My Ear Hurts, It Must Be My Low-Carb Diet

If you hurt, then it MUST be caused by your low-carb diet, right?

Today has been one long, painful day for me. A couple of days ago, I noticed my ear started irritating me with an annoyingly persistent pain that has gotten progressively worse. I cleaned out my ears with hydrogen peroxide, flushed them with this blue bulb in an ear wax cleaning kit and even put alcohol in them to help kill whatever it is that got in my ears to make them hurt.

Since I use a headset at work to talk on the telephone with customers, this made my ear hurt even more. To give you an idea of how bad I was hurting, I took my lunch break which is usually reserved for working out at the YMCA and I drove home to clean out my ears with the peroxide/flushing/alcohol treatment...AGAIN to see if they would feel any better. I also did something else I don't like to do and that's taking some medicine to feel better. One of my coworkers gave me a couple of ibuprofen and I took them hoping they would help reduce the inflammation in my ear.

Whatever did the trick, the pain has begun to subside somewhat. But I can still feel the pressure and pain every time I move my jaw and we'll definitely monitor this the next couple of days to see if I need to go to the doctor about it or not. One thing's for sure, I won't be sleeping on that ear tonight! :-O

Why did I bring this up? Well, you're never gonna believe what somebody said to me about my earache. This person knows I am livin' la vida low-carb and smugly proclaimed that my ear pain "probably has something to do with that low-carb diet you're on." HUH?! Are you kidding me? What the blankity-blank does my diet have to do with my ear hurting?

But you know what, I'm glad this came up because it is something I've been meaning to address for a long time. Isn't it interesting how every little pain or problem that your body goes through ever since you've been on the low-carb lifestyle is now under this gigantic microscope for everyone to analyze and examine as evidence of what low-carb does to you? This isn't fair to the low-carb lifestyle, but that's exactly what happens.

Oh, that low-carber has a cold, he must not be eating enough fruits and vegetables to fight it off. Jeepers, you broke a bone in your wrist, your low-carb diet must not be giving you enough calcium. Gosh, your cholesterol is over 200, you really shouldn't eat all that fat. Have you heard any of these kinds of statements before? I'm sure you have and frankly it's quite annoying.

You never hear anyone talk about how the low-fat diet or vegetarian lifestyle causes the physical problems that those people go through, do you? Then why do people blame low-carb for our ailments other than the obvious disdain that so many have for this way of eating? It's a conundrum that will take real people like you and me to just live our lives as examples of what people following this nutritional approach are really like. One-by-one, we can impact those around us...slowly.

We're not some space aliens (well, not all of us!) roaming Earth with our "strange" diet. We are real live human beings who are eating the way our ancestors have been eating for thousands of years. Of course we're gonna have a sniffle here and there as well as the bumps and bruises that come with living life. Yet, those things are not CAUSED by low-carb living. Things happen and that's that. Enough of this nonsense about low-carb being at the root of all of our health problems already!

Do you have a story like my earache being linked to livin' la vida low-carb that you'd like to share? Feel free to click on the comment link below and tell us all about it. I'm sure there are other low-carbers out there who have experienced lamebrained comments like this as well. Oh, do tell.