Some Interesting Self-Diagnosis and Findings (Diet's Impact) Regarding My Tinnitus

My tinnitus is very strange in the sense that it fluctuates which in of itself is not unique but the fluctuation seems to occur after waking up from sleep. In other words, the severity of my tinnitus for the entire day is realized in the morning. If I wake up with it being a 3, it stays a 3 and if I wake up being a 9, it stays a 9 no matter what I try to calm it down.

So I set out to find out the reason for it and my findings are quite interesting and may help others. When my tinnitus started a little over a year ago, I tried everything from pills, vitamins, supplements, working out and diet. Nothing has affected by tinnitus more than diet so I try my best to stick to a healthy diet and avoid foods that tend to make tinnitus worse even though I could never link a food or drink to an increase in tinnitus in the short-term. Even with a healthy diet, I could not link the randomness of my tinnitus to diet directly until I began to avoid eating dinner completely. I only realized this for a few weeks now after carefully tracking the severity of my tinnitus to when I was eating (or not eating).

I went one week with tinnitus being at a level 2-3 and I honestly thought that it spontaneously went away. This was precisely the time that I was eating a light healthy lunch (sometimes just a protein bar) and a small snack at around 6-7PM as my "dinner". My tinnitus went from a high pitched crickets to a dull hum that I could only hear in a quiet noise-free room. Well, I broke my diet last Saturday when we had some friends over and I really gorged myself with junk food, huge dinner and topped it off with dessert as you can imagine being on strict diet for a week made me go all-out. Sunday morning I woke up with my tinnitus being a 8-9 and has since stayed around that range (has been 24 hours).

Could it be a coincidence? Doubtful since when I thought back of my fluctuating tinnitus in the past, I always remembered that I was on some type of diet on and off. For example I did a challenge with my coworker on who could go longer with no food and just water. Well, I went 4 days and when I think back, I had virtually no tinnitus during those days.

The theory I have is that eating food releases insulin and that breaks down sugars into immediate energy, If you have just enough of this free energy, your muscles and organs just use it to function. If you have an excess of this free energy, it somehow affects the brain and nerves that makes them more "excited" which in turn turns up the gain of tinnitus. When you go with little food, your body and metabolism slow down and it so happens that it also turns down the gain for my tinnitus.

I know the link between diet and tinnitus is not a secret but I'm just surprised at the level that it can affect it, at least for me. Going from a tolerable, almost forgetting you have tinnitus to driving you crazy just from diet is a huge affect that I can't just ignore. It certainly has more of an affect than any supplements, pills and vitamins I've tried. At minimum, knowing this fact puts me at ease since knowing the WHY gives YOU the power to control your tinnitus and that's huge. I'll continue to monitor my diet and go back on the super light, no dinner diet to see what affect it has on my tinnitus and will report back any findings. For the extreme sufferers, it's worth giving it a try if you've tried all other options. As a bonus, you lose weight and your clothes fit better.

 

Have you tried the ketogenic diet?