Olena from Kyiv tells us how the keto diet helped her with Lyme disease and how her diet has changed since the war began.
I’ve had Lyme disease for 9 years, and it was very bad at the beginning – there was gluten and dairy intolerance, incredible fatigue, partial motor nerve paralysis, and major blood damage.
I had been on the GF/CF diet for many years. But the stars suddenly aligned, and I realized I needed keto (even though my gut doesn’t want meat in the amount taken on keto).
And my condition has really improved, even in terms of stamina. But I haven’t lost weight. At some point, I even gained a kilo or a kilo and a half.
I am a resident of Kyiv, and just before the war, from February 17th to February 22th, my family and I got COVID-19. I was on ozone all winter because of Lyme disease, so I got a coronavirus infection quite quickly, but I was dizzy and weak all the time.
On February 24th, I woke up because of bombs. We heard terrible explosions from the left bank of Kyiv. We saw smoke over Vasylkiv. We couldn’t go to the bomb shelter – everyone felt ill because of the consequences of the COVID. We stayed in the hallway of our apartment. We went to the grocery store from time to time and managed to buy enough food to stay on the keto diet.
I could hardly sleep because of the news about Chornobyl and Energodar. On the night of the fight at Zaporizhzhya NPS, I didn’t have any sleep and was praying. Early the next morning, we moved to Western Ukraine.
I usually make myself egg bread and eat it with butter, some salad, scrambled eggs, or meat. I think before the war I was in a state close to ketosis, though I dabbled in seeds, explaining to myself that it was because of a hard life.
But it seems that the real ketosis started in the first days of the war – the smell of urine changed sharply, I started to lose excess water, and I lost so much weight in a week that I could put on thick sweatpants under my jeans.
