Its been a while
In fact its been a good solid year since I’ve written
anything here about my health and life journey. Part of that is because things
have been fairly dynamic, and part of that is because things have been fairly
difficult.
While everything I’ve previously discussed about my health
has been through the lens of autoimmune issues, it was already becoming
increasingly clear a year or more ago that the situation had been evolving and
that an updated paradigm was warranted. While the autoimmune issues were very
real – you don’t just test positive for every marker of Lupus without an
autoimmune problem – and the likely root cause of my overall condition, my
symptoms were becoming increasingly decoupled from acute immune triggers. This
had been the case since at least mid-2023, after my second week+ long fast. By
this point, I had fasted for a week on two occasions, for 3-5 days on several
more, and for 36-48 hours probably dozens of times. I had adhered for long
stretches to a pure carnivore diet, and only gently introduced the
(theoretically) safest non-carnivore options like organic fruit and honey. To
my knowledge, this is the only evidence-based approach to seriously fighting
autoimmune disease and, one way or another, I had largely moved past these
issues by the end of 2023.
What was also clear, however, is that I wasn’t healthy. In
retrospect, I was still struggling to totally move on from the autoimmune
paradigm and was sometimes shoehorning symptom triggers into that myopic view
when it wasn’t warranted. To make things worse, the realization that the
resolution of autoimmune markers and reduction in autoimmune triggers weren’t
going to portend a full-scale return to health was fairly demoralizing. That
can all be seen by simply looking back one year, at some musings that I’m not
overly proud to have written.
What I knew very clearly at the time but was not fully
exploring was that I struggled quite a bit at work. And this was despite the
fact that my work was, um…..not particularly challenging. Bluntly and briefly,
I was under the supervision of a boss who put her greatest efforts into
ensuring that as much work as possible was shunted away from our department. It
was a boring, uncomfortable work environment, but certainly not a busy one.
Still, I did enough work to know that my symptoms were exacerbated and magnified
by the effort. Conversely, symptoms diminished whenever I was away, and able to
fully rest my cognitive faculties.
The notion that I was suffering from impaired brain
metabolism was something in which I became increasingly confident over the
winter. While specific foods didn’t trigger acute symptom onset like they used
to, I could still manipulate symptoms by, for example, binge eating, which
would preclude symptom onset in part or entirely. Exercise helped considerably
as well, as I was often barely able to shuffle out the door before eventually
finding improved health over the course of multiple hours of walk-jogging at an
easy effort. These factors, combined with the obvious acute distress that
accompanied mental effort either at work or home, largely cemented my new
metabolic paradigm of neurological dysfunction.
However, the final nail in the coffin, so to speak, didn’t
come until the first weekend in February. I flew to Las Vegas to spend a long
weekend with my family, and frankly I felt like shit. I struggled mightily with
pain and numbness on the flight, and the plan my wife and I had to show up
early for a day of hiking ended with her leaving me behind to hike on her own.
After a full week of work, I wasn’t in sufficient neurological health to
function at a normal human level.
But, after a couple days wandering around the strip with
alcohol in my hand, that had changed considerably. To be clear, this wasn’t
some Hangover-esque degree of debauchery. I just simply sipped alcohol (largely
not caring how it might affect my symptoms) for most of a couple consecutive days
and felt really quite good. As I progressed from shaking in the trailhead
parking lot to feeling as well as I had in months, I finally confirmed with
certainty the metabolic damage to my brain and abandoned any remnants of the
autoimmune paradigm for good.
The reason I was able to do this is because alcohol is, for
all intents and purposes, a brain fuel. The traditional notion is that the
brain only uses glucose for energy, but this isn’t really true (much more on
this in a later post). The brain can also use, among other substrates, alcohol.
So while I had once again wrecked my body all week by straining my brain in an
energy-deficient state, I had followed it with a relaxed weekend of frequently
available energy flowing from large cans of hard seltzer. While the obvious
overall health implications still apply, in this case my brain and nervous
system were recovering thanks specifically to an uncommonly available energy
flow.
I’ll write specifically amount impaired brain metabolism and
its consequences in part 3, but for now its enough to know that I had
confidently assessed the major problem I was still dealing with. The arduous
duel tasks of demonstrating it and dealing with it will comprise part 2.
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