His diet sounds like a real food diet, with a pretty moderate amount of whey protein to me. Probably higher in protein than what I seem to do best on, could have used some low carb veggies, but not something I'd expect most people to get anything worse than a mild case of the Atkins flu.

Even when people read Atkins, they go all out with the protein for about a month. The A-TO-Z experiment says as much. I see no reason why it would be different in this case. Incidentally, there is no report in the A-TO-Z experiment of the effect we're discussing here, i.e. hormonal damage.

It can cause HPA axis damage though if I read correctly, which ultimately can cause hormonal disruption.

I'd like to read it too. Do you have a link?

Hormonal disruption is inevitable. It will happen when you change from one diet to another significantly, regardless of what diet you end up with. It is not exclusive to going low-carb.

Like gall bladder disease, it's not that low carb causes hormonal damage. It simply brings it to light.

When my hormones were messed up, I couldn't get into ketosis. But that didn't mean low carb wasn't doing me good: it did. It didn't mean I should eat wheat and sugar: that made things worse.

And even if that were so: going back to your former way of eating, which you said you did, would have given you relief if you had some kind of problems with low carb. Yet it has not.

You have to be proactive about getting to the bottom of the problem, and as many of us have discovered, we can't rely on our doctor to do so. They have been trained to think of only the most obvious thing, treat that, and blame any lack of progress on the patient.

Get some testing. Quit trying to blame the diet which isn't going to help you anyway. All the stuff I've read about people having trouble with ketosis resolves when they stop trying to go ketogenic.

There isn't anything I can find about permanently damaging the HPA axis by not eating carbohydrates. They aren't necessary for life. They are a crutch if someone has a damaged metabolism and that should be your focus, Konflict.

You've got that backwards. It can cause a change in hormone levels, which people hypothesize can cause damage. The null hypothesis here should be that acute hormonal changes due to a diet change are simply the body adapting to the new dietary environment, not that the changes are "damage." Plausibly damage might happen if an individual is exposed to a stressor which their individual metabolism cannot adapt to. Again, what you've read is a hypothesis that nobody went to any rigor to try to test, there's very little "there" there, people throw these guesses out there, and then we're stuck explaining to people why they're not well grounded for years. The only piece of evidence that a low carb diet can cause damage to the HPA axis that you've presented that I take seriously is your own n equals one experience, and you have to be careful there, false results are common.

Once in a while, somebody does come up with some mysterious ailment on low carb, maybe it's a poor response to the diet. But people come up with mysterious ailments all the time. Coincidences also happen all the time. You can get somewhere with an n equals one experiment, but you need very well controlled experiments, well controlled measurement, and repeatability--and then to show that it's true for somebody besides yourself.

That something is going on with your hpa axis sounds like a good starting point, since you have symptoms that do sound like diabetes insipidus, if you're really drinking and peeing that much, that's as reasonable as thinking that something's going on with your glucagon/insulin ratio if you were hyperglycemic. Causation is harder, two concerns here, I really do hope that you go to a doctor and find out what's really going on, and I don't want people who have a far greater probability of being helped by the diet to be thrown off by highly implausible concerns, that Authority Nutrition article seems more likely to do harm than good, and even for you, all it's really provided is a bit of confirmation bias for your suspicions going in.

About permanent damage. Here's an explanation of the distinction between permanent and chronic.

Permanent

Imagine you hit your thumb with a hammer, and you break your thumb. Imagine that your thumb does not heal. This is permanent.

Chronic

Imagine you hit your thumb with a hammer repeatedly, each time you hit, you break your thumb. But, imagine that each time it breaks, it heals almost instantly. This is chronic.

In the case of permanent, even if you stop hitting your thumb, your thumb remains broken. In the case of chronic, when you stop hitting your thumb, it heals.

Diet works as a chronic system, not permanent. The exception is with deficiency or poisoning over several years. For example, a deficiency of B12 will lead to permanent irreversible physical damage after a couple years. Some deficiencies can cause temporary reversible damage, fixed with appropriate supplementation.

Low-carb is not deficient nor is it poison. But, just like any other diet, it affects hormones. This primarily depends on the previous diet. For example, if we start with a diet that is high in carbs, then we go low-carb, we'll need less insulin, and insulin will drop. Technically, this is hormonal disruption. Low-carb typically includes meat and lots of fat. If, for example, we go from a diet that lacks meat, then go low-carb, there will also be hormonal disruption of a different kind. In this case, some hormones (testosterone, estrogen, probably others as well) will go up due to the greater amount of substrate for their production and metabolism, i.e. fat, cholesterol, protein, certain vitamins like the B complex, etc. This too is technically hormonal disruption.

I believe that when you say hormonal disruption, you mean detrimental, i.e. something bad, yes? Low-carb is unlikely to cause detrimental hormonal disruption of any kind. On the contrary, it's more likely to restore normal production and metabolism of all hormones, but primarily insulin.

