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I am raising money for Matthew’s Friends because the work they do and the support to they offer is absolutely life-changing. 

My mum is epileptic, and a couple of years ago her fits were completely uncontrolled for no apparent reason and no matter what anti-epileptics or medicines she took, nothing seemed to work. Her GP finally suggested changing her diet and going onto medical Keto, with the support of Matthew’s Friends who are specialists in this field. 

The medical Ketogenic diet is NOT the fad diet that you’ve probably heard of, it’s not as simple as ‘no carbs’, it’s extremely strict, everything has to be weighed and tracked and the effects it has on the body can cure a number of neurological and physical problems if done properly. 

‘A medical ketogenic diet is a very low carbohydrate, high fat diet which changes the metabolism in the body from burning glucose for energy to burning fat for energy.   It is currently a recognised treatment for intractable (drug resistant) epilepsy, Glut 1 Deficiency and Pyruvate Dehydrogenase Deficiency. Increasingly the diet is being looked at in other neuro-metabolic conditions as well as Brain Cancer.’

For my mum, this helped to regulate her seizures and paved the way to her recovery back to as normal as she can be. For children, research suggests that the Ketogenic diet, if done properly, can essentially reverse the effects of epilepsy and can stop it from continuing into the course of adolescence and adulthood; the founder, Emma Williams MBE, knows first hand how important this diet can be as her son Matthew unfortunately suffered brain damage as a result of uncontrolled seizures as a child, but had Emma been listened to by doctors when she tried to push for this treatment when he was an infant, this might never have happened. Her work, and the work, research and support that the charity gives and has given to thousands of families is absolutely fundamental in the epileptic community and it has changed the lives of so many people across the globe. 

From a purely personal point of view, the Ketogenic diet has changed my mum’s life, and as a result has also changed ours, as her epilepsy is now much more regulated, despite coming off the diet in late 2019! 

The charity relies on donations for the work that they do, and the amount of work they do is hugely impressive, personalised, and they are leaders in this field. Their work is crucial for so many people across the globe and raising money to help change other families’ lives in the same way that ours changed is so important to me.