• Do you experience PMS, low sex drive, irregular menses or impotence?
• Do you suffer from recurrent vaginal, prostate or urinary symptoms?
• Are you susceptible to a variety of infections? =====================================================================
A Set of Provokers
Yeast overgrowth occurs most commonly in individuals exposed to one or more of the items on the following list:
• A diet high in sugar and refined carbohydrates.
• Repeated courses of antibiotics( a total of more than twenty weeks in a lifetime-or more than four times in one year-would make Candida overgrowth likely).
• Birth control pills, fertility drugs or other hormone therapies.
• Prednisone and other steroids.
• Chronic and excessive emotional stress.
• Any immune suppression condition.
With a list like this, it ' s hardly surprising that millions of Americans suffer from yeast overgrowth-and most of them don ' t realize they have it.
Clearly, you know my thoughts on sugar and carbohydrates. As for antibiotics, they can be life-saving but are often over-prescribed. Birth control pills, HRT and steroids are drugs whose importance to your life I cannot judge without knowing you. If you do have a yeast overgrowth, you may have to make a difficult decision regarding these drugs. All alter the balance of beneficial bacteria in the intestine-which keeps Candida in check.
To understand how yeast can interfere with your success doing Atkins, you should hear about one of my patients. Laurie Yule was just 5 feet tall and weighed 134 pounds before doing Atkins. Her goal was to reach 118 pounds. She got down to 122 quite easily. Then after getting severe bronchitis, she was placed on antibiotics by another doctor. Laurie soon began to feel bloated and had difficulty losing any more weight. Essentially, the antibiotic had disturbed the balance of her intestinal flora and she was experiencing a yeast overgrowth, which had stalled her weight loss. Once I took Laurie off yeasty foods, the bloating vanished and she moved beyond her plateau to lose another four and a half pounds in a month.
What You Eat
I cannot point to published research that proves diet can actually cause yeast. But my clinical practice has convinced me that the wrong foods can and will encourage the continuation and expansion of a Candida overgrowth.
The worst offender is sugar. It is the major growth factor for yeast, and Candida patients are invariably warned to stay away from ice cream, candy, pastry, corn syrup, maple syrup, molasses, etc. If you ' re doing Atkins, there ' s certainly no possibility you ' re eating any of that. You ' ll also be avoiding the natural sugar in fruit juice and lactose in milk.
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