Are you ready to begin your journey OUT of narcolepsy and INTO life but don’t know where to start?  Are you tired of hearing me talk about science-y stuff and that my family and I use diet to mitigate our symptoms?  Want me to just lay it out for you so you know what to do?  Yeah?  Well not yet.  Oh I know, I’m mean.

In the upcoming series Madcap Diet for Narcolepsy:  A Beginner’s Roadmap I will tell you HOW to do the diet my family and I follow.  But first, I have to give you a clearer picture of our destination.  After all, you need to know if you really want to take this trip with me.

The journey I’m asking you to take with me is not a journey that ends in a CURE for narcolepsy.  Nor is the diet a journey that takes all of your narcolepsy symptoms away as long as you are on it.

CURE:

1. to restore to health, soundness, or normality 
2. to bring about recovery from 
3. to deal with in a way that eliminates or rectifies 

This journey is about symptom mitigation: 

MITIGATE:

1. to cause to become less harsh 
2. to make less severe or less painful 

To be clear, this diet will help your symptoms become less harsh and less severe.  LESS.  My family and I still have narcolepsy, but we have LESSENED our symptoms.

I have a theory about what happened to our symptoms when we changed our diet.  Let’s see if I can explain the theory so that it makes sense…

There are so many things that happen when people without narcolepsy eat the Standard American Diet (SAD).  The phrases sleepy, tired, brain fogged, less energetic, fatigued, lethargic, sleep poorly (I could go on but won’t) are all used frequently in people’s vocabulary today because the nation as a whole is feeling the effects of what they eat.  Go back to the Science-y series and you’ll see that the effects of food on Orexin happen to EVERYONE, not just people with narcolepsy.

Narcoleptics feel these effects so much more acutely though.  If we are already feeling sleepy, tired, brain fogged, less energetic, fatigued, lethargic, sleep poorly, etc.  WHY ADD TO narcolepsy symptoms with what we eat?  My theory is that we should eat in a manner that honors narcolepsy.  Don’t add to the symptoms’ severity but instead do what we can to keep Orexin ON during the day when we need it most, and OFF when we need to sleep.

Make sense?  Good – because that my friends is our DESTINATION.

Before any road trip there should be some preparation before hitting the pavement.  In this new series Madcap Diet for Narcolepsy:  A Beginner’s Roadmap I’ll take you through all of the pre-trip activities so that we can begin the journey with a solid and safe start.  It’s not all about preparation though, I’ll be with you the entire trip as we make stops along the way (fuel-ups, roadside parks, scenic overlooks, overnight stays, and the like), otherwise known as THE DIET.  Each stop should give you greater wakefulness so that you can enjoy the journey.

Now that you know what our destination is, are you ready to begin your journey OUT of narcolepsy and INTO life?

Your Madcap Miss (a.k.a. Gina Dennis)

Let me be totally up front here…I AM NOT A DOCTOR, nor am I a nutritionist, I only have a tiny amount of formal training in such things as a Health Coach.  But I am a person with narcolepsy who uses dietary and lifestyle changes to mitigate my narcolepsy symptoms.  I’ve been experimenting with these changes since July 2011 and have successfully maintained a high level of narcolepsy symptom management since that date.  And so has my family with narcolepsy.   This website contains our personal stories, failures, and experiments.  In this website I will share with you the information that I have found most credible and some practical ideas for mitigating narcolepsy symptoms.  I beg you to check with your doctor before initiating any of the dietary changes I speak of, especially if you are taking any medications.

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