CANDIDA FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Every first Friday of the month from now on You can join the Questions & Answers sessions I hold for the lovely people on my email list.Fancy hearing the latest answers?Or maybe you’d like to pick my brains about something personal – then put your email address in the box below.

You must have lots of burning questions. Regardless if you are battling with Candida yourself or whether you live with someone who is – Candida always is a pain in the bum!

Since I started this blog I’ve had hundreds of people ask me candida & health related questions. I’ve created this page to share some of the candida information with you

Candida Frequently Asked Questions – Index

CANDIDA DIET & FOOD RELATED QUESTIONS

1. My doc says I can eat 2 cups of fruit a day – is that ok on the candida diet?
2. When can I start eating fruit again?
3. What Candida Diet did you follow?
4. I am following a candida diet and I’m stuck for meal ideas. I also have several food intolerances and I am gluten free. What can I eat?
5. Can I eat mushrooms on the Candida Diet?
6. NEW: What is the determining factor to say that a person moves from stage to stage on the ACD?

QUESTIONS REGARDING HEALTHY EATING/ HEALTH IN GENERAL

I’m curious what you eat on a day to day basis.What diet are you following now?

QUESTIONS ABOUT DIE OFF SYMPTOMS

1. As I’m Progressing with the Diet my Symptoms Get Worse – Am I doing Anything Wrong? Maybe I don’t have Candida…
2. The itch on my heels at night prevents me from sleeping – it drives me crazy – what can I do?

Let’s Get to It – Candida FAQ:

CANDIDA DIET & FOOD RELATED QUESTIONS

Q: My doc says I can eat 2 cups of fruit a day – is that ok on the candida diet?

A: Definitely not if you have a systemic candida infection (basically if you’ve had it for a long time and the infections are in several areas in your body). And even if you only have a light yeast infection I recommend you don’t eat fruit at least at the beginning of the diet. I wonder, does your doc have a good track record of healing candida? If he has, then fair play… If not, then take what he says with a pinch of salt.

Often doctors don’t have an in depth knowledge of what feeds candida. My naturopath told me to eat Manuka HONEY. It was meant well and honey and fruit are certainly healthy… – just not for candida sufferers!

Fruit is sugar and sugar feeds yeast. There is no getting away from it. If you can’t live without fruit try and stick to berries and green apples rather than bananas or dried fruit. And eat it first thing in the morning or before a meal rather than as dessert, to make sure most of the sugar gets digested before they enter the large intestine where candida lingers. Fat in the diet prevents insulin from dealing with blood sugar, which is complicating matters. So if you eat fruit or any sweet stuff to that effect than don’t have oily, creamy buttery stuff with it. But be prepared that even if you are not experiencing major symptoms after eating it, the sugar from the fruit might still provide enough candida food to prevent you from fully recovering.

If you find it hard to stop eating fruit try eating just half a grapefruit.

If you have a lot of faith in your doc why not test it? Follow his advice for a couple of weeks – eating 2 cups of fruit a day. Then do 2 weeks without fruit and record how it makes you feel.

When can I start eating fruit again?

I don’t recommend eating fruit until you have been able to tolerate yeast free bread, starchy vegetables like potatoes and carrots and certain grains like buckwheat or quinoa for quite some time. I have made many fruit experiments, on holidays, at family gatherings and the such… and I can honestly say that despite the great enjoyment I got from eating the fruit, I nearly always had more symptoms the next day. Hence I am skeptical and take a firm stance on this topic. On special occasions you could have some green apple, blueberries, strawberries or grapefruit as a treat. That’s fine as long as you don’t fall back into old eating habits. But other than that I’d say stay away from fruit until you are absolutely Candida symptom free.

Q: What Candida Diet did you follow?

A: I followed the 7 days Candida Cleanse Protocol and strict diet outlined on the www.thecandidadiet.com I found this site very helpful to gain an understanding of candida remedies and was grateful to be able to follow their menu plan.

I basically tried out most of the recipes on the site which took me roughly 6 weeks. I also found inspiration for what to eat in the 3 weeks anti candida plan at www.foodforthoughtuk.com. This site introduced me to the idea of incorporating brown rice, quinoa, beans, lentils and hummus into the candida diet. This was very welcome to me as those foods had not been allowed during the strict diet I was following up until that point.

When I started my diet (August 2010) there were only a handful of websites about, and recipes were hard to come by. Constantly hungry and on the look out for more anti candida recipes I came across this recipe book.

This book has got hundreds of recipes in it, including a lot of adaptations of “classics” I so missed like rice pudding, breads and cakes. I found that I personally preferred different flavouring/ spices to the recipes that were in the book. So I ended up putting my own slant on the recipes. But the recipe book was crucial in giving me hope & inspiration to make my own food creations, helping me to keep candida at bay.

