One thing I learned early on in chronic illness was that if I simply didn’t eat I could avoid a lot of trouble. I just naturally fell into a pattern of eighteen hour fasts, there were years where that was the norm for me four to five days a week.
I had never done a long term fast, but I had read about it. I had to not eat for my surgery July 2nd, so I started fasting about forty hours in advance. This was abdominal surgery and I didn’t feel much like eating afterward, so I maintained pretty tight calorie restriction for five days. I kept it under 500 calories and it was all things that would mostly get handled by my stomach, leaving little to pass through.
A month passed between that surgery and my AI health diary suggesting that I might have MCAS - mast cell activation syndrome. During that time I did quite a few eighteen to twenty hour fasts, and a number of longer periods.
There’s a lot of information out there on fasting but I wanted detailed physical effects and I found this in a video by Dr. Eric Berg. Somewhere between eighteen and twenty four hours, your body enters autophagy, where it begins to recycle old, damaged proteins, as well as taking out some stuff in your microbiome.
When weighed during preop the scale said 206 pounds - for a body mass index of a porky 29, just a couple bags of Ruffles shy of being officially obese. My primary motivation to start fasting was avoiding wear marks on the last notch in my belt.
There were several the things I learned in the video that specifically got my interest.
I still thought I had a microbiome problem at that time, and was curious if autophagy would reduce the maladaptive histamine producing species.
Letting one’s gut rest as a source of reduced inflammation was something I intuitively knew, but I wanted to see what happened going further.
I already supplement with Noopept, which is a precursor for Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor. I wanted to supplement after the natural process had activated, to see if there were synergies.
Supplements:
I was fasting, not starving and dehydrating myself, there’s a big difference. This is what makes up a fast for me:
Vitamin C, vitamin K, boron, iron, a time release 5-HTP, L-theanine, and a multivitamin at wake time.
Glycine, NAC, taurine, L-glutamine, L-tyrosine, and DHA/EPA fish oil three times a day.
A low sugar electrolyte replacement using DripDrop three or four times a day.
The amino acids and fish oil were selected specifically for their effect on gut health. Your digestive tract resurfaces anywhere from every forty eight hours to once a week, depending on which portion, and I knew that was the source of my trouble. The electrolytes are a must, especially with flaky kidneys, especially out in the California summer heat. The low amount of calories in the DripDrop is not sufficient to break autophagy.
Conclusion:
The scale said 206 prior to surgery and I paused to check while writing this - 183.4 pounds. That’s a decrease from a BMI of 29 to 25.7. The healthy range for men is 23 to 25, and my weight from age twenty to forty was 185, plus or minus a couple pounds. That healthy range is 164 to 178 pounds at my height, and I’ve still got love handles, albeit deflated now, so I’m going to keep going.
My ALT dropped from 32 to 14 during that first month, and above 30 is an indicator of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD). I wanted to get a DEXA scan before I started, but could not afford it. I still want one now because I’m curious to see how much visceral fat I have left. I do not have a formal MCAS diagnosis yet, but I’m following the protocol for it and the results have been dramatic, as seen in SelfCare Saturday: Sleep. Visceral fat produces a cocktail of inflammatory cytokines that can raise the immune system noise floor, fostering mast cell degranulation.
Paying obsessive attention to food, meds, and supplements, along with how I felt, has produced some truly dramatic results for me. I’ve been a logger of such things for years, as I tried to hunt down why I was so sick. It took the breadth of knowledge of Anthropic’s LLM combined with my record keeping to finally solve something that plagued me for almost two decades.
I would not wish how I felt on anyone. If you are constantly under the weather too, I hope that you find some inspiration in this to start focusing on your troubles.
Here’s the entire Dr. Berg video if you want to know more.