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This note may appear to have structure, but it really doesn’t. It probably wont be worth anyone else’s time to read it.
I’m trying to formalize an approach to discovering how diet influences some issues that I have been having. This is partly mitigation of unintended consequences but also to measure the outcome while tracking what I am actually changing. I have been naively relying on anecdotal experiences and memory instead of recording what I’m doing. This has resulted in me prematurely changing some variables which has, in turn, left me scratching my head when I try to draw conclusions from the outcome.
In October of last year I had COVID and spent two weeks not doing very much. Half way through, as my health improved, I stopped eating vegetables. I witnessed a bunch of things that cast doubt on my thoughts of diet, the various afflictions I faced, and how diet affected or effected them.
The experiment has resulted in weight loss, reduced inflammation, clearer skin, and a handful of other effects that I hesitate to attribute to this without further consideration. I am worried that despite thousands of years of human existence, diet is very poorly understood at large. If my judgment is faulty due to diet, will it still be good enough to recognize that it’s impacted?
Here’s a bullet list of what I plan to pay attention to or what I hope to draw correlations with regarding my diet going forward:
Regarding pain these are specific areas that I’ll be tracking:
Regarding mental clarity, this one is harder to quantify, so I’ll just consider whether the following are better or worse than the previous day:
Regarding mood, this one goes right out the window, I don’t know how to really record or measure this, I’ll have to do some searching, but these are the categories of interest to me:
The content under motivation needs to be described so I can clearly outline what the problems are, how I hope to change them, and what I hope to have accomplished when I’m done.
What’s under variables needs to go into a spreadsheet so I can tick them off on a daily basis if they should happen to apply.
The stuff under interference should probably also go into the same spreadsheet and maybe a list or set of lines below that for comments.
Throughout my lifetime, I’ve suffered from a few minor issues here and there. For the most part, I just considered them a part of life and kept on going, but as I get older it seems I’m noticing the small ways in which they interfere with the rest of life or pile up and cause larger problems. After the culmination of a life-altering event, I decided it was time to start fixing the problems so they wouldn’t interfere with life at large anymore. Mainly I was focused on fixing the issues that caused pain because they have the clearest correlation to problems relating to rumination. I’m not sure if that’s the right term, but I consider the problem of rumination to be an inability to detach and see the larger scope, or even to move on to other things.
Headaches.
Chronic headaches plagued my childhood and persisted into adulthood. I have identified probable sources for most of them. Strong smells, lighting conditions, diet, stress. I’ve eliminated most of the triggers for these with the exception that the lighting one isn’t always obvious and neither are the food ones. While diet tracking will be my goal here, I’ll also pay attention to mood and stress levels.
Headaches have become a very minor problem overall, but I should try to minimize their occurrence because they do lead to compounding issues and consequences of inflammation and any inflammation causes my PVPS to return.
There’s also still something of a huge question mark regarding headaches for me. I had made the correlation that when I consumed iron-rich foods or things that increase the uptake of iron, I would get a very specific headache at the base of my skull/top of my neck. (Note, not exactly like caffeine/dehydration, but similar.) I presumed this to be the fault of high iron. The correlation was so consistent that I would avoid more than 20% of my RDA of iron to prevent these headaches. (My bloodwork was normal for ferratin levels when I stuck to under 20%. I had been managing for at least a year before getting my blood checked as I needed to find a doctor covered by my insurance.) I noticed that sticking to it eliminated the problem. Every time I deviated from this, I would end up with a headache. These headaches would persist for about a day. They were worse when lying down and it made sleep (and everything, really,) very difficult.
Mental Clarity.
Over the years I have noticed that things I haven’t thought about as much are slower to recall. I can be certain I don’t have knowledge of something, and then the next day I’ve remembered the missing information. This is annoying, but also a bit reassuring that some things aren’t actually gone. I don’t expect this to change, just something worth noting.
In terms of focus, recall, and not forgetting something I decided to get up and do just a moment ago. I expect these to decline over time, but I noticed sometimes were better or worse than others.
I have a fairly good memory. It’s not idetic, but my recording and recall seems to be faster than many. Memory recall errors due to interference are one thing, but having a recall issue without a source of interference is more worrying to me. I was on and off the carnivore diet for a while because I would eat normally during family celebrations. When the time between these celebrations was greater, I was thinking more clearly in terms of recall and information being immediately accessible.
The ease of thinking isn’t usually something I’m aware of until some time has passed and I realize when it becomes easier to think again that I was working in a fog. It’s not a heavy fog, but it is a fog. Carbohydrates of any kind seem to cause this.
Pain.
