My Side Effects to Dr. B. Diet Plan

I decided to recap my side effects with my Dr. Bernstein Diet, just to give an idea on what to expect not only for the positives – which there are of course – but also about the negatives and having a better understanding on what this Diet Plan could cause.

Usually in the morning I'm always starving, but the Ketosis is basically this: making your body in a starvation mode so the ketones will send messages to the brain to use the stored fat to save the whole system.

Since I'm dehydrated in the morning, extremely hungry and weak, I can barely walk to go to work. I use to walk to go to the clinic the first week, after that I decided to take the streetcar, definitely too long walk for my weak strengths. So Weakness is one factor that it's constant in my Dr. B. Diet experience, I'm usually a super active woman, I have – outside this plan – the energy of a 5 years old. But not now with the little amount of Calories that I take every day. I go to sleep way earlier than normal; I'm slow in doing almost every physical activity, maybe due to the low sugar intake. For this reason but not only, having a regular workout is out of discussion.

If you're a woman expect to have your period messed up, most likely absence of ovulation. It is obviously normal; the human body is a perfect machine so there's no chance to prepare the system for a pregnancy when it's in starvation trying to survive!

Hair loss is another common factor of malnutrition, although is medically supervised this Diet allows an average intake of 500/600 Calories, it can be considered malnutrition so your hair may fall down quicker than usual, fish oil could help to prevent this, but it's just fish oil and not a miracle pill.

Less relevant - but still not a pleasant experience for me - are the bruises. Three times a week injections will causes you bruises here and there from time to time, especially when the body fat starts to be less.

Dizziness is another random side effect that I experienced during this Diet Plan, it is clear for my body, that it happens when I'm physically tired, hungry or I simply didn't have my supplement pills yet. I did not find a logic explanation for that, rather than the malnutrition.

I feel always cold, although it seems an unrelated symptom to the Diet, I noticed that lots of people following this Plan had the same issue. I'm not sure if it's the lack of body fat, lack of energy for the body to produce heat or something else.

Overall they're all bearable side effects; the only one that makes my life a bit different is my lack of energy and strengths. It prevents me to do many things I used to do and I enjoy; like hiking, running, going for long walks on the lake, and so on.