JK Diet
Beginners Section:
Bad
Foods
Good Foods
How To Begin
What The Diet EntailsWhat You Can Eat Section:
Food Suggestions
Eating Out
Sugar Information
JK Diet Support Information
Section:
Get Support On The Diet
Yeast & Pulling
Menu Plans
TTM, Food & Skin Care
Other TTM Resources Section:
TTM Support Page
TTM Success Stories
Mari's TTM Story
TTM Library
TTM Remailer
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"My own experience is that you have to give it about a
month. Sorry. More accurately, it seems to come in stages, depending on what
"bad" foods you have been eating. Sugar and caffeine, if you withdraw from
them cold turkey, make you feel better and decrease pulling urges in about a day or two.
Make sure you have aspirin handy, because you will get caffeine rebound headaches
that will take about a week to resolve fully. For other "bad" foods, for the
first 10 days or so you might actually get worse, depending on when you ate them, since
many of the "bad" foods have delayed reactions. My wife tells me that with
diets it is customary for people to have a "Farewell to Food Night" before they
start the new regime; if so, this guarantees that two or three days into the diet, just
when you are starting to get sick of the diet, the Bad Food Binge really is kicking in,
and people are both irritated at the diet and suffering from the excess. The usual
"bad" food attack (eggs, for example) starts to hit at about two days, gets real
bad on day 3 and 4 and starts to taper on day 5 down to whatever your usual behavior is on
about day 7 to 10. One good bout of an M&M Peanut pigout easily ruins a week.
A lot of people don't make it past day 4. In fact, most people have to try the diet
several times, usually over the course of a year, before they get over this hump. I
don't know of any way to address this problem, but in the meantime the TTM usually doesn't
go away, so there are numerous future opportunities for most people to give diet a fair
chance. The first sign of improvement, however, happens only after about three weeks.
This long delay I guess is due to the hypothesis that it is not the foods
themselves that are making the pulling bad, but rather something that the foods feed.
It there is a yeast involved, it takes a while to starve it into submission so that
it stops putting out those irritating chemicals that actually cause the internal
irritation and the skin itch. They die off gradually, and only after a long delay
without their favorite foods do they decrease in numbers (as the persistence of TTM shows,
they must be hardy buggers). Somewhere in week three people note that something unusual is
happening--if it happens at all. For many lash pullers, and a few others, TTM
doesn't seem to respond to foods one way or another. (In those cases, I would recommend
looking also for contact allergies, particularly to furry pets; and I am sure even this
won't work for some people, since there appears to be several types of TTM). But if you do
note a surprising skin peace at about three weeks, by about four weeks you start to rely
on this new way of relating to your hair, and it starts to get better. Until you
grow resentful about not being able to eat the stuff you haven't had for a month, start to
doubt it all, have an "experimental" binge, and convince yourself once again. It
takes time. But consider this: If you are still alive a month from now, unless you
make *some* change in your life, your are almost certain to be still pulling your hair.
If it doesn't work, you've lost a month of coffee and Reese's peanut butter cups.
Since most people find those food "bad" for them in other ways, it's not
a great loss. A related update: I have gotten so many emails from people who have become
convinced that "bad" foods make their pulling worse, I don't save them any more.
It must be several hundred by now. I only keep those emails from people who
have gotten past the first week of the diet (or more) and have found it to work.
That number is approximately 150 to date. Good luck!
John."
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