Summer Health Update Pt 1 - I'm Still Not Quite Healthy

 

A couple Saturdays ago I ran 22 miles. It was slow, and easy. But it was 22 miles nonetheless – my longest run since Kona almost four years ago. Two days after that I ran a semi-spontaneous mile at a local track. It was slow, and quite hard. But it was fast enough to suggest some fitness was coming along. In only my 9^th week back running, I had clearly managed at least some degree of improvement.  

Unfortunately, that day I also had woken up feeling less than optimal – just a bit agitated, heart rate was high, slight head and neck pains. The kind of extremely low-grade nervous system dysfunction I had largely avoided the prior couple of months. This got worse for a couple of days, until I finally realized the vitamin D drops I had started taking (more on this in the next post) were causing the problem. The drops were suspended in coconut oil, and even just a drop or two a day turned out to be enough to start triggering my ever-lurking neurological symptoms.

My diet had remained quite strict through the spring and summer, but was more inclusive than it had been at one point. I was consistently consuming reasonable amount of organic fruits – specifically berries and avocados – without issue, to go along with copious meat and occasional fish and egg consumption. This had been working fine, and had resulted in weeks of borderline symptom free training – I was running nearly every day, and hitting upwards of 60 miles per week.

However, even after quitting the vitamin D drops, the diet and my health kind of came apart on me a bit. An all-day road trip saw me cave and drink a cup of coffee, in addition to plantain chips and the consumption of packaged meats that served as my reintroduction to pepper and other seasonings. Lasting for several days after, for the first time since spring, an entire constellation of neurological symptoms returned – limbs tingling and going numb when sitting, brain fog, heart palpitations, increased pain and sensitivity in my neck. Just like that, I was no longer running again.

To be clear, it hasn’t been dietary factors alone triggering or exacerbating symptoms, and my health hadn’t been literally perfect. But it had been quite close, and my mistakes in those couple of weeks both temporarily derailed my progress and made clear that my underlying issues still required some reasonable measure of improvement to return to full health. The poor air quality in the decades old building at which I work seems a bit of a trigger, but has been partially remedied by an air purifier. The smoke from the Canadian wildfires may be as well, and significant emotional and/or cognitive strain still seems to exacerbate any symptoms already present.

But mostly it’s the food, or the plants specifically. So now I retrace my steps yet again, and hope for even further improvement. I’ve just ended a nearly 4 day fast as I type this (the previous 8 day fast in April marked a massive step forward and my return to quasi-normal health and exercise), and intend now to redouble my efforts to avoid dietary mistakes that threaten to disrupt my progress. Beef, salmon, eggs, some organic fruit remain the staples and will stay that way for quite some time, ideally without exception. While there is still a fair bit of progress to be made, I feel generally good about my health, both with respect to the gradual neurological/autoimmune progress and (as I’ll write about next) in a comprehensive metabolic sense.