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Mysterious shortness of breath: What has helped you?

Lung Health | Last Active: 6 days ago | Replies (3422)
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@husy

So I am checking in 6 months after the onset of my shortness of breath (January this year).

Things have improved quite a bit. most of the time I don't notice it that much, but things have been relatively stable in terms of intensity since April (no improvements since then really...

It's at its worst:

-first thing in the morning.
-after meals, particularly meals that rich in sugar. breakfast (cereal and dairy) in particular, and today I was fine until I had a pint of lime juice... And that flared things up for about 3 hours after.

Has anyone else noticed a worsening with sugar intake / is there a suspected correlation with blood sugar? post meal spikes seem to be the main spikes for me.

weirdly, I have not noticed anything major if I drink alcohol though, which would sort of invalidate that...

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Replies to "So I am checking in 6 months after the onset of my shortness of breath (January..."
fefemagee | @fefemagee | Jul 9, 2023

I just sent a message to Gabriel the other day stating that after I eat, I feel as if it’s worse. My lungs and diaphragm feel they won’t expand.

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Gabe, Volunteer Mentor | @gabrielm | Jul 9, 2023

@husy, I'm glad your symptoms have improved. That's always a good sign.

If you're anything like me, I was a snorer and mouth breather throughout the night. I believe this contributed to me also feeling a bit worse in the morning. Large volume of breathing that I think caused me to hyperventilate somewhat and took a while for me to breath normally.

There's a little trick as part of the Buteyko method where you tape your mouth shut at night with cotton athletic tape, a small piece running vertically under the nose and down to the chin. The idea being it makes you reduce your breathing throughout the night. I kept this up for a few weeks and it seemed to improve things. Just a thought for you to consider.

I definitely notice mine to be worse after heavy meals. I have since changed my diet to be less carb-centric and more fruit, vegetable, fiber, and protein focused. I eat smaller and incorporate intermittent fasting so as to not feel so full of food so much. I think this has slowly helped my breathing improve a bit more over the past few weeks. I've also incorporated daily walking in addition to mild weight lifting.

I'm not sure if there's a direct correlation to blood sugar, but those of us that are sensitive to breathing issue I think sugar can affect it perhaps in ways we don't understand. But I say it's always worth a try to modify certain things in your lifestyle to see what works. I'm always experimenting!

Alcohol was hit or miss for me. I'm not much of a drinker, but times that I've had 2-3 beers in a sitting, I noticed that sometimes it affected me and sometimes it didn't. Alcohol does make me a lot hungrier and thus makes it more likely to overeat so cutting it down a while back to the occasional drink I think also helped, but hard to tell on that one.

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