What I Eat Since Having Lyme Disease
Key takeaways:
After Mya Castellon took antibiotics for Lyme disease as a teen, she experienced problems with her gut health.
She discovered that cutting gluten and sugar from her diet helped relieve her symptoms.
Eating healthy as a college student can be hard, but she’s found ways to stick with her diet plan.
When Mya Castellon started to experience high fevers and fatigue as a 12-year-old living in Tennessee, she says everyone assumed she had the flu.
When the symptoms continued for weeks, they began to suspect it might be mono. But after she was sick for months, including several trips to the hospital with high fevers, doctors started looking for another cause.
After several more months of waiting for test results, she finally had a diagnosis. Mya had never noticed a tick on herself, but she had Lyme disease, an illness carried by ticks that infects 476,000 Americans a year. Doctors prescribed a round of antibiotics to clear the infection.
Antibiotics ‘tore up my gut health’
While most people get rid of Lyme disease by undergoing treatment with antibiotics, some people have issues longer. Since Lyme disease triggers an immune response, some people have inflammation throughout the body, including the gastrointestinal tract. This inflammation can cause various GI symptoms, such as nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea.
For Mya, the antibiotics worked, and her symptoms soon decreased. But once she had recovered from the worst of her Lyme disease, she noticed other, longer-term effects from the antibiotics.
“It tore up my gut health,” Mya says. “When I was finally feeling better and ready to get back into school and sports, I was getting sick a lot.”
Fatigue, joint pain, and digestive issues such as bloating were also a problem.
Searching for a solution, Mya visited a doctor who took a more holistic approach. That doctor suggested adjustments to her diet. Even though she was only 14 at the time, Mya took the doctor’s advice and quickly learned just how big an impact what she ate had on how she felt.
Cutting out gluten and refined sugar has big benefits
Mya’s new doctor suggested she cut down on refined sugar in her diet. Like many kids her age, Mya enjoyed sweet things and was reluctant to make the change at first. She decided to just reduce the amount of sugar she was eating rather than go cold turkey. But even this small change produced quick, positive results.
This convinced her to eliminate all refined sugar (she still eats natural sugars such as those contained within fruit) and also take the doctor’s suggestion to cut gluten from her diet, as well. Mya’s mom has an allergy to gluten, so making this change wasn’t as difficult or strange as it might be for some teens. At that point, Mya says, the benefits to her health were huge.
But it took her a while to figure out how to manage everything, Mya explains in this TikTok video for GoodRx.
“Before I was sugar-free, I was still getting little sicknesses. I was sleeping a lot. I couldn't get up in the morning. I would get up and just feel like, ’Well, I could go back to sleep for four more hours,’” she says. “When I made that change to eating clean, it would be Saturday and my body would wake me up at 8, which was huge for me. I'd be upset. I'd be like, ‘Why am I not sleeping past 8? This is annoying.’ I just wasn't as tired.”
Mya also noticed that when she indulged in sugar or gluten, she immediately felt more tired and had more digestive problems. These experiences motivated her to keep going with her new diet plan. While it was hard at first, Mya says that over time, avoiding sugar and gluten became much easier.
“It’s hard at the beginning. And then you get to a point where it doesn't faze you anymore. You don’t feel like you're missing out. You feel so much better, that sugar … it’s just like, ‘No, I’d rather stay away from it, because I know how my body's going to react to it,’” Mya says.
College poses challenges
Mya kept up her restricted diet in high school because it eased her symptoms so much. But when she went away to Knoxville, Tennessee, for college, she found it much harder to stick with her healthy eating plan.
Living in a tiny dorm room, she couldn’t cook. She ate all her meals in the dining halls, which had limited healthy options. The fact that COVID-19 was raging didn’t help her maintain her health, either.
“I almost fell back to how I was years ago. I got really sick,” Mya says. She decided to move back home and study remotely for a year to get her health back together. She went back to eating clean, started exercising regularly again, and even used an infrared sauna often to ease symptoms such as fatigue.
With her physical health restored by her break, Mya is now back in Knoxville for her junior year in college. She’s made a few important changes to maintain her health while away from home.
“Now, I’m in a house, and I can cook all my food and I — fingers crossed — have not gotten sick,” she says. She’s a big fan of Trader Joe’s, thanks to the store’s many sugar- and gluten-free options, and she’s also learned to make a few quick, healthy recipes she relies on when things get busy.
“I have repetitive recipes that I love and that are easy to make that I'll do. I'll make homemade quinoa bowls. I'll do tacos, salad bowls,” she says.
Is it more effort than grabbing a burger? Of course, but Mya says the relief she gets from the symptoms she experienced after her Lyme disease diagnosis make the extra work worth it.
Be patient, and don’t get discouraged
Mya tells others living with Lyme disease who might be thinking about adjusting their diets not to be daunted or discouraged. Finding the right approach for you sometimes takes a little tinkering. But things get easier, and eating clean becomes second nature.
“It's trial and error, and it can take some time. But you just have to not get discouraged,” she says. “It can be hard when you're trying all these different things, and it feels like it's not working for you. But once you find it, especially with diet, it can be huge.”
If you’re struggling with Lyme disease symptoms, Mya’s experience suggests it might be worth experimenting with your diet to see if healthy eating can help ease your symptoms, too.
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