Myopia: Quitting Glasses?

[hnsight_ner]

Any of you guys try to quit having to wear glasses for nearsightedness?

I started about seven months ago, with a rehab program. Down to -2.25, started out with -4.00 prescription.

Pretty amazing. Before, totally blind without glasses. Now I can skip a day here and there altogether (as long as the lighting is decent). Supposedly another year and a half or so and I should be at or really close to 20/20. Posted some lens comparison pictures here: http://www.cedonulli.com/my-eyeballs-vs-limiting-beliefs/ (hope that's cool, link and whatnot?).

Eating makes a pretty big difference too, ie. skipping sugars and simple carbs. And drinking. A night of boozing and I can't see for shit for the next two days.

[mksiemens]

that's wild.

never even heard of that before.

so your prescription for glasses actualy changed that much?

what did ur optometrist have to say about that?

[hnsight_ner]

that's wild.

never even heard of that before.

so your prescription for glasses actualy changed that much?

what did ur optometrist have to say about that?

It didn't change that whole amount at once. For the first month they kept me at the same, the following month based on my measurements, they took it down one diopter, to -3.00.

That took me about a month and a half to get fully used to and see 20/20 (with the glasses on). After that all the decrements have been about 1/4 diopter each. Apparently I was overprescribed to begin with, and part of my myopia was ciliary (which they say can be corrected pretty quickly). So now the improvements are not as fast, but still getting better a bit at a time.

My optometrist said "that's not possible" and "no, I can't give you lower prescriptions". I quit going there, buying my glasses online now.

It's super nice to actually be able to find my glasses, if I'm not wearing any.

[Bacon]

Probably not exactly the same, but when I dropped from 350 down to about 200 my vision got dramatically better.

I'm still wearing glasses.. for 20/15 vision, but w/o them I'm still 20/20. Something (nonsense?) about extra rods/cones in my eyes, but then, 2 optometrists have said the same thing, so who knows.

[Relic]

do you do any eye exercises or anything? I know the eye is a muscle so I would think that it would be possible to be able to improve your eyes to some extent despite conventional wisdom.

[shiggles]

So what did you actually change to get this kind of improvement?

Diet, eye exercises etc.?

[hnsight_ner]

So what did you actually change to get this kind of improvement?

Diet, eye exercises etc.?

The main idea I guess is how glasses change the focal plane in your eye.

All the rehab stuff is centered around using a specific prescription strength for near work, like on the computer. It lets me only see clearly to about 20 inches, and I keep far enough from the screen where the image is just barely in focus. I always alter that distance a bit. There's a distance calculator on Alex site, and I keep track of how many centimeters I can move back and still see clearly. I use it as a log for improvement.

I also have a 'normalized' prescription, one that's about 1/4 diopter lower than the correction that the centimeter calculator suggests. So I can see clearly at a distance, but only as long as I make a conscious effort to focus. After a few months when my vision clears up with that prescription, I get another 1/4 lower.

There's a bit more to it with the details of how long to do what, but that's about the gist of it. No weird voodoo.

Aside from bulking up (NF!) and getting my eyeballs back in shape, the fun of the myopia rehab thing really is this: http://www.myopiachallenge.com/vision-improvement-an-opportunity-to-experiment-with-style

[TheRedWriter]

This is extremely fascinating. While no doctor has ever come out and said it, year after year my vision degrades. I am very interested in seeing how this plays out for me as I continue to loose weight and regain fitness.

Thanks for sharing this.

[JessOfAllTrades]

I have to admit, I'm highly intrigued by this. While I kind of like wearing glasses (I was 20/20 till high school, didn't wear them all the time till college), I'm starting to fall out of love with the burden and the expense of contacts when I want to go glasses-free.

[Elenea]

When I was a little kid with glasses one of my neighbours talked about how she trained her eyes to wean herself off of using glasses.  It's always been kind of rolling around in the back of my mind, and I'm always a bit loath to increase my glasses/contacts prescription - unless my sight is noticably worse. 

 

Granted, my eyes are currently an -8.50, and I am seriously lethal without any eyewear.  I can't really function at all, and to read anything it's practically got to be on my nose.  I'm sure staring at computer screens all day at work and home doesn't help anything.

 

I think I'm at the point where my eyes are finally levelling out, but my eye doctor bumped my prescription up anyway last ime.  I got a second opinion and that doctor confirmed the -8.50 is really where I should be.  It really frustrates me that despite the fact I told my doctor that I thought she was overcorrecting my eyes, she changed it anyway.  I'm wearing my old prescription now because I don't see the point in changing.  I'm fairly certain that wearing the higher prescription will just continue to make my eyes worse.

[zackaryirlbeck]

Wow this is interesting. I wear glasses for near sited and I hate them. I want ro do something lime this.

[Ataraxia]

How much energy and time did it take you to make this progress?  I want to do this, but I'm afraid of whether or not I have enough room for this training in my life.

[Birdwing]

My mom did something like that! She used to be useless without her glasses when I was a kid. When I was about 14, her glasses broke, and we couldn't afford to get them replaced. So she didn't replace them, and she still hasn't. It's been about 9 years now. I see her squinting sometimes to see things that are far away and small, but she's also nearing 50, and perhaps her eyes are "getting old".

 

I heard that it's something like, optometrists tend to "over-correct" the eye with the glasses, and the eyes worsen over time.

[Linada]

I have recently been retrying this after slacking off for a long time. The ciliary (muscle based) myopia really does correct itself quickly. It's like any other muscle really. Rest it well, stretch it out a bit, give it the right challenge and it will adapt. I got a few centimetres worth of improvement from just a few days of trying not to keep my nose to the paper. I expect it will take a fair bit of hard work to change the actual eyeball shape based myopia, but if bones can adapt their shape to load, why not a squishy little eyeball?

[Soujourney]

Hi guys,

Anyone check the site (now not working) or try anything along these lines since? Keen to see if anyone has had changes.

[jasonkoller]

So maybe I missed it cause I skimmed so fast cause I was so excited that this might be possible,

But is there a link or something that explains how to train eyes?

[Kiazi]

I want to tackle this as part of one of my next challenges I have started training my eyes one and off several times. But never really committed to it