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Janelle's log
Quote from Hermes on September 13, 2024, 10:39 amWhat is the gist of the book? I waste a lot of time scrolling through feeds. Mostly Quora and YouTube shorts.
Learn to work with your subconscious thoughts instead of fighting them the way most of us do most of the time. Subconscious mind thinks differently. Conceptually not so logically. As in there is no negative. Not something does not exist in subconscious stream. Have you ever tried to logic something out with a toddler before they grok that NO actually has a meaning beyond that someone is yelling at me? Ever see a kid smile and then slowly do exactly what they were just told not to do? And say no repeatedly while they do it? Smiling the whole time? Yeh. That is our subconscious mind. Almost frustrating enough to make one think they are being purposely messed with.
Like I said. It is simple. He did a much better job, simpler, quicker, more effective than I just did.
Quote from Janelle525 on September 13, 2024, 10:54 amQuote from Joe2 on September 13, 2024, 9:56 amQuote from Janelle525 on September 13, 2024, 7:16 amQuote from lil chick on September 13, 2024, 5:12 amI believe in cheese! One of my kids is mostly made of cheese and has zero cavities. Of course, with a heavy French family tree we may have an ancestral need, LOL.
I think I will try your idea of more fats to help with dry eye.
Yeah I have always loved cheese. I would eat it as a snack pretty consistently throughout my life. And of course I was raised on pizza and mac n cheese. I don't crave those things anymore though. I think melted cheese is like glue. Much better on the digestive system un-melted.
Do you still do quite a bit of dairy fat? I noticed ice cream didn't help my dry eye much, so I'm not 100% positive it is all fat in general that helps. But at least not trying to be so low fat has helped.
When I first started having skin issues beyond eczema and urushiol 43 years ago, I starting getting welts/boils/giant zits similar to what @griffin describes on his big cysts. Got married and drove to Upper Peninsula, Michigan for honeymoon. Broken down Mustang and not much money. Bought big loaf of whole wheat and a 2# chunk of Swiss cheese at local yup market. Ate that for two days. Golf ball size zits took 3 or 4 days to form. Started out like pea sized painful knobs coming up from deep skin. Huge relief when they opened and drained. Took me another 8 years before I connected food with symptoms at all.
Yikes!!! I don't get any skin problems from dairy, but I do think overdoing dairy fats are an issue for most people. Clogs up the liver.
Liver clogging should be the diagnostic term for this.
Quote from Janelle525 on September 13, 2024, 10:55 amQuote from Joe2 on September 13, 2024, 10:06 amQuote from Janelle525 on September 12, 2024, 3:23 pmSo the forum seems safer now that some bad actors aren't around. I am doing pretty good. It has been the hardest last several weeks though emotionally. I ended up drinking coke for a few days as that is one of my weaknesses, I have always loved soda. By the last day I had a hypomanic episode acting like an addict. I won't go in to details here as it's very private, but I did literally feel like an addict. I ended up processing a major trauma that day. It's not completely healed but I think I am on the right path.
Period this month started very heavy again. But all of sudden by the end of the second day it lightened up almost to stopping by the 4th day. I kinda freaked out about it again. I was thinking maybe I'm vitamin K deficient as I had a bruise pop up too. Beef beans and rice aren't particularly high in vitamin k! But I have been eating about an ounce or two of gouda every morning thinking k2 acts like k1, but now I'm not so sure and maybe soluble fiber can bind some vitamin K.. I am going to try eating more green vegetables this month, but not too much quite yet I wanted to see where my retinol levels are at, my blood test is on the 20th. So I will try to stick to the foods I have been eating until then. Just to see what my baseline is.
The dry eye is way better. I have been using more olive oil on my whole wheat pasta in the morning that seemed to really help. So I think we do need fats for healthy mucus membranes! Karen Hurd right again! (and no I don't follow her like she's my guru, I'm listening to my body and considering physiological function we can't know everything all at once)
No change on the buttcrack front (or back? lol). No more ideas on that other than being on a strict elimination diet, which I don't have any motivation for. Plus then what?
From the land of never would have thought:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMFFQKW2?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title
I thought it would be a waste of time and money. The kid did a good simple job with a profound idea. Hilariously simple.
Have better weeks. And butt crack.
I tried listening to that interview GS did with him, I unfortunately didn't get that far. I might try again. Thanks Joe.
