Peatarian Success

Integral

Member
Joined
Aug 7, 2015
Messages
112
Hello all. I'd like to share a post I made on the Ray Peat Inspired facebook concerning my recovery from some quite serious, complex and stuborn health issues that I have battled for a number of years. I am by no means the finished product, and nor do I have all the answers - still on my journey back to health. However, I am sitting here typing to you today with a subjectively fantastic quality of life and am in a very good place indeed. Please be warned this is a long post! I am just wanting to post about my success, for the purposes of providing some potential hope, and, at any rate providing some data which could be potentially interesting to some of you.

Hey guys. I have been reading this group for the past three months. I came here after first starting working with my functional medicine practitioner, Chris Salmon, who has had me on a Peatarian inspired protocol. I just want to share a little bit of my story and let others know of some of the success I have had after being in the shitter health wise. This is long, I warn you, but I've been to friggin' hell and back and I just want people to know that there is hope.

There was a time I thought there was no one out there on this earth as screwed up as I was. I poured over Internet searched, posted on forum after forum, but couldn't find people who were going through what I was, and I did not know what to do. A year of high stress, highly restrictive dieting, and an incredibly toxic lifestyle when I was 21 left me in pieces. I struggle to find the words to describe how bad I felt. I was an utter mess. I was a skinny-fat 160lbs at 6 ft 3, with all my muscle mass cannibalised by my lifestyle. I was weak. I was so fatigued I could not get through my day without multiple naps, and that was when I could get some shut-eye, insomnia set it, and left me feeling even worse. Then came the brain problems. I was in my second year of University and could not focus on my work. I didn't understand what was happening to me. It felt as though someone had injected my brain with concrete. I could not think clearly at all, was forgetting things, and could no longer participate in class. My levels of functionality just plummeted lower and lower until they virtually hit rock-bottom. Then came the depression and anxiety. The howling, lacerating, crippling pain weighed so heavily upon me. My digestion became irregular. From the first meal of the morning onwards, the belching, the flatulence, it was just overwhelming. The insomnia intensified, and my symptoms just got to the point where I could no longer cope. I just couldn't go on.

I tried a variety of interventions. Nothing worked for me. Nada. Not a zip. Supplements. God, the money I spent on supplements makes me cringe! I tried different nutritional interventions – different manipulations of macronutrients/fruitarianism/vegetarianism/fasting/carb cycling ad infintum. No matter what I did, I just kept progressively feeling worse.

It all hit me during the examination period at University. I could no longer cope. I was done.

After seeing Dr after Dr, I withdrew from University on mental health grounds (depression) and set out on a long road to recovery which has led me to this post today where I am now sitting here symptom free and feeling fantastic.

The first symptom to alleviate was the depression. The drugs I was prescribed worked their magic I suppose. It took a course of 7 months titrating up in dosages of medication to start to drag me out of the dark tunnel I was wandering down. I was then stable enough to go back to University, and have since completed by Batchelors degree. I still had no emotion, no sense of purpose, and felt awfully anxious, but there was progress. Something I'd not seen in so long. The side effects of the medications weren't pretty – they worsened my already poor cognition, killed my sex drive, and made me feel incredibly flat (apathy), but I was stable. No more racing thoughts. No more incredibly dark, low moods. My Dr switched the meds up a few times, we went from SSRI to SNRI, did combination therapy with an antipsychotic, changed the antipsychotic, altered doses, added a low-dose stimulant (modafinal) – man I could go on concerning how many things my Dr tried. It took nine months but we finally cracked it and the depression went away. We then stayed on the meds for a further year at the exact same dose to prevent relapse, before beginning to titrate down. I'm now off all medications.

During this period of time, I gained 60lbs. I still had absurd levels of fatigue, still felt unmotivated, still had cognitive troubles, still had insomnia, and still suffered from digestive problems. However, I was not in that incredibly dark place any more. I felt as though, through hard work, I could rebuild. I wanted to start with my body composition. I started following a well-thought out strength and conditioning routine, followed good nutritional habits, and took sensible supplements. Within 15 weeks of training, I went from back squatting 60kg to 140kg, incline bench pressing 40kg to 80kg, and deadlifting 80kg to 190kg. I followed a program called No Mercy by a gentleman called Jason Ferruggia, which was basically periodised progressive overload with intelligent deloads (every 4th week if I recall correctly) and a wise rotation of exercises. Admittedly, I had been a competitive powerlifter in my teens and was much stronger before, so perhaps some of these gains were 'muscle-memory', though I'm not convinced (would muscle memory still apply after four years of not working out? I'm not sure). Despite the strength and muscle gains, my body composition was still a mess, and yes I was eating 'clean'. Not to mention, I still had huge cognitive problems, insomnia was awful, and I was so, so fatigued. After the gym I could crash on my bed for hours and rely on coffee to pick me up and get through the day. I was running on sheer will-power and motivation to get my body composition in check.

