Hello Keto people, Just wanted to introduce myself, and share my story.
I’ve struggled with health for pretty much as long as I can remember… probably since age 11 or 12. Nothing major but a lot of lethargia and fatigue. In my earlier years it was enough to be noticably different from my peers - mainly I just had less energy and needed more sleep. Maybe I was operating at 80% of the average person Occasional digestive issues but never anything bad enough to point to digestion as the problem. Things got very bad for seemingly no reason towards age 13-14 - from what I remember I had depressed mood and was pretty lethargic. I don’t remember the details but my parents say I noticeably changed and became less like myself. They took me to a naturopathic doctor and he basically said my health was a disaster. I spent a year or two working with him and essentially fighting his recommended procedures… which to be fair were quite extreme for a growing teenager. Things like doing a antimicrobial fast and various flushes. I only ended up fasting for a day or two at a time and doing a couple of the recommended flushes. I took antimicrobials for an extended period of time and although once in a while I had terrible diarrhea for days at a time, I eventually improved to the point where I was released from his care and lived a pretty good life for a few years. This whole experience ingrained a sort of skeptical respect towards functional medicine in me. My diet was pretty much a slightly healthier version of the SAD diet… basically more fruits and veggies and relatively less processed sugar than the average person but still way too much.
Fast forward to college. I pretty much had moved back to eating whatever I wanted with no restrictions. Felt good most of the time, excelled in my first 2 years of college. But starting my 2nd year I had bouts of lethargia that rendered me pretty much useless for 1-2 days at a time, on average once every 2 weeks. I just wanted to sleep most of the day. Sometime during that time I got strep throat and ended up on antibiotics. Interestingly, after I recovered from strep (took 2-3 weeks to fully recover) I felt pretty good for a while and ate the same junk diet. I still had the odd crash days but was able to excel in school through my 3rd year. Summer after my 3rd year my health took a serious dump. I was working as a summer intern and had the hardest time staying awake most days. I just wanted to go back to bed. Spent about half my work days during the summer like this. Thought I would improve by going back to school but this didn’t happen. Things just kept getting worse. Not seeing a connection to my diet, my lack of energy caused me to worsen my diet. Ate cereal with supermarket milk 1-3 times per day. Had no restrictions on sugar intake.
By the end of year 4, I knew things had to change. I talked with some people, remembered the old naturopath who had helped me years earlier, had a chat with him, and decided to drastically change my diet. No more dairy, sugary fruits, processed sugar, or cooked starches - not even rice or potatoes. Basically fully keto. Basically was eating raw veggies, eggs, meat, nuts, seeds, and sprouts. My health drastically improved for close to 6 months but I eventually started to have my lethargy and brain fog issues again. I continued this diet mostly but became lax and added in some store-bought high-grain trail mix and eventually some vegan protein powder. IIRC these were the only major changes but I believe I introduced these after I started feeling like garbage randomly. Sick of feeling like garbage, I decided to eat clean again, and I’ve been eating a mostly pristine diet since then up to about a month ago (so that’s been roughly the past year). Basically I thought I was sensitive to starches and high sugars so I avoided them. When I ate them, I felt worse for a couple days and often got headaches a day or two after eating them. Periodic seemingly random ocular migraines that lasted 3-6 hours had also been an issue for the past 7 years or so. Towards the end of last semester things seemed to be doing pretty well and I was able to work out regularly. Felt like I was getting stronger and more energetic. But midway through summer 2018 I decided to get drunk for the first (and probably last) time and it took until 5pm the next day to make it out of bed. I thought it’d be a day or two of recovery, but nooo… Far worse than that. I rapidly devolved into doing the worst I’d been doing since before I cut out all the junk food several years ago. I thought I’d eventually recover but I didn’t. What had previously been episodes that lasted a week or two at most became several months. Depression followed. I felt like I was getting cornered because the list of foods I deemed acceptable at this point wasn’t much past a dozen. I wasn’t eating organic but I was eating basically half the veggies in the fresh produce aisle, fruits (including grapefruit, oranges, strawberries, kiwi, green apples, and blueberries/blackberries/redberries) meats, olive oil, peanut butter, and nothing else. I tried replacing peanut butter with almond butter, tried using organic pure olive oil instead of the cheap stuff with other things mixed in. Nothing seemed to be working.
Finally I contacted my previous naturopath and he advised doing another antimicrobial fast for 10 days. Wasn’t a full fast but was a fasting-mimicking diet with less than 1000 calories per day. Felt high and foggy the entire time but my lethargia lifted almost completely. I no longer had trouble getting out of bed in the morning. I felt a lot of hope. Once I finished that, I went back to eating my normal “healthy” diet again. I felt incredible the first few weeks. Productivity in working on my thesis and course work was way up. I felt like myself again. But every few days I randomly felt like garbage for a few hours. Like I had come up from being underwater to get a breath of fresh air but was slowly being pulled back in. Eventually there was more feeling like garbage than feeling good, and I had to go back to the drawing board.
Since I didn’t have physical access to my naturopath, I told him about the issues but decided there wasn’t too much he could do for me that I couldn’t figure out on my own. Maybe this was a stupid decision but I needed to find some next step. Started watching the various naturopaths talk about health and found that I matched a lot of the symptoms for candida and/or SIBO overgrowth. Intestinal discomfort wasn’t really something I was experiencing throughout any of the time of my health issues aside from pretty frequent gas. But when I did have gas it passed rather easily rather than resulting in bloating. My stools were just as inconsistent as my health - sometimes looking perfect and others looking like nothing had digested at all. Anyways, I went about getting a bunch of herbs and supplements to treat candida, and started the “candida diet” for about a month. But there was a problem - I was experiencing no improvement that lasted more than a couple days. If anything, things were steadily getting worse. Grades were suffering, and I didn’t think I could get passing grades for the semester if things didn’t improve fast. Additionally I was rapidly losing the desire to live. Thoughts became very dark. Lots of contemplation of what might happen after I die. Probably not to the point of being suicidal because I still knew that the solution to my health issues was out there - my emotional side and thinking side were just not meeting on common ground.
