An unusual approach to diet for long covid recovery

On this site, I review the strategies that helped me recover from long covid and chronic fatigue syndrome. See all long covid recovery posts.

This is for information purposes only and nothing I share should be considered medical advice. What works for me may or may not work for you. Please do your own research and consult with your own trusted medical professionals.

A starting point: Mediterranean Diet

I like many people started my recovery with diet changes. My dad switched to a Mediterranean/Blue Zone diet a few years ago and recovered from a serious health condition without other medical interventions. Feeling inspired, I started here.

My diet was already fairly healthy. But I swapped out a lot of grains for fruits and vegetables, added a lot of olive oil and really cut back on my desserts and meat.

The nice thing about a Mediterranean or Blue Zone diet is it is not restrictive or difficult to follow in any way. It’s the way many people eat around the world, who live long happy lives.

It is also delicious and fun to eat!

However, this did not magically cure my long covid.

Here are some of the other diets I tried…

Gluten- and dairy-free

A doctor told me to cut out all wheat and dairy, which is just depressing when your life is already very hard. But I tried it for a month. Nothing changed. I eventually ate a delicious ice cream cone and felt better than I had in a long time and then gave up this diet.

Intermittent fasting

Dr. Google told me that people were curing their long covid with intermittent fasting because it clears out the viral debris? Lets the cells rest? Or something? I was never so sure. I started with having a restricted eating window as recommended. But this did not go well. I felt hungry. And I have a history of not eating enough food, so this diet really stressed me out.

I talked to my counselor and we agreed that things that caused me this much stress were not the way forward.

Migraine diet

I developed chronic migraine as part of my symptoms, which means I had a splitting headache, nausea and dizziness almost every day for many months. It’s as bad as it sounds.

The migraine elimination diet as outlined in Heal Your Headache is extremely restrictive. Like no opinions or garlic, which are in almost everything pre-prepared. You must follow it for MONTHS before adding food back in one by one. At this point, I would try anything to be pain-free, so I did the diet fully.

Many months later, it turns out no food triggered my migraines. But the diet does tell you to also test all your medications! Turns out one of them was significantly contributing to my migraines and I stopped it. So this diet was not a total wash. But the help had nothing to do with food.

Bottom line: Restrictive diets were not helpful for my recovery

When I was trying different diets, I was exhausted and had limited energy. I struggled with having enough energy to put something in the microwave, let alone cook something complicated from scratch. So I eventually decided fed is best.

There is substantial evidence that long covid is a mind body condition. To recover, we need to teach our nervous system that we are safe. Being scared of eating the wrong food or putting lots of energy into eating restrictive diets did not help me feel safe.

Food is also social. According to polyvagal theory, we need to connect to others to get into “rest and digest” mode which promotes healing. So restrictive diets made it even harder to spend time with people as I had to ask what was in everything I ate.

Lastly, food is delicious. Life with long covid is hard. So I found I felt best when I enjoyed sugar, gluteny donuts when I wanted one.