After years of trying to improve my blood serum uric acid without medication, following conventional medical guidance, I found I had nothing to show for it. 10 years as a vegetarian with no beer, and moderate alcohol, I found my uric acid levels actually got worse! I could never seem to shake the regular feeling that I was on the verge of another gout flare, and still had them a few times a year. I certainly was making zero progress in curing gout in my body.
[DOGMA ALERT]: There is no cure for gout, but you can effectively treat and manage the condition with medication and self-management strategies.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Gout, https://www.cdc.gov/arthritis/basics/gout.html
Overweight since high school, despite at times heavy aerobic exercise (like running a dozen marathons), I happened to listen to a podcast on keto and get a DEXA body composition scan and my world changed overnight.
Diet and lifestyle is often what you hear in the context of weight loss. But what does this really mean? For most, your doctor really doesn’t have a clue on how to actually loose weight. And what does lifestyle really mean in a practical sense? With my own experiments, absorbing concepts from the keto, low-carb, and carnivore community, my uric acid is now below 6 mg/dl and I eat 1.5 to 2 lbs of red meat a day!
So in the end I find myself pissed off that the medical community, which is great at acute health problems (think broken bones and heavy trauma), does such a terrible job of addressing chronic health. I went through a multi-year odyssey to get to the root of my gout and figured the least I could do was share my N=1 experiments with others who would like to really kick gout. As I see it, if you are here you have three options:
Manage Symptoms
Follow mainstream advice to take your Allopurinol, Colchicine, or other medication the rest of your life to “deal with” your gout.
Snake Oil Salesmen
Chase extremely questionable miracle cure solutions peddled to those of us desperate enough to try anything.
Actually Curing Gout
Learn how to fix the root cause ( metabolic syndrome ) and address a constellation of other problems.
Clearly I chose to go with door #3. While it has required a significant change in lifestyle, the payoff has been huge. I sleep better, I’m at much lower risk of diabetes, heart disease, my strength and mobility has improved and so much more. My goal with this website is to give back and help others with what I’ve learned. You will find nothing for sale, no marketing, no referral revenue, or anything else. I’m paying for this out of pocket because I can and I’m just plain tired of our modern “sick-care” system and the snake oil salesmen taking advantage of those of us in pain.
Stick with me to learn more. I plan to try to offer simple do-it-yourself strategies to truly address the lifestyle question, outline big levers you might experiment with yourself, some thoughts on how you measure progress, and links to actual studies that lend support for the approach.