Having said all that, it's still possible that low-carb allows existing or new pathogens to take over during the transition. But if that's true of low-carb, it's also true of any other diet, when we change from one to another significantly. However, the likelihood of that happening when we change from any diet to low-carb, compared to any other change, is low. This is because low-carb removes the primary culprit for basically every disease, i.e. obesity, heart disease, neurological disorders, etc - carbs.

Within the context of permanent vs chronic, low-carb acts in a chronic fashion, just like any other diet. Once you quit, that's it for the effect, it goes away, and a new effect occurs, depending on what diet you go with this time around. There is this false belief that somehow we can go on a diet, fix the problem, then get off the diet and return to our previous diet, hoping that the problem does not come back. If the problem was caused by the previous diet, and if we go back to that diet, the problem will simply return.

It just occurred to me. Konflict said that he didn't lose weight when he went low-carb, That on its own is indication that there is something else going on besides diet. Diet is not the only thing that can make and keep us fat, or sick as the case may be.

That's what I mean when I say low-carb can expose underlying problems.

Most times when people have trouble it is not the plan that is the trouble but the application or like you said an underlying medical condition. Some people believe low carb is all bacon and fat. And while some can choose to eat that way, low carb is meant to be much more than that.

I'm not knocking the diet here, all I'm doing is looking for answers or help that I can't seem to find anywhere with anyone and it's scaring the hell out of me. I feels almost as if I have no joints left and all my movements are bone on bone. I can't even turn my neck without it feeling like it's on fire....if I keep my ankles or wrists in a certain position for too long I get arthritis like pain, my knees crack multiple times when I try to crouch, my lower back hurts so bad and can only lay a certain way when trying to sleep.

Like some of you are saying maybe the diet exposed something genetic in me or exposed an underlying issue....but at this point I'm frightened as the doctors haven't found anything abnormal.

Here's an update of all my bloodwork:


Labs from 1/24/17

TSH: 2.75 uIu/mL (0.34 - 5.60 uIu/mL)
T3 Free: 3.55 PG/mL (2.5 - 3.9 PG/mL)
DHEA: 213.6 uG/dL (5 - 690 uG/dL)
Total Estrogens: 88 pg/mL (60 - 190 pg/mL)
Estradiol: 18 PG/mL (<40 pg/mL)
Free Testosterone: 62.7 pg/mL (46.0 - 224.0 pg/mL)
Testosterone: 341.27 NG/dL (175 - 781 NG/dL)
Vitamin D3: 45 ng/mL (30 - 100 ng/mL)
Prolactin: 10.4 NG/mL (2.6 - 13.1 NG/mL)
Glucose: 101 MG/dl (70 - 140 MG/dL)

Sodium: 136 MMOL/L. (135 - 143 MMOL/L)
Potassium: 4.2 MMOL/L. (3.6 - 5.1 MMOL/L)
Chloride: 99 MMOL/L. (98 - 107 MMOL/L)
C02: 30 MMOL/L. (22 - 30 MMOL/L)
BUN: 8 MG/dL. (7.0 - 21.0 MG/dL)
Creatinine: 0.8 MG/dL. ( 0.6 - 1.2 MG/dL)


New labs as of 2/6/17:

Cortisol - 11.22 UG/dL (6.7 - 22.6 UG/dL)
Lactate Dehydrogenase - 114 IU/L (98 - 192 IU/L)
C-REACTIVE PROTEIN,HIGH SENSIT - 0.05 MG/dL (0.0 - 0.7 MG/dL)
Sedimentation rate Automated - 2 MM/HR (0 - 15 MM/HR)
LYME AB IGG - NEGATIVE
LYME AB IGM - NEGATIVE
Rheumatoid Factor < 7 IU/mL < 14 IU/mL

These are all symptoms of extreme dehydration. Drink a lot of water and get yourself to some kind of emergency service.

Test for Diabetes Insipidus

We've been saying SOMETHING is going wrong with your water balance and YOUR LIFE IS IN DANGER.


Please, act like it!

I will demanded to be tested for this at my Dr appointment is coming Thursday. Would joint and bone pain/cracking, and insomnia be a side effect of this as well?

Yes. You would be missing the usual cushion of joint fluid.

Yes. The brain's cells all float in and communicate with water.

Update: did a 12 hour water fast the other day and got my blood and urine sodium/osmolality checked. Osmolality machine was "down" so I'm still waiting on those results, but here's the look at my sodium levels:

Blood sodium: 139 mmol/L (135-143 mmol/L)
Urine sodium: 16 mmol/L (28-272 mmol/L)

So my blood sodium is normal, but urine sodium is VERY low out of range. I don't have an appointment until March 2nd, and am unsure what these tests state. P

Thanks for the update. I guess with the amount of water you're passing through for the day, low urine sodium is probably a good thing.

My mom has always had very high salt intake, we used to nag her about it until it came out that high salt intake isn't really that dangerous. It turned out she had a benign growth on her adrenal that caused her to waste salt, so she was probably right to listen to her body.