Creaky Joints and the Blood Type Diet

About a week ago, I made a bold decision to embark on a radically different nutrition plan - Type O Diet for Arthritis. Since then, I have removed the following from my eating plan, if not quite from my consciousness:

*Caffeine
*All refined carbs (including sugar and all flours)
*Most grain products
*Most dairy products (I'm still eating a little yogurt and a miniscule amount of cheese)
*All nightshades - that's potatoes, peppers (including hot ones), paprika, eggplant and tomatoes

I've also had partial success with alcohol, having only had two glasses of red wine They were not the giant 'takes half a bottle' glasses either, although I do have some of those glasses, and they are gorgeous.

I'm not doing this to lose weight, because experience has proved to me that you don't have to remove anything from your diet in order to get leaner. I'm doing it to see if I can get some improvement in my creaky, squeaky joints.

I've never been what you would call a limber person, but the last few years have been ridiculous. I was kneeling in front of the fire about two weeks ago and when I got up my ankles, knees and hips were aching so badly it took a while to straighten them out! Note: I'm not 110 years old. I'm not even 40, people! For the last 6 weeks I've been having some diagnostic scans on my sore and stiff hip which firstly showed a minor tendon problem (labral tear) and then showed the beginnings of osteoarthritis. Bloody Hell. I'm beginning to rust! This can't be allowed to happen! So, of course, I did what any rational being would do in the circumstances; I Googled.

The first thing I discovered was something I remembered from my Naturopathy studies, and that is, with osteoarthritis, expect a very slow improvement. My basic plan is to adopt an anti-inflammatory diet (check, see above), remove nightshades which are known to slow down cartilage repair in people that are sensitive to them (check), take lots of glucosamine, chondoitin, collagen, hyaluronic acid and fish oil (check, check, check) and do it perfectly for at least three months before expecting any results (one week down, go me!). I also found quite a few anecdotal success stories on the Blood Type Diet site and this encouraged me to embrace my Type O-ness and see what eventuates.

I'm feeling quietly optimistic. Before the actual diagnosis, I'd already been thinking quite hard about my systemic stiffness and what might be causing it. I made the discovery that during my eat-stop-eat fasts, or on any day when I'd eaten low-carb and dropped a bunch of water weight, my joints ached less. This got me thinking about food sensitivities and that I might need to clean up my act, and now I've done it. I have no idea if I went through any food-related withdrawl symptoms because, if they were there, they were not as bad as the caffeine withdrawl, which I think I'm not quite over. My de-caffeination symptoms mostly consisted of many random acts of bitchiness. It was like having intense PMT rage all the time arrrrrgh why is everybody so annoying, all the time, and especially right now! I'm a charm right now. Really. Come on over for a c-c-c-coffee *tears up*.

As for exercising, I'm going to take it intuitively. I'm doing Turbulence Training bodyweight exercises, and I'll keep that up. I'm also doing some yoga to stretch out my tight bits. And then, when I've done my exercise and eaten my chicken and jerusalem artichokes with no tomato salsa I go and stand by my coffee machine and take a few deep sniffs. Do you think that's ok?