Thank you, @GreekDemiGod. :) I learned a lot about myself during that time so I have no regrets. Plus, because I was so isolated due to the injury and forced to get routine blood work and other testing (monthly), I was able to see how different diets, based on real food, not some lab concocted rat chow, affected my biology without too many confounding factors muddying the waters.
It was about 2 years on high-carb/low-fat cooked plant-based—mainly fruit, root veggies, baby lettuces and to a lesser extent, sprouted oats and legumes—before the depression got so bad that I resorted to 80/10/10. That, and I still hadn’t gotten my period back and my weight wouldn’t budge past 41 kg—healthy for me is around 45 kg. I had come across one of Douglas Graham’s talks and after reading his book and seeing that the diet could help with depression and optimizing hormones and weight, I went raw. For the first two years, I felt great getting all those simple sugars and finally gained some weight but it eventually wrecked my digestion, left me ravenous and in hindsight, I was almost manic. I’d have days where I felt euphoric just being alive and then others where I was riddled with anxiety, and then my weight started dropping quickly. I think within 4 months I was down to 31 kg. I was working with a naturopath at the time and she had me reintroduce starches just a few months prior to fracturing.
Knowing what I know now, I can totally see the warning signs that my thyroid was tanking. For example, we know the role of thyroid in copper metabolism, well, my hair is naturally quite dark, including my eyelashes and eyebrows, and it turned a light copper. My hair goes auburn if I spend a lot of time out in the sun so at first, I hadn’t noticed the change. My hair also stopped growing, including my body hair. I have long, thick eyelashes—I have the genetic mutation, distichiasis, where I have multiple rows of lashes—but during that time, they became sparse and it was as if I had trimmed them down to my lash line, my eyebrows developed bald patches and hair stopped coming in on my legs. Then there was my skin. It became so orange that nurses questioned if I had jaundice. Even my liver suffered. I developed “sludge” as the tech doing the ultrasound called it, and gallbladder attacks. Ray said in an interview that without exception, anyone with gallbladder disease is chronically hypothyroid.
Anyhow, my apologies if my post came off like I was judging your current dietary experiment. It wasn’t directed at you. I have 12 years of vegetarianism and another 4 years of veganism to add to the almost 5 years of veganism I described above so a long history with plant-based, and given the topic of the thread, I thought I could add something to the conversation.
From my understanding, we want a relatively sterile small intestine, but not a sterile large intestine so the idea of a sterile gut doesn’t seem possible or even healthy to me outside of a lab setting, but I could be wrong. Not that I’m endorsing it but even on the stereotypical Peaty milk and OJ diet, we get plenty of bacteria from the milk, and unless we’re ultra filtering our juice like with coffee filters, we’re getting fiber from the OJ. I get what you mean about the similarity between Peatarians who avoid certain foods and carnivores/keto dieters. I tolerate gluten just fine but prior to veganism, I was never much of a starch eater so a dairy and fruit diet comes natural to me, however, if that weren’t the case, I’d be working toward tolerating the foods I enjoy. That’s exactly what I did with dairy. It took me 10 years of a digestive nightmare to tolerate it again but I kept going back to it, not because Ray said it was good, but because even as a child, I knew it was good. And really, if you think about it, even people not following specific diets have foods they like and foods they won’t touch. We all have our preferences. I think problems arise when someone won’t consume a food out of fear of something they heard or read, despite experiencing nothing negative from it.
It was about 2 years on high-carb/low-fat cooked plant-based—mainly fruit, root veggies, baby lettuces and to a lesser extent, sprouted oats and legumes—before the depression got so bad that I resorted to 80/10/10. That, and I still hadn’t gotten my period back and my weight wouldn’t budge past 41 kg—healthy for me is around 45 kg. I had come across one of Douglas Graham’s talks and after reading his book and seeing that the diet could help with depression and optimizing hormones and weight, I went raw. For the first two years, I felt great getting all those simple sugars and finally gained some weight but it eventually wrecked my digestion, left me ravenous and in hindsight, I was almost manic. I’d have days where I felt euphoric just being alive and then others where I was riddled with anxiety, and then my weight started dropping quickly. I think within 4 months I was down to 31 kg. I was working with a naturopath at the time and she had me reintroduce starches just a few months prior to fracturing.
Knowing what I know now, I can totally see the warning signs that my thyroid was tanking. For example, we know the role of thyroid in copper metabolism, well, my hair is naturally quite dark, including my eyelashes and eyebrows, and it turned a light copper. My hair goes auburn if I spend a lot of time out in the sun so at first, I hadn’t noticed the change. My hair also stopped growing, including my body hair. I have long, thick eyelashes—I have the genetic mutation, distichiasis, where I have multiple rows of lashes—but during that time, they became sparse and it was as if I had trimmed them down to my lash line, my eyebrows developed bald patches and hair stopped coming in on my legs. Then there was my skin. It became so orange that nurses questioned if I had jaundice. Even my liver suffered. I developed “sludge” as the tech doing the ultrasound called it, and gallbladder attacks. Ray said in an interview that without exception, anyone with gallbladder disease is chronically hypothyroid.
Anyhow, my apologies if my post came off like I was judging your current dietary experiment. It wasn’t directed at you. I have 12 years of vegetarianism and another 4 years of veganism to add to the almost 5 years of veganism I described above so a long history with plant-based, and given the topic of the thread, I thought I could add something to the conversation.
From my understanding, we want a relatively sterile small intestine, but not a sterile large intestine so the idea of a sterile gut doesn’t seem possible or even healthy to me outside of a lab setting, but I could be wrong. Not that I’m endorsing it but even on the stereotypical Peaty milk and OJ diet, we get plenty of bacteria from the milk, and unless we’re ultra filtering our juice like with coffee filters, we’re getting fiber from the OJ. I get what you mean about the similarity between Peatarians who avoid certain foods and carnivores/keto dieters. I tolerate gluten just fine but prior to veganism, I was never much of a starch eater so a dairy and fruit diet comes natural to me, however, if that weren’t the case, I’d be working toward tolerating the foods I enjoy. That’s exactly what I did with dairy. It took me 10 years of a digestive nightmare to tolerate it again but I kept going back to it, not because Ray said it was good, but because even as a child, I knew it was good. And really, if you think about it, even people not following specific diets have foods they like and foods they won’t touch. We all have our preferences. I think problems arise when someone won’t consume a food out of fear of something they heard or read, despite experiencing nothing negative from it.