I also incorporated some advice from an German specialist for yeast infections who is treating candida patients successfully in a clinic in Austria. His name is Harald Stossier. His book “Die Candida Diaet” (only available in German, sorry) outlines his way of treating candida which is very different from what is commonly known as “The Candida Diet”. He actually allows you to eat potatoes and soups from starchy root vegetables, which when I first read it this did not make sense to me at all. So I went with Erica’s advice.

Q: I am following a candida diet and I’m stuck for meal ideas. I also have several food intolerances and I am gluten free. What can I eat?

A: You are in good company – I used to have lots of food intolerances, allergies and digestive issues (IBS, constipation, colitis). Naturally I had to adapt my meals to be easy on the digestive system and anti-inflammatory. Have you seen the recipes page on my blog? All the recipes on there are sugar free and a lot of them are gluten free, too.

Q: Can I eat mushrooms on the Candida Diet? 

A: Technically mushrooms should be allowed as they don’t contain any sugar and therefore cannot feed Candida. But the problem with mushrooms is that most Candida sufferers initially react hyper sensitive to everything containing mould or fungus, mushrooms included. So eating mushrooms might still cause your immune system to fire up allergic responses in your body, being it IBS style symptoms like bloating, gas, abdominal pain or sudden fatigue after the meal.

In the later stages of the diet when your immune system is stronger you can try adding a few mushrooms to your meals again. They are extremely healthy, quick to cook and some of them even have cancer fighting properties. Here’s more info on the health benefits, some tasty recipe suggestions and a quick report how it affected me when I ate mushrooms during the diet.

NEW Q: What is the determining factor to say that a person moves from stage to stage on the ACD? 

A: When you can move from stage to stage on the ACD depends on personal preference, severity of symptoms and whether food intolerances or other illnesses have to be treated as well. So there is no single determining factor I’m afraid.

Many people do not even go through with stage 1 and start straight away with the candida diet. So that comes down to personal preference.

Then it takes at least 2-4 weeks to get the candida overgrowth levels down enough so you can embark on stage 3. If in doubt and you feel quite ill, stick to stage 2 for a few more days. Soup or rice days are very beneficial to speed things up.

Generally speaking the more often you have stage 1 or 2 diet days during the ACD, the better for your health and the quicker you will recover. On the flip side the worst thing that can happen to you if you start phase 3 too soon is that you’ll experience more symptoms and feel worse. So you’ll automatically be reminded to eat a bit lighter until you might want to try it again.

Another deciding factor is your stress level.The happier and relaxed you are, the sooner you can start the next stage of candida elimination.

Always pay attention to how you feel that day, and never introduce new foods etc. when you are feeling ill or very stressed/ tired. A good indicator whether you are ready to move to the next stage is whether you haven’t experienced new symptoms for at least 5 days.

Once you think you feel well enough to try eating carbs again you have reached stage 3. Then you carefully add one food after the other back into your diet (with a few days or even weeks break in between to avoid allergic responses) and test whether it agrees with you. First starchy vegetables, then grains once a day, then twice, then desserts or dishes that are harder to digest like a big raw salad or a lamb stew. And before you know it you’ll be fully well again

QUESTIONS REGARDING HEALTHY EATING/ HEALTH IN GENERAL

Q: I’m curious what you eat on a day to day basis.What diet are you following now?

A: I have grown so used to eating a low GI, high protein diet that the Candida Diet has become part of my lifestyle, hah! I eat a sugar free, low carb diet that is a bit more forgiving in terms of how much legumes, grains, starchy vegetables and dairy I can eat than the standard Candida Diet. I eat tons of salads & vegetables and a fair amount of soups, lentils, beans and fish dishes. I bake my own yeast free bread, eat quite a bit of brown rice, spelt pasta and soba noodles and occasionally quinoa.

Having spent most of my life in Germany I am all for hearty dishes and stews, and I still enjoy the odd meat based dish. Hence I love a lot of paleo dishes. But since living in the UK I have also fallen in love with Indian cooking and Mexican dishes. So my cooking is definitely influenced by all of those things and constantly evolving.

I tend to follow food combining rules. That means I might eat chicken and vegetables but not chicken and bread. I also make sure that my meals are mostly alkaline to promote healing. I force myself to have the occasional vegetable juice and eat lots of greens & fiber stuff to get my digestion going and tell candida to bugger off At first it was a big headache for me to know when I could eat what, but it’s second nature to me now. And since I lost my sweet tooth I am obsessed with everything coconut, almonds and hemp seeds, and I can’t resist trying out new fancy superfoods like chia seeds. I adapt my meals depending on what time of the month it is and what symptoms I have. It’s amazing how you can use foods & herbs as natural remedy.

