainly feel better being on it. maybe its placebo, maybe its hooey, maybe its real. Either way I cant wait to get back in my own kitchen and evict my DH from his short cuts.

I follow a heart healthy diet with lots of fruits and veggies and low fat, high fiber. I drink lots of water. My MS is very mild and I am nearly 54 years old. I felt better as soon as I improved my diet. A good diet lowers inflammation in the body.

I LOVE seeing this thread!

All 3 of my doctors have told me that diet has nothing to do with this disease.

I believe 100% they are WRONG.
and I believed them at first.

I got the ' MS Recovery Diet' book and it educated me and made me try different things and I am ever so glad I did.

The book talks about food sensitivities and allergies. They think what triggers MS is having a sensitivity/allergy to a food, which activates the immune cells and then start attacking the myelin sheath.

So I rubbed some of my taco meat on my forearm one night.. I looked down about 20 minutes later and the area that I rubbed the meat on wasn't red, but was completely inflammed, it was raised off of my arm about a half an inch.

That was enough evidence for me, so I stopped eating red meat. I noticed by the end of that month my numbness on the right side of my abdomen had completely subsided and my symptoms were not as pronounced.

I gave in a month ago and ate a burger (thinking it couldn't possibly affect me too bad since I had been without it for months), OMG! BAD MOVE! The next day I was stumbling over ever step I took with my right leg, my feet and legs were numb, my hands were numb, and it felt like the right side of my body was melting into the ground.

Burgers and steak were my favorite (still are) but it's not worth what it's doing to my body.

since switching to raw milk I am dramatically better about lactose intolerance. The paturizing process kills all the bacteria good and bad.Its the difference between live milk and a dead product. it kills the CLA and so forth, so you lose most any benefit from drinking it. I switched to organic milk for a while and did better, but once I switched back to raw it was amazing. no more lactose intolerance! no gas after drinking it. no more belly ache.

Red meat is very tricky as well. if I eat supermarket meat I get tummy aches, rashes, and dont feel well. I can get headaches, stumbly and generally have trouble. if I eat meat from the local farm that is grass fed, free range and we know each scrap of food that animal ate, and it wasnt rammed full of antibiotics I can eat all the red meat I want. Did you know that a normal package of hamburger from the grocery store has 100s of different cows mixed into the meat?

I know where my chickens come from as well. I can go visit them, check on their diet, see that their houses are clean and their eggs are well tended. The yokes of their eggs are a deep dark yellow, but the ones from the store are pale and light.

I think that the commercialization of our foods has done us a great disservice and we are paying the price for it. ADD, ADHD, Bi-polar, Lupus, MS, and so many other inflammatory conditions. Most of the corn grown today in the USA is meant for commercial purposes such as high fructose corn syrup, or other such chemically laden products.

Once I started educating myself about what I was putting into my body, from food to medicine to exposing myself to harmful cleansers and toxic body lotions I was shocked. When I started removing these things from my life, it improved dramatically.