After 15 weeks on Jason Ferruginous program, and still looking and feeling like crap, I hired a body transformation specialist to get me into shape at, what was to me at the time, great expense considering I was not working (living off my savings I'd earned from four years of retail work + Uni scholarship). This dude charged me £330 a month to work with him, and I worked with him for four months. He put me on a strict diet, an incredibly demanding exercise regime, and initially the results were awesome. Worth the commitment I thought. After four months, however, things changed. The cravings. I had to literally slap myself in the face to stop myself from cheating on my diet. All day, my mind was transfixed on food. Oh man how I craved. I just couldn't deal with the body transformation program from a psychological perspective, and dropped out of it. Still fatigued, still with body compositional issues, still not able to think straight, and still an insomniac with digestive problems which seemed to be getting a hell of a lot worse.

January of 2015, I stopped the body transformation program. I went on a month long binge. I just couldn't stop eating. My brain screamed for food. I gained back all the weight I lost the four months prior plus interest – I was now 242lbs. I gave myself a month off the gym because the fatigue was such that I could no longer physically get to the gym and lift. March 2015 rolled around, and it was on. I was to get in shape once and for all. I set myself up on a 2500kcal diet, which I thought was reasonable, with a 30/30/40 split of macronutrients, and got to work. The fatigue was awful, so I was only able to do basic workouts, but I tried my best. I couldn't lift in the gym, mind. I was using stuff I had at home. Kettlebells, pull ups, Glute Ham Raises, Back Extensions, dumbells, bodyweight movements, etc. Week after week, I weighed in and saw no shift on the scale, and I felt like I was literally a living corpse. Every damn time I stepped on that infernal device, I'd have 242.2lbs staring back at me. I dropped kcal by 200 a week to illicit weight loss. Nothing happened. All the while, my cognition was so poor I could barely speak! I was so pissed off that no matter what I did, nothing made the scale budge. Every 'expert' I spoke to told me that it was simply a case of Calories in vs. Calories out, and if I was in an energy deficit, my body would burn fat. Yet here I was, dropping calories by the week, increasing activity, and measuring/tracking/logging everything, yet I could not get the scale to move.

While I was a member of Jason Ferruginous membership site, he underwent a bit of a paradigm shift in the nutritional recommendations he advocated. He started talking about the thyroid, a bloke called Matt Stone kept being brought up, and people on the forum were talking about a guy called Rat Peat. People were posting their body temperatures and pulses. I didn't understand what this was all about, but I was intrigued. At this point, I'd try anything. I purchased Matt Stone's Eat For Heat, followed the advice within it, and something funny began to happen. I started to feel...different. You have read about the severe depression I suffered from. The stuff that glues you to the bed and doesn't allow you to leave your room for weeks at a time. Well, that depression brought with it an equally screwed up accomplice: anxiety. Walking down the street gave me heart palpitations. But now, I started to feel calm. What the hell was going on? I couldn't quite understand, but for the first time in years (my problems started when I was 21 – I'm 24 writing this now) I felt as though I was on the verge of a break through. I don't know quite what it was, but I researched tirelessly and what I read just made sense. This talk about restrictive dieting, the body's survival response, and the shutting down of the thyroid. The symptoms people were talking about on these message boards I was reading. It was like they were talking about me!

I was piecing it together one day and a realisation formed.

I have been running on sheer will-power for years.

I am a complete wreck with no quality of life, a walking corpse.

I cannot sleep, I cannot eat without digestive distress, I cannot even think straight, I am tired in my very bones, and I am (at this point) obese after a life of leanness.

If my body doesn't have the capacity to get through a day functioning 'normally', I think it could give a rats arse about losing weight.

