One Year Later

My father will not be a centenarian. May he rest in peace...

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I spent some time last autumn in the Neurology section, with him. All those elderly people trying to still function, battling it out, and the nurses and doctors assisting them in Purgatory, matter-of-factly... My respect for the medical establishment, imperfect as it may be, has increased even more. They have not saved my father, but they did extend his life by a few months...

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A neurologist thought I may suffer from a subclinical case of vasculitis. She had me try "Lyrica", which I could not endure. My pain, at its worst, is not worth the side effects and the zoning out. I tried "Gabaran" as well -- much easier on me: I composed many songs on the one and only pill I tried. I am glad to know there are such powerful painkillers out there, but I hope I will never have to use them consistently.

The neurologist also suspected an incipient diabetic neuropathy. Given my high genetic risk of diabetes, over 40%, I figured my following Dr. Peat's recommendations for almost a year must have been quite unfortunate. Luckily for me, her suggestion to help with this one worked wonders: "Milgamma" (B1 as a benfotiamine and B12). It was literally like growing back a bunch of nervous endings... I had come to accept that my right big toe had left the system for some idiosyncratic reason and I was not too worried (I should have been!) Well, I was overwhelmed to feel it return to me! Regeneration after degeneration, so there is hope!

So... I dropped my sugar consumption to almost zero. Peat was definitely wrong for me on this front!

No more weird numbness for me. That is a winner! And no, I don't miss OJ. I see it now, for myself, as the orange specter of diabetes.

Another huge improvement was the disappearance of the CA-125 marker.  I cannot be sure what brought that about. Except giving up sugar, I did not do any other spectacular diet changes.

One small thing I can think of is that I increased garlic consumption. My body was craving it. If it turns out this new garlic habit got rid of some incipient tumor, hey... The stench is a small price to pay. I also brought a bunch of PUFA back into my life in the form of potato chips -- I have to have them at least once or twice a week, dipped in my garlic salsa...

Thyroid function -- I am still at 25 mcg T4, but with my free T4 bumped up into a mid-range of normalcy (it used to hover to the lowest normal and even under that), with a rather high TSH by US standards (2.6). I think this is a pretty reasonable spot, I am sleeping well, I no longer experience those "hit by a truck" moments... Some days are better than others, energy-wise.  My weight is pretty much the same and nobody guesses my age, so I am alright. Actually, I look much better than I feel and people look confused and rather skeptical when they hear about my troubles.

I stopped measuring all the other hormones, I will let my body deal with them. I experimented with supplementation of most and I didn't like it one bit. Maybe I am oversensitive, or maybe I have a low tolerance -- my 23andme results show me as a slow metabolizer for many substances (including coffee, yet another reason for me to not follow Peat), so perhaps I should stay away from any "bio-hacking" that involves hormones. Nobody knows for sure how they work, anyway, so why be a guinea pig, life is too short even without self-experimentation.

In my search for the perfect seaside, I visited Cyprus and loved the taste of their produce... I hated the pollution, though...

I hope you are all doing well and staying healthy and gorgeous.

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...