It's been humbling to learn that "chronic illness" means that you try again and again but unlike anything normal, you do not get stronger, you do not get better, you do not improve incrementally. What it means is that you fail, every time, sometimes more, sometimes less, but that every single effort you make at improving things just leaves you exhausted and defeated. But you have to do it. It's either that, or spiral downward. It feels like treading water as the ceiling closes in. I'm stuck in the dichotomy of being healthy enough to run not-quite-two-miles at a time but not so healthy that running not-quite-two-miles won't wipe me out for the next 48 hours. Is it a good day? Is it a bad day? Why the fuck isn't my endurance back? Actually took my temperature during yoga today to see if maybe I had COVID again. Nope. 95 degrees. Why the fuck am I still coughing. Because I'm still coughing. And my endurance is still shit. And you give it your all and your all is so much less than it used to be and no matter how many times you reach for the goal it just gets further away. Fukkit I'm starting baicalin again. It's abundantly clear that every medical professional out there is just looking for an excuse to tell you why you should never leave your house again and equally clear that the COVID consensus is the tower of goddamn Babel. This. This is how we end up with tooth powder to protect us from Halley's Comet.
I want so badly to try to help people like you, but the feds have told me to fuck off (not really, more correctly, they told me, "Sure you can do that...if you can first do these studies we recommend that will cost $5M and 3 years." Studies which, mind you, have nothing to do with safety or efficacy, but rather goddam shelf life and batch-to-batch variability. Neither here nor there.) You and others like you have kicked the virus for weeks or months, but your alveoli have likely been invaded by inflammatory cells that refuse to fuck off. Have they tried giving you steroids or some other potent anti-inflammatory? Antiviral treatments won't help, but something that chills out your immune system might. May even try fasting. If you can get through it, it at least couldn't hurt.
I have zero talent, knowledge, or skills to offer any input here, but I've seen some amazing health turnarounds with people who have done the Keto form of eating. At its core, the idea is to convert the body from running on carbs, to running on fats. People with a wide range of chronic issues - like diabetes - have completely reversed their condition due to (un)expected knock-on effects of that way of eating. In essence, lower your carbohydrate intake to less than 20 grams per day, eat a lot of fatty meats, leafy greens, eggs, cheese, etc., for 1-2 months, and shit changes real fast in your biology. The unintended consequence is you basically wind up removing sugars from your diet almost entirely, as well. And my uneducated brain feels like that is more important that most of the rest of the Keto plan, because there's just so much in our diets today. I dunno. I wonder if KB has/should tried/try Keto; if for no other reason than evidence gathering...
I'm personally skeptical of keto for anything other than a specified medical reason, such as diabetes, for whom I understand that there is some evidence of lowering blood sugar. My main gripe with it is that your brain runs almost exclusively on carbs, and it requires a lot (like 120-150g depending on the person). A rule of thumb is that the average adult's brain is 2% of their mass and uses 25% of their daily calories. This is mainly due to how energy intensive it is to keep building up severe ion gradients across all the neuronal membranes, and some other cells too. An ion gradient is potential energy, so it requires work to maintain the potential. The idea behind keto, if I'm not mistaken, is that it forces fat out of storage, because the backbone of a triglyceride is half a sugar molecule, so if you put two of them together you get a whole sugar, which then can be used as brain food. But then what happens to the 3 fatty chains that are cast off the triglyceride? I guess they're floating around your liver and blood until they're metabolized to a ketone body that can be excreted??? Also, basically every single large study that's ever tried to correlate diet to overall health or mortality comes up with the same conclusion, which is that the more plant protein you eat, the longer you live, whereas meat/dairy and especially egg protein kills you faster (lots of caveats in there). Overall, keto seems dangerously unhealthy to me, although I don't have evidence to support that beyond the epidemiology and a few anecdotes about people going nuts on keto. I think the only nutritional advice anyone really needs is: eat more plants.