It was then I remembered videos I had watched when I was tried (unsuccessfully) to treat my depression without medication. There was a gentleman called Dr. Mark Hyman who put a series of videos out on YouTube giving an outline of some practical advice he advocates in a book called the UltraMind solution. I had not had success with Dr. Hyman's protocol myself, but I remembered he was talking about something called Functional Medicine. Around this same time, I had remembered a bloke called Paul Chek who's videos I used to watch. He was talking about the healing power of food and the success he has had with his clients healing symptoms like I have with correct nutrition, which was what I believe Dr. Hyman places a lot of emphasis on also. This connection between two sources who I trust caused me to look a bit deeper into the rationale for Functional Medicine and how it could apply to my healing. I was already about as low as humanly possible. I had already spent over a thousand pound on body transformation coaching. I had already spent thousands of pounds on supplements. I had already taken all the prescription drugs and seen all the doctors. I had done my research, and from the data I had seen, Functional Medicine interventions were credible. Moreover, and what sold me – there were people out there like me who were healing. I figured I'd give it a shot. I began the search for a Functional Medicine practitioner to work with here in the UK.

Enter Chris Salmon.

After getting off the phone with a few of these guys and girls, I eventually ran into a dude on google called Chris Salmon who was operating in the town over from me. I saw that he was a qualified Chek Practitioner and interestingly had his own health complications in the past. I called Chris up, and there was just something different about my conversation with him. He seemed like a genuinely caring, compassionate, empathic human being. They say when the student is ready, the master appears. Cliche as it may be, the old adage rang true.

We arranged our initial consultation. He talked about metabolism, I listened on. He mentioned the thyroid, kept mentioning that Ray Peat bloke and gave me all sorts of very interesting stuff to think about. My cognition was still shot, but I could see the logic in what Chris was talking about. A few days later, he emailed me with a comprehensive breakdown of the outcome of our consulation. Essentially, I gave him the whole story, and he gave me his interpretation of what was going on with me. I was satisfied with his conclusions. We then started a 12 week program incorporating Peat style nutrition.

First it was the sleep. After years of averaging 3-4 hours a night with multiple awakenings (as much as 10), I started sleeping for longer before awakening. Then it was the digestive symptoms. It was baffling to me, but man, they just disappeared. Then came the energy. I could not believe it, and I am a bit emotional writing this right now, but the fatigue that consigned me to my bed for the past few years was gone. I felt....motivated. I wanted to do stuff. I wanted to help my Mum around the house, I wanted to read, I wanted to speak to people. I was in disbelief, people around me were asking me what has happened. I felt like a kid again. My energy levels became fantastic. Then, finally, the cognitive dysfunction lifted. I could concentrate, I could absorb information, I was articulate again and intellectually vigorous. There is a bit of a frog in my throat as I write this now as this is an emotional topic for me and it's caused so much pain in the past, but finally, after years in the wilderness, I have my life back. The times I was so tired I had to tell my mother who suffers from similar health related issues stemming from chromes disease that I could not assist her are now over. The time I was so cognitively impaired I could not even write a forum post or make a YouTube video asking for help because I could not speak is now over. All the times I had asked why this had to happened to me, why I had to be such a wreck, why I had no quality of life, it's all behind me now. I've been well for some time, too. I am sleeping well. My digestion is fantastic. My cognition is fantastic. The plethora of health problems I had have been reversed, and I am on the mend.

Now, I have gained 20lbs in this process, going from 242.2lbs to 262.2lbs exactly. Chris and I still have work to do. We have a Skype call in two hours and we're going to talk all things liver and fat loss. The journey isn't over yet and we still have this final piece of the puzzle to figure out. Notwithstanding, I am so grateful for Chris's help and cannot thank him enough. Over the course of this program he has become not just a Functional Medicine practitioner but a good friend and a bloke I cannot speak highly enough of.

So for all of you out there struggling with your health complications and wondering if there is a way out, know this: there is hope. I am still learning myself about all things Peaty and I am still on a journey like everyone else. I am not going to say that what worked for me will work for everyone else. I am not telling you that your journey back to health will be like mine. I have been to hell and back and lived to tell the tale, and what I am confident in saying is this: the body is smart, and if you work with it, the body CAN heal.

Thanks,
Rav.
 

FredSonoma

Member
Joined
Jun 23, 2015
Messages
914
Awesome to hear!!!!!!! I know what you mean about the emotions... I am similar age to you (22) and have spent the past few years miserably tired, anxious, and lost, mostly I think due to my health. Just in the past two months with Peating I have started to have energy, feel happy, and feel like I'm getting closer to just being a normal, functioning person. Good luck in the future!!!!
 

tara

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Joined
Mar 29, 2014
Messages
10,368
:welcome Integral
Thanks for telling that story.
 

Parsifal

Member
Joined
Aug 6, 2015
Messages
1,081
Great story! By the way, I've tried to find the FB page for Peat but can't find anything? Can someone send me a link please? :)
 

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