I generally bulk cook meals for 2 days in advance and for freezing, so when I come back from work or my fitness/ yoga classes I don’t resort to candida friendly food out of desperation. I get hungry every few hours. So I also make sure that I constantly have healthy snacks like hummus nearby to tide me over and to keep my blood sugar levels on an even keel. I am more and more moving away from wheat in any pasta or whole-grain form onto gluten free terrain. I also moved away from cows milk and cheese to goats-cheese and sheep’s milk and rice milk. I find myself becoming more and more intrigued with vegan dishes, and I’m keen to start fermenting vegetables and making Kefir coconut water to wean myself of expensive probiotic supplements.

QUESTIONS ABOUT DIE OFF SYMPTOMS

Q: As I’m Progressing with the Diet my Symptoms Get Worse – Am I doing Anything Wrong? Maybe I don’t have Candida…

I started my candida diet around 4 weeks ago. My problem is that since I am progressing with the diet – my symptoms got worse, especially the itch on my skin. Is that a sign of detoxing or maybe I am doing something wrong? Could this mean that I don’t suffer from candida but the itch is caused by something else? I am a bit confused and discouraged.

A: It’s understandable that you feel confused. Yes there are cases where people have typical candida symptoms but as it turns out they actually suffer from a different health problem or auto-immune disorder other than candida. But these cases are far and few between. And even those cases would see an improvement in their symptoms from initially following a sugar free diet and doing things to boost their immune system. So you are on the right track!

When you follow the diet you automatically presume that you should start to feel better rather than worse. Unfortunately that is not how it works with Candida – Generally things get worse before they get better. The symptoms that pop up are often random and don’t feel related to anything you’ve been eating or doing. So they don’t make sense.

But there is a lot of healing going on on a cellular level inside your body that you are not aware of. Often times an itch or tingling sensation in a certain region can be triggered when deeper lying skin tissues start to be repaired and candida by-products get broken down. Sometimes the circulation is getting better where there used not to be any for a long time. These are all good signs.

Key thing is that you stick to the diet. Any intake of sugar can worsen your symptoms and trigger re-infections and itch attacks. Treat the itch you are experiencing with natural remedies (I’m going to show you a few in a minute). You should see a marked improvement very quickly. If after a few days you are still experiencing symptoms I would see a specialist to check for other illnesses.

Q: The itch on my heels at night prevents me from sleeping – it drives me crazy – what can I do?

A: Of course your heel symptoms could be caused by a different health problem. But regardless what they were caused by – you can improve, if not heal them, with simple home remedies.

Try These Home Remedies To Control Itch:

• Use an Apple Cider Vinegar Wrap
• Keep your fingernails short
• Have a relaxing foot bath with tea tree oil & lavender
• Moisturize 2 x daily with aloe vera gel & tea tree moisturizer or coconut oil
• Keep your spirits up & carry on eating no sugar

• Wrapping your foot before bedtime in a cold moist cloth with diluted natural apple cider vinegar provides tremendous relief to itchy feet. Keep it near your bed and reapply when the frantic itch urge hits you. If it impacts your sleep too much you can wrap some foil or plastic bag around it and a sock on top to keep it in place and prevent scratching.

• Needless to say that you should at all times have super short finger nails to prevent the worst.

• Have a nice foot bath every night. Add a few drops of tea tree oil and lavender to warm water and soak your feet in it for a few minutes. This will also relax you and help you go to sleep.

• Dry your feet and put some high strength aloe vera gel on your heels/ feet. After that put some tea tree moisturizer or coconut oil on top (coconut smells nicer but tea tree is more effective and melts into the skin better).

• Apply moisturizer to your heels/ feet every morning and every night. Again, aloe vera & tea tree have worked best for me.

I have healed itchy skin symptoms everywhere on my body with this technique – It really works!

Try this, I hope it works for you.

Acv, aloe & tea tree are highly antibacterial and antifungal – they would ease your symptoms even if they were non candida related.

And remember, healing systemic candida, which is what you have by the sounds of it, since you describe fatigue and vaginal infections, does take time. Be patient, you are doing the right thing and you will get better!

Enough about me, let’s talk about YOU! Remember that when you join my email list you have direct email access to me and can ask me whatever questions might be on your mind, in private. And be sure not to miss the live Candida Q&A session the first Friday of the month.

In the meantime if you have any question just pop it in the comment box below.

No Candida Diet is quite the same, and Candida is unpredictable and random. In other words there’s plenty of opportunity to feel anxious & confused and start doubting your beliefs. But strength is in numbers, right?!

Chances are that the question that’s on your mind right now I might be able to answer – Try me

P.S. Remember that these are just my ideas and thoughts that I’ve distilled down from my own experiences. Always seek final advice from a qualified nutritionist, therapist or doctor.