I spent three years dealing with fairly significant PVPS. My temper is not easily stirred and I’ve never been in a shouting match with anyone. I don’t see a point in getting angry at a lot of things that seem to anger others. I don’t suppress my anger, a lot of stuff just doesn’t anger me, or if it’s going to, I analyze the situation to find empathy if it’s warranted, consider the use of being angry as a tool, and it typically runs its course quickly.
But by the end of the first year that PVPS began, I was in a constant struggle to not lose my temper. I couldn’t focus on relationships and working was just about the only thing I could manage to do. I wasn’t really consciously aware of how impeded my thinking was, either. I was aware I was stressed, but I didn’t realize just how badly it affected problem solving or even just living.
I learned techniques to relax the pelvic floor muscles, I started exercising more, I began cutting out foods that were known to cause inflammation, I adjusted my eating schedule, and I made wardrobe adjustments (couldn’t wear belts anymore.)
I lost a fair amount of weight via intermittent fasting, and was on and off ketogenic diets for a while. The weight loss helped decrease the frequency of back pain that I was periodically dealing with, which had become so much a part of life that I forgot how much I was dealing with it. The PVPS pain was interfering with everything and regular over-the-counter painkillers weren’t really helping. Ultimately I was given a nerve blocking injection which more or less eliminated the pain. And when that shot wore off I had my diet adjustments, exercise, and a set of activities to help me lower stress in place that would keep the pain at much more bearable levels.
COVID restrictions made it easier. That was around the time the shot was wearing off. Remote work has the advantage that I can just pause what I’m doing to exercise or occupy strange positions without having to explain to others why I need to do it. It also helped that in combination with other events at the time, I had more time for relaxing.
I would go weeks without any pain. Then months. And then I would only get it here and there possibly a month or more apart. It can still return and be severe enough that I can’t think straight to do my job, but it’s nothing like what it used to be.
Skin and Complexion.
I was having a lot of odd skin issues with red itchy skin on my arms and my face getting red and sometimes even getting splotchy and oozing.
After it was particularly bad, I was eating a clove of garlic a day, cutting out dairy, strawberries, drinking a tea of turmeric, ginger, and cinnamon, and this was on top of avoiding inflammatory foods because of the PVPS-related pain.
I halted the garlic and histamine blockers and then a few weeks later I went for an allergy test. My IgE levels were extremely low. I had never had this checked before, so I don’t know if anything I was doing actually lowered it.
The test concluded that I have no allergies to anything. They determined this by stabbing me repeatedly up and down both of my arms. By the end of the test I found it pretty amusing at how irritated I was starting to feel with being stabbed repeatedly. I was simultaneously wanting to laugh and to punch the administers of the test.
I forget if strawberries were included in the test, but shellfish was supposed to be. My face gets very splotchy and will ooze if I eat strawberries. If I eat shrimp or certain soy-based oils, my face gets very red and splotchy.
There was a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine that provided me with some packets of an unknown powdery substance that would fix the redness. Just a radical reduction within hours and then almost completely eliminated by the following day. I have long since run out, but I avoid shrimp and soy sauces now and it’s not much of an issue.
Before I started carno, a prescription of Metronidazole would clear up my face and then again when the redness would occasionally resurface. I applied that stuff for months until my complexion was clear again. But seemingly random foods would cause it to resurface and when I ran out of the stuff and the problem resurfaced a year or so later, I found a shady website to get a new prescription and bought another tube online.
Mood.
There’s a lot that can affect mood. Ignoring all of those for a moment, I had no idea how up and down my mood would be as a result of being so sensitive to glucose changes in my blood until I eliminated carbohydrates. I felt this to some extent when doing keto, but inadvertently going over because of carbs in vegetables kept me from really noticing it. When I went full carnivore I became much more level headed. Those ups and downs from glucose, even if I wasn’t aware that I was hungry, were somewhat chaotic. Those stay gone as long as I stick to meats. So I was prone to mild mood swings when I wasn’t on carno. I need to pay attention to see if it comes back.
In the same vein, I need to pay attention to my emotional state in terms of how quickly I empathize with others and whether it’s justified. I don’t know how to quantify or record this yet, either.
Anti-motivation.
Semi-random, didn’t really fit under the above, but meat is super boring.
I was looking for no carb flavored waters for some variety and now I think those may have been a mistake and kept me from completing the transition. Same with the Jacklink snacks. They look good on paper and they are a nice flavor diversion from the monotony, but I suspect they are playing a role in preventing a full transition to where I wont be annoyed at the monotony of diet. Others have said they don’t care about the monotony after the transition, so if I can muster the will power, I’m going to cut those out. If I reintroduce them, I need to track them because despite seeming harmless, they can skew the results.
2024-02-03 - foods that are safe for me to eat
updated: 2023-06-02 12:16:00
generated: 2024-08-16