I was rapidly becoming uncertain about the benefits of veggies. I was learning a lot, but didn’t have the mental clarity to make decisions moving forward. I was pretty certain at this point that my body wasn’t digesting something I was eating properly, and that probably related to not having the bacteria I needed to digest those foods just as much as some of my symptoms may have been caused by overgrowth of certain bacteria. Oxalate and salycylate sensitivities, histamine intolerances - I was reading about them all but it seemed that if I took all of them out I’d be left with eating pretty much nothing. I’d heard about the SIBO and OAT as well as doing stool tests during this time as well, but they’re expensive and I couldn’t really figure out exactly which ones to take (actually I got a stool test but I have yet to see the results). Also there was paranoia about how dirty our meat supply is in terms of the hormones and antibiotics in them. And there was no way I’d be able to drive the 90 minutes to the nearest supplier of maybe clean meat. So meats were periodically eliminated as well. My strength was quickly fading as well. I’d lost about 10 lbs on my 10-day fast and wasn’t regaining any of the weight. I was now quivering doing pushups - there was just no strength in my muscles. One of my lymph nodes was bulging to the point where when I had my physical exam about 2-3 months ago he advised me to get an ultrasound done on it to ensure there wasn’t a tumor growing there. And my thyroid was a bit low so he advised I start taking thyroid meds.
I’d seen a lot about the carnivore diet throughout the past 6 months or so along the way, and had actually tried it for a 3-week period before I did the fasting procedure with my naturopath. During that time my conclusion was that I felt “ok” on the diet but felt pretty heavy and low energy, especially in my muscles. I basically felt halfway between my best and my worst, and that was far superior to my worst so it was left as a backup plan. But I wasn’t full carnivore during the 3-week period - I was eating avocados during the first week and a lot of eggs for the rest of the time. Also quite a bit of chicken and pork since beef is pretty pricey.
So going forward again to about 3 weeks ago I was at my total wits end. It was the point where I do something drastic or probably have to redo this semester in school. I knew that my gut was probably still messed up but also had the many anecdotes of the “miracles” of the carnivore diet in my head so I thought I’d give it another go. This time, only beef. Days 1-3 I still felt like garbage. After that, brain function was dramatically better. Then physical strength came back. But it wasn’t perfect. I was struggling a lot with sleepiness. My brain worked but I just wanted to sleep a lot. For the first 2 weeks I was sleeping close to 10 hours per day, sometimes more. Now, week 3 I feel like I’m close to maybe 70% of the best I’ve felt. Brain works well, I have plenty of physical energy, and I feel calm. But I also feel a bit sleepy pretty often. And in the past week I’ve gotten 2 headaches. I’m trying to get back into a workout routine and that’s helped tremendously with awakeness in the past. But I feel like I’m taking my life back. It’s only 3 weeks in but if nothing goes hugely wrong I’m going to stick with this for a while.
One thing that I’m still pretty concerned with is the quality of the meat. For two reasons - one is that I’m very interested in trying Augenous Vonderplanitz’ raw foodist methodology for myself. Not sure why but I’m becoming increasingly attracted to raw animal products. That attraction is heavily influenced by stories of people who have improved their health with raw animal foods, and I’d like to accelerate my own healing through that. But also as I eat more rare meats, I like the flavor more and more. I am very hesitant to eat the store-bought meat raw because who knows where it came from. Also, there’s plenty of horror stories of certain bacteria strains on meats sending people to their deaths. I just don’t have the knowledge to know and the information on the topic seems to be disproportionately minimal.
Anyways, I’m very early along in the zero-carb diet, so I have no idea where this will go. My hope is that things will continue to get better, or if the road gets bumpy that it will stabilize relatively quickly. I’ve been very surprised at how quickly I have apparently adapted to this diet. Perhaps the fasting and antimicrobials did some pre-cleaning and healing of the gut that made my body more receptive to the change in diet. I don’t know, but I’ve had zero nausea and relatively low intestinal discomfort. And none of that nasty depression or brain fog - that honestly was probably the worst part of my issues. Just total loss of mental focus and control. I’m pretty much willing to eat anything or do anything lifestyle-wise to ensure that it doesn’t come back. If diet alone solves it, then great. It hasn’t solved the problem for more than a few months in the past 6 years but maybe this is the one. But if there are other changes that have to be made, I’ll accept that as well. It seems that at least 50% of health is not food related but lifestyle related, and I honestly have a pretty unhealthy lifestyle. Inconsistent sleep schedule, 14+ hours per day staring at a computer screen, less exercise than my body needs, and very little social activity. Doesn’t seem to be problematic short-term but long-term it likely makes a huge contribution to lack of health. But such is life in this modern day.
I hope to one day heal my gut enough to re-introduce plant foods again. I love plant foods and think that if used correctly, can be used as nutrition and/or medicine. But at the same time I value cognitive performance and physical/emotional well-being much more highly than food so I can see myself going either way. I’m only 25 years old but I certainly feel a lot older in terms of the way I’ve been feeling physically. I’m just… tired, and ready to be done having to fight to want to keep going.