I have an injury that caused spinal stenosis, which is basically a narrowing of the space within your spine that can put pressure on the spinal cord and nerves within. It typically occurs in the neck or lower back. Mine is in the neck.
Some of the symptoms are pain in the affected area, numbness in the limbs, and muscle weakness. I had all three of these symptoms at one point or another. The pain had become quite constant and almost unbearable. I eventually went to the doctor and they wanted to put me on pain medication, but I refused. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life on pain medication and surgery wasn’t an option yet.
With those options off the table, the doctor sent me to physical therapy. Now, in and of itself, physical therapy is a good thing and has helped many people recover from their injuries. However, in my case, it seemed to make the pain worse.
I stopped physical therapy and decided that I was going to try and Jedi mind-control the pain away. That didn’t really work either.
At that point I decided that if physical therapy was the answer, perhaps I could go back to practicing Karate a few times a week, to see what would happen. I continued my training over the next year and it seemed to be working, but on some days the pain would come back sharply. Although I was stretching the muscles and working the joints in that area, it wasn’t enough to cause the pain to go away.
After speaking to a different doctor, I asked what would continue to cause this kind of pain. He said that it was a degenerative condition, which causes the narrowing of the spine and thus, the pain, to worsen over time. He also said that inflammation could aggravate this even further.
My research on inflammation began, and the effects it causes on the body. Inflammation is supposed to protect you by fighting off infection. When inflammation occurs, it sends white blood cells, increased blood flow, and nutrients to the affected areas, which causes swelling, redness, and warmth. When inflammation is caused by other events and/or triggers, it can wreak havoc on your body in many ways.
How Inflammation Can Harm Your body
I’m going to list some of the other ways that inflammation can harm your body and then get back to how it can affect your joints and bones as the cause of neck and back pain.
- Your gut – one-way inflammation can harm you is through your gut, which can cause other symptoms and even inflammatory bowel disease, which includes ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease.
- Heart disease – the formation of fatty plaque in the arteries can trigger chronic inflammation, which in turn causes blood clots to form, leading to a heart attack. Obesity and unhealthy eating can increase inflammation in the body. This part struck a nerve with me…keep reading to find out why.
- Higher risk of cancer – chronic inflammation is linked to cancers of the digestive tract, cervix, esophagus, and lungs. In 2014, a Harvard University study found that obese teenagers with high levels of inflammation had a 63% higher risk than their thinner peers of developing colorectal cancer during adulthood.
- Lung disease – inflammation in the lungs causes fluid accumulation and a narrowing of the airways, which can make it difficult to breathe. Inflammation in the lungs can cause infection, asthma, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis.
- Gum disease – chronic inflammation of the gums can lead to disease that causes gums to recede and the skeletal structure around the teeth to become weak.
- It makes weight loss difficult – As stated above, obesity is a major cause of inflammation in the body, and losing weight is an effective way to fight it. However, chronic inflammation can create hunger signals and slow down metabolism, causing you to eat more and burn fewer calories. Inflammation can also create insulin resistance, increasing your risk for diabetes.
- It affects the skin – Most people don’t know that psoriasis is an inflammatory condition that occurs when the immune system causes skin cells to grow too quickly. Chronic inflammation has been shown to contribute to the formation of wrinkles and accelerated cell aging.
- Linked to depression – According to a 2015 study published by JAMA Psychiatry, inflammation in the brain may be responsible for symptoms related to depression, such as loss of appetite, low mood, and poor sleep.
Finally, the effects that inflammation can cause on your joints and bones are very serious. Inflammation in the joints can cause pain and stiffness in the joints and in some cases, can lead to rheumatoid arthritis.
Inflammation throughout the body can cause increased bone loss and interfere with bone growth.
With all of these inflammation-induced conditions, it caused me to think about how I can reduce inflammation, and according to the research, one of the ways to do that is to lose weight.
I immediately created a meal plan around a low-fat diet and I continued to exercise. After two months, although I lost about 12 pounds, I had even more pain in my neck and felt as though I had increased inflammation. I couldn’t figure out what was causing my pain and inflammation to increase if I was eating a healthy low-fat diet and losing weight.
I decided to try something a bit different. I had lost weight on Atkins before and they had since come a long way to improving many of their products. I had also heard about the ketogenic diet, which is similar to Atkins, but with much higher levels of fat and very low levels of carbohydrates.
I decided to just go with the traditional Atkins diet, which limits carbohydrates, but more importantly, it practically eliminates sugar! Why is this important? Because sugar is a major cause of inflammation!
The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition warns that processed sugars trigger the release of inflammatory messengers called cytokines. Sugar is in many forms, such as sucrose, fructose, and corn syrup.
As I continued Atkins for the next three months, I decided to stop actively exercising altogether, to isolate the effects of the diet on my body and see if it would indeed relieve my pain.
After three months, I lost 30 pounds, but more importantly, my neck pain was gone, and the inflammation was gone too. I want to note that part of this diet was eating healthy fats that help lubricate joints.
However, I couldn’t believe that my pain had gone away from just changing my eating habits, so I went off the diet for a week and ate whatever I wanted, including many desserts and other carbohydrates containing sugar. The results were staggering. My pain had come back with severity, to the point where I couldn’t move my neck for a few days.
I still wasn’t convinced, so I went back on Atkins for the next couple of weeks. After about three days, I started feeling better and my neck pain once again went away without taking any medication whatsoever.
In analyzing the results, I realized that although exercise is key to good health, muscle strength, and energy, it was my diet that relieved the pain I was having and just about eliminated it altogether. This was especially true with my avoidance of sugar.
For those of you with a sweet tooth like me, you can easily substitute sugar with some great natural alternatives like Stevia or Erythritol. I will tell you that it’s going to be difficult to shake the taste of sugar, but it’s well worth it in the end.