Thanks for the biology! It's a thing that never really caught my interest in school, and probably my weakest area of understanding. The core thing about Keto that you kinda got wrong is that it is primarily leafy greens - like, 70% of your diet - and the rest is fats and proteins in various forms. Like the Adkins Diet, you eat a "palm-sized" bit of protein with a big ole salad that dwarfs the protein. So it is basically a heavy-plants diet, but fortifies that with specific proteins, and no carbs. The interesting part about the low carbs, is that plants store their energy as sugars (carbs) in their roots. So in Keto the shorthand is to eat "above-ground vegetables; mostly the leaves". It's a little weird to get used to, but, in essence, you have a steak salad as much as possible: a bed of fresh spinach with crunchies like celery and cucumber and onions, with slices of really nice flank steak on top, and a light vinaigrette dressing. (Which, to me, is pretty much a meal I would eat every day, for every meal, as often as I could! :-) Over the years I have been doing it, I have tweaked and adjusted it according to my body's particular needs, and I would no longer call food intake "Keto", the health benefits I have seen from eating this way have been too numerous to count. Which is, honestly, like DUUUH... of COURSE eating more veggies, fewer sugars, and zero "processed foods" is going to make you healthier. But the way that worked for me to get to that kind of diet was via the phenomenal weight loss I encountered the first year. 40 pounds lost, and have been kept off for close to 3 years now. Better sleep. Sharper brain and thinking. No afternoon crash. Zero reliance on coffee to get at it, in the morning. Keto for me was just the path to the healthy diet we all know we should eat. The early rewards kept me diligent, and the long-term effects have kept me thinking the "Keto way" ever since.
...the body running on fats vs. the body running on carbs doesn't cause COVID. Cutting out sugar? Yeah that's effective against diabetes. We've known that one for a while. I had my health screwed up pretty mightily by one dietician already and no offense? Attempting to fix a lung problem through liberal applications of cholesterol makes slightly less sense than my neighbor recommending I watch "The Secret" again.At its core, the idea is to convert the body from running on carbs, to running on fats.
But your issues began pre-COVID, right? When you were still biking throughout LA and not losing weight, etc? I was thinking of whatever the undiagnosed underlying issue was, prior to COVID. Ya know... it's the only tool in my toolbox, and it worked on me, so I figured I'd hit you over the head with it and see if it worked for you, too. :-)
Oh, long since. Problem is, part of the "treatment" was a certified, bona fide nutritionist writing me a prescription for "eat lots of veggies, cut out nearly all carbs and increase your protein content by 3-4x" and I gained 15lbs in 4 weeks. When I went "WTF yo" she was firmly in the "that's a sign our plan is working!" camp. So we did it for another month and I gained 25 pounds. There's usually a moment during all this where they go "huh, I'll bet you have some sort of thyroid issue" and then they run blood tests and nope. No thyroid issues they can recognize. That's about the time they start mumbling into the EHR and fob me off on some specialist that refuses to see me. Has happened three times so far. But that's just the metabolism I grew up with. I'm used to it. I know what works there; not eating. Not eating for days weeks months or years. I'm good at not eating. The problem I ran into with biking is "not eating" means "you don't have enough energy to get to work" which put me in trying to triangulate "enough energy to bike 16 miles" with "and none left over such that I'm still hungry" and then some days it was so hot that it took three bottles of gatorade before I stopped seeing stars while sitting down. That shit I can deal with. This new "and eating lunch is going to make you feel like such shit that you need to take a nap" thing is the real drag.
The suggestion about fasting was solely based on data that show that it can help to reset inflammatory cells to a more stable state. Purely short term, either a couple weeks going like less than 1000 cals/day or like 3 days without food then back to normal. Personally, I've tried a 3 day fast one time, and I failed after 30 hours. It gave me a pounding headache, and I couldn't focus on anything other than food. It was horrible, but I wasn't sick, so I wasn't highly motivated.