Using Dietary Cycles to Prevent Restless Legs Symptoms (Part 1)

I have had restless legs syndrome (RLS), which we called “jumpy legs” in our family, since about age 11. It usually kept me up until 4:00 AM every night, after which I had to get up about 6:00 for school. I was continuously sleep-deprived. This sleep deprivation continued until…

Unexpected relief

At the age of 27 (1979-80), I went on a trans-African camping expedition. During the trip, we took quinine to prevent malaria, and I didn’t have restless legs for the first time I could remember. When I got back to the USA, my doctor prescribed 325 mg of quinine sulfate for my restless legs, which I did not take regularly/preventively, but only as needed (that is, before bed if I had restless legs). The effect of quinine sulfate on restless legs is the closest thing to a miracle I have ever experienced.

Before I even got into bed, I could feel the effect, which was like a warm, cozy, totally relaxing “wash” over my legs. (To me, quinine is the only effective medication for RLS; the new medications don’t work as well and appear to have horrific mental side effects.) I continued to use quinine tablets as my first line of defense against RLS until…

Managing other health issues

In 1989-90 I traveled for a year and a half around East and Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, when I returned, I developed candidiasis (another horror story). It was when trying to diagnose (pre-internet) and treat this disease, that I made my discovery about what was causing my restless legs. This was because, in order to try to pinpoint the causes of my candidiasis symptoms, I had to eliminate virtually all the foods I normally eat. (An aside on candidiasis: After six months of misery and incapacitation from this grossly underestimated disease [not recognized by most doctors at the time], a friend suggested I might have candidiasis. A doctor prescribed oral Nystatin, and within three weeks all the symptoms were gone.) That’s another story, but the point is, my experience candidiasis had a silver lining, which was to solve my RLS problem.

Seeing improvement with an elimination diet

During candidiasis I was fasting (or semi-fasting) and systematically adding things back into my diet. I noticed that I didn’t have RLS during fasting times. I had also read the book "An Alternative Approach to Allergies" by Theron G. Randolph, which was an early book exploring environmental causes of disease (not just “allergies” but many kinds of reactions—very bad book title). Fairly quickly I figured out that in my case, restless legs were a withdrawal symptom to certain foods that I was eating on a regular schedule. To summarize the primary point of that book:

I had to eat trigger foods on a schedule

Everybody knows that most people can be “addicted” to certain substances, such as caffeine, alcohol, or nicotine. The result is that when one imbibes the substance, there is some positive response, but after some hours, the positive reaction wears off, and you have withdrawal symptoms (e.g. caffeine headache); then you re-ingest the substance, and so forth.

This is called “addiction” when the substance is something that is “bad” for you and/or you are unable to stop the cycle. But the addictive substances that are well known are not the only ones that have this effect—why would they be? Almost any chemical you ingest could have an effect on your particular body chemistry. For example, some people get tinnitus after taking aspirin. Most people have noticeable responses to spicy foods. Some people can’t stomach dairy products. Some food may cause a canker sore. Foods are just tastefully dressed chemicals, and there are all kinds of things that happen when people eat them.

Generally one doesn’t notice the effects, but with some foods one may get into a cycle of exposure/withdrawal. Each person has their own food cycles/addictions, but they have no ill effects, and few of them dictate our diet choices. People just tend to eat certain foods on certain schedules and are unaware of any food responses unless something “goes wrong.”

In my case, restless legs was a withdrawal symptom for a small number of foods that I ate on a regular cycle. Symptoms of withdrawal are usually much harder to spot than initial responses to ingestion like a stomach ache, because they do not occur right after eating something, but hours later.

Identifying my food triggers

I immediately found a handful of foods that led to my RLS, and by paying attention to what I was eating and when, I learned all my cycles. For example, I was on about a 5-hour cycle on milk (that is, I would have restless legs about 5 hours after my last milk intake — and it might not even be the milk; it might be a chemical used in processing or preserving it. I was on a 12-hour cycle for eggs, and a longer cycle for beer and cooked tomatoes.

I made a list of my food triggers, the number of hours in the cycle (ranges between 3 hours and 24 hours), and other notes. For example, 90 percent of my restless legs symptoms occur in the left leg, so when my right leg twitches, it is very easy to find the culprit since I have only three known triggers (rum, pecans, corn).

When I reached menopause, I noticed that the number of foods/other substances causing RLS increased dramatically from about five (milk, corn, beer, tomato, chicken) to about 25 (but lately seems to be diminishing). They include mostly foods and a few additives and medications. Some are things I eat every day; others I rarely eat. (My research was made much easier, I suppose, because for most of my life I was poor and almost never ate packaged foods or ate out, sparing me from lengthy ingredients lists or unknown ingredients.)

Part 2 continues here.