Paleo --> Peat --> Nutrigenetic Diet

That's right, I'm moving on... After trying Paleo and losing on it, besides a few kilos, lots of energy and precious thyroid tissue , I embarked on the Peat style diet and kept that up for eight months. I gained a lot of energy back, I increased my metabolic rate as reflected in my daily calories intake, I stuck to my pre-Paleo weight and I acquired a superior understanding of how my body works. ("Superior", as compared to the blissfully ignorant lifestyle I used to have before my health failed me, but I am sure many of you are way more in tune with their bodies than I can ever hope to be.)

I have been fascinated by deciphering the results of my genetic testing for a few weeks now and I am mesmerized by the potential answers that lie within the field of Nutrigenetics. 

I know, this is still in its infancy and there are no "gurus" around to make "following" a nutrigenetic diet an easier journey. Not that I paid attention to the "Peat practitioners" previously as I had been too burned with the Paleo "practitioners" to ever trust any of these folks again, but there is not even a Ray Peat in this emerging field. 

So much the better, no noise. These "practitioners" are all self-experimenters who gathered a bit of  knowledge, largely from extensive internet browsing, and who have superior online marketing skills. In Peatdom that is so obvious: Peat is making way less money than the astute "practitioners" who "translate" his work for their patients, whom I guess must be people too busy to bother reading all the Peat articles for themselves. The fact that these highly questionable "practitioners" do not only dispense nutritional information without qualification, but they also dabble in hormone supplementation, using a few intuitions of Peat's as "the science behind them" makes me shudder.

But enough of that. I never linked directly to them and if you used them, good luck to you, I hope no harm will ever come your way and I am the one who exaggerates here.

NUTRIGENETICS!

Just like I did not throw away many of the Paleo recommendations when I moved to Peat dieting (as a matter of fact, the valid parts of these diets tend to overlap, see the broth and/or gelatin example, which is carried forward from Paleo to PHD to Peat, in the order in which I discovered them or, rather, from Peat to Paleo to PHD, in their chronological order), I will preserve from the Peat lifestyle whatever worked for me in this self-tailored Nutrigenetic diet.

So, my Nutrigenetic diet will consist of cross-referencing my genetic risks and predispositions with the Peat style diet and adjusting everything so that I may not, well, succumb too early to the diseases that my genes "destined" me to encounter, should I not pay attention to my lifestyle and awaken any of the monsters laying dormant for now.

You see, I have already managed to disturb the Hashimoto monster during my Paleo/ketogenic experiment, and that was a second-rate one, hidden in the background, on the innocuous list of "typical risk factors".

Between "Scleroderma" and "Essential Tremor" there were a bunch of other conditions. Source: 23andme.com

Thus, believe me, I don't want to step on the Type 2 Diabetes or Coronary Heart Disease dragons, which reign supreme on top of my list of high risk, unlucky genetic combinations:

And the list goes on and on and on, unfortunately.. Source: 23andme, I hope they don't mind...:)

At some point on the same scary list, Hypothyroidism is mentioned, with 3 out of 5 markers indicative of higher risk...:(

Alas, it was in the (three) stars... Source: 23andme.com.

It will be a bit awkward to blog about this because that would mean revealing a lot of my genetic make-up.  On the other had, so what if I reveal too much information, who is tracking this down and what can they do about it? 

The risks associated with that are amply overshadowed by the chance that someone else might benefit, one way or another, from the story of my journey...

Biohackers or Simply Hacks?

“You should know that there’s a different way to live: you can feel delicious, vital, and genuinely content. I’m here to show you that you can live an extraordinary life and that you can feel great—regardless of your age, even if it sounds unlikely or unimaginable.”

(Dr. Sara Gottfried, “The Hormone Cure”, Scribner, 2013)

I would have read such statements with more than a bit of skepticism until a few days ago, when precisely this feeling of vitality and happiness took me by surprise and proved to me more than any book that what I have been experiencing for the past few years were hormonal imbalances.

I will get to the bottom of this and will “biohack” my way into making this glorious feeling permanent, whatever it takes.

I am now sure that my body has not been damaged consistently in any way by any autoimmune disease, that my connective tissues are healthy and that I would be contemplating a second part of my life in perfect health and feeling wonderfully vibrant if only I could find the right paths for my diet and, if need be, dietary supplementation.

I might have caught this at the turning point, where everything goes wrong starting from the most fragile tissues in one’s body: the thyroid gland, perhaps the thymus (more research necessary on this one). And I feel guilty for maybe having brought this upon myself by listening to a bunch of health gurus of the blogosphere: Catherine Shanahan, Mark Sisson, Dr. Jack Kruse, Chris Kresser, etc.

Having been burned once, I will keep a very watchful eye on all the “Ray Peat Practitioners” who write about health and give advice out there. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. I am examining their output, their relationships and the complex online marketing system which they are actively building as we speak.

And I am reading as many scientific studies as I can as I go through Dr. Peat’s main theories and advice.