I have been eating animal based (fruit, meat, dairy) for the last couple of weeks. It's been quite a special kind of hell.
I loved eating lots of pineapple, mango, blueberries, strawberries, aged cheddar, kefir, greek yogurt, macadamia nuts, pistachios, and butternut squash. However, the blood sugar roller coaster was very much unpredictable and not fun. It was also very inflamming - I kept needing more and more and more insulin, and my migraines got worse. My hunger signals were all over the place, too. Nuts in particular are dangerous. Something about them flips a switch that makes you gorge on them.
But the worse part was the ever-present gastrointestinal torture that only got worse as time went on. My colon is so inflammed and the fiber has constipated me so much that my stools are giant undigested fibrous lumpy boulders (type 1 & 2 on the bristol stool chart). At first I thought it was just the dairy and nuts so I cut back to just fruit, but it made no difference.
Wrecked Tum
I am now very familiar with the exact anatomy of my colon. I can feel the spasms ascend up my right side, and soon enough a sharp stinging pain as the content turn through the corner. I feel them get squeezed across the traverse colon, another sharp pain turn, and finally down the descending. Once I feel them in my lower left side I know I'm going to have a bowel movement soon. It's not fun, and the pain wakes me up in the middle of the night.
I recently drank some red food coloring in a drink and got to play the "is this blood or food dye in my poo?" game again. Bright red streaks nestled into the creases of the cobblestone. A good way to test is just to wait and see if the color stays bright red or not. I waited a couple of hours and returned - it had darkened. It's blood. *YOU WIN pinball sound effects*
There is a quaint notion that "plants are trying to kill you," and I must now concede with great pain in my guts, that this is true.
So I'm back on the meat train. Choo Choo!
Putting the MOO in MOOD
It really is amazing how much the gut affects mood and mind. Within a few days of adding back in all sorts of fruits and foods, I started noticing my moods become more unstable. I started having strong bouts of anxiety, loud racing thoughts, and a paralyzing melancholy.
Then within a day of switching back to beef only, I could feel my entire body start to relax again. My mind quieted down and my overall inner sunshine brighten back up. Wild.
The cognitive psychologist part of my brain tries to argue that this is mostly cognitive because I believe eating meat is good for me. But I thought meat + fruit would be good for me too and I only received negative mood swings from that.
So all the recent research in nutritional psychiatry is peaking my interest more and more. I follow a few YouTube channels of people trying to self-medicate with diet, such as Lauren Kennedy West who deals with psychosis and schizophrenia. It's amazing to see how small changes in diet and body can flare things back up again.
The Metabolic Mind group are pioneering a lot of the research into "well formulated ketogenic diets" for the use in treating psychiatric disorders. From what I have seen in others and my own experience, I am somewhat skeptical that the ketosis part matters all that much. My guess is that it has far more to do with the elimination of inflammatory foods in combination with the maximizing of certain nutrients.
Rash Decisions
The only real persistent problem I've had with meat-only eating has been Prurigo Pigmentosa. It's often called the “Keto Rash”, but I would get it even without being in ketosis.
It's quite the curse. It starts as these tiny little dots on the upper chest, neck, and parts of the lower back. They start to itch and then swell into smooth welts that turn into equal parts itchy and burning pain. They worsen at night, so you will not sleep. When they are healing the welt flattens and turns into a dry flaky dark purple patch.
I switched over to the animal based approach to try to avoid this issue, but now I've got to face it again. Awhile back I thought introducing some small amount of carbs would work, but that didn't seem to fix it. So I've been diving back into the mystery and figuring out how I'll tackle this.
There are a lot of different theories as to what causes the keto rash, nausea, and acid reflux. The most common explanation is that it is due to low stomach acid and bile/enzyme insufficiency.
Chewing the Fat
Throughout my life I've struggled with digesting fats. Every time I'd eat something extra fatty during the day I'd end up with horrible nausea and acid reflux. I've been on low carb several times before and there were definitely many times I had unexplained nausea and skin rashes.
That was one of the benefits I got from eating a low-fat plant based diet for several years. But avoiding fat is just a bandaid that actually worsened my gallbladder and stomach acid function in the long run.
I remember when I was still vegan and tried out Bryan Johnson's "Blueprint Protocol" there was this "Nutty Pudding" that would nauseate me every single time I ate it simply because it was fatty.
Transitioning to eating meat was especially difficult for me. Just a few slices of steak would nauseate me for hours every single day and give me the worst heart burn of my life. But slowly I could tolerate more and more without too many side effects. Until eventually, the rashes appeared. Cutting back on the fat helps a bit, but not much. Adding more fat definitely makes it worse.
To this day struggle with extra fatty cuts. It sucks because I'll actually feel fantastic at first, but then like clockwork 4-6 hours later, the nausea hits hard and I have to just suffer through it for 1-2 hours. Sometimes peppermint tea helps. I'm usually fine with a 1:1 ratio of fat to protein, but ideally I could bump that up to 2:1 which is what is frequently recommended.
So, past evidence supports the idea that this is indeed a long-standing fat metabolism issue.
Acid, Bile, and Enzymes! Oh My!
If you don't have enough stomach acid, this creates a whole cascade of negative consequences.
The lower esophageal sphincter does not close properly, leading to acid to climb up the esophagus. This is the great paradox of heartburn. People take tums and acid reducing medication, which only worsens the situation. The real treatment is oftne to find ways to increase the acidity!
The pyloric sphincter at the base of the stomach will also malfunction and dump half-digested food into the intestines. This results in other signals not being properly sent like poor bile and enzyme release, and so you fail to break down and absorb a lot of important nutrients.
I learned this past week that over 40% of type 1 diabetics suffer from Exocrine Pancreatic Insufficiency. When your pancreas isn't producing insulin it is also failing to produce a lot of other helpful stuff, especially related to digestion.
There are a lot of solutions to these problems. One of which is supplementation.
There's an OTC product called NOW Super Enzymes that has Betain HCL + Pepsin, Bile, and Enzymes all in one pill. I haven't tried it myself yet. I'm going to wait for the rest of my gut issues to settle down first before doing something new.
But I did do a little experiment!
I took two plastic bags and placed a hamburger patty in each with some water. In one of them I put the super enzyme and placed them both into a a 98.6ºF water bath for an hour to simulate body temperature breakdown. As you can see below, it looks like this stuff works pretty well at breaking down the burger! Cool!
Left Bag: Burger Meat + Water
Right Bag: Burger Meat + Water + Super Enzyme
Song of the Week
Owsley “The Bear” Stanley was the sound engineer for the Grateful Dead. He was known as the Acid King and made over 5 million doses of LSD. He was also a carnivore for over 50 years until he sadly died in a car accident at age 76.
I recently found out that in 2006 he went on a low carb forum and wrote hundreds of posts sharing all of his knowledge and wisdom about his lifestyle. You can read them here.. It's been really fun reading through it and hearing about his wild stories and excellent advice. The guy was a mad scientist and genius.
Owsley's carnivore journey started after talking with arctic explorer Vilhjálmur Stefánsson. When I read that I thought, "Hey that name sounds familiar" and it turns out I have already been reading one of Stefánsson's fantastic books for the last few weeks called "Not By Bread Alone"!
Thanks for reading :)
-Jason