Yeh. I dinged him about it. He talked 45 minutes out of the 60 he interviewed a guy. Hilarious. He got excited. He outlined the physiology of what Haskins described psychologically. All about the bile, right? Well bile does interact with hormones - like dopamine. So Garrett's stuff was good, but I wanted to hear about 45 minutes of Haskins. I grok Garrett's stuff in his livestreams.
So I countered his excuse of getting excited with - yeh, you interviewed a guy about how to keep dopamine levels reasonable and got all dopaminergic on him. Nice. He sees the irony. Thinking he will have him on again. Will blast him if he does not let the kid talk more. Still it was a good interview.
@christian, your post broke my heart, WOW! You don't see a post like that every day on these interwebs....thank you
So I got my vit A test back. It's 33.7. It was 35 back in January. So not really much change. That's with eating 100-300 mcg (or less) a day during that time. And low A for 6 yrs.
My eyes have been getting pretty dry again at night. I think the soluble fiber is binding up my fats. Even if I take it away from food. Dry eyes is caused by fat deficiency not vitamin A deficiency. Makes you wonder about the original vitamin A studies. I commented back around May that there was an infant who appeared to have vitamin A deficiency and subsequently died despite them feeding her cod liver oil for a week or two. She was being fed skim milk and was severely malnourished. Is xerophthalmia an essential fatty acid deficiency? That's what I wondered originally but then decided well then why did the mice develop it on lard??? Maybe lard doesn't have the fatty acids mice need? Then the other question would be then why didn't Grant get dry eyes on such a low fat diet? Maybe his liver is processing what little fats he gets from bison efficiently?
I got some other labs as well. Good news is I don't have insulin resistance. Glucose was normal at 86. A1C 4.9- normal. And Insulin 9.7 some say anything less than 10 is fine. So homa-IR which is a fairly good measure of insulin resistance is 2.1- about 2 or less is good.
Cholesterol numbers are much better which isn't surprising given all the soluble fiber. But it can still be better. Triglycerides are normal. They were almost as high as 110 in the past which is where fatty liver starts.
LDH is still low which means I still struggle with hypoglycemia. Which was why I even turned to fatty food to begin with.
BUN shows I was dehydrated. That's a bummer because I did drink a glass of water about 45 mins before going, but I still have a bad habit of drinking less than I need especially because the more water I drink the lower my blood pressure goes.
Calcium is lower than I want it to be. I guess my one-two ounces of cheese isn't enough with all the phytates in the whole grains. This is why I believe in getting these numbers tested once a yr, it can give clues as to how your diet is effecting your health.
Everything else was good other than higher than optimal MCV at 93 which has been that way for many yrs. Some say that is B12 deficiency. Which wouldn't be surprising as the entire time it's been 91 or higher I had struggled with low stomach acid. Thinking of using a supplement, but really can't decide on which. I don't have any other markers of anemia though. Even despite greatly limiting any folic acid in my diet which can hide B12 deficiency.
No change in the buttcrack rash as always! I tried switching to psyllium husk 4 times a day instead of the beans for a few days. It bound up my bowels pretty good. Which at least is a change from IBS-C that I used to have back 9 months ago. It also didn't clear up some hormonal acne. Very weird as Karen Hurd claims it works great for that. But I also went off my normal diet and had some yogurt as well.
Hi Janelle! Thanks so much for the update. Very interesting! I think Jessica had good results during her fatty acid experiment, and you could be right that dry eye is about that. You could look back at what she was doing. I think this is the correct thread:
https://ggenereux.blog/discussion/topic/essential-fatty-acid-omega-6-experiment/
My eyes also get dry at night. I still eat the toasted sesame oil a few times a week that Jessica mentioned. It's yummy. But I guess I didn't go forward with the rest of the changes she suggested, and maybe that is to my detriment. I wonder if she still does the extra oils.
Sad about that baby that you mention! One of my anecdotes that I think about is a loved one who had failure to thrive and didn't gain weight properly during her first year although she was a large baby to start. I suspect that her problem was a weak kidney, which wasn't diagnosed until old age. Probably started out big because in utero her mother's kidney did the work. I think we can all agree that a weak kidney might lead to toxicity of many types including VA overload? She believes ice cream saved her, which her dad swooped in and gave her. (Cod liver oil yikes). Luckily she came from stock who are good at digesting dairy, and I can totally see how ice cream is like a concentrated mother's milk, a high fat, high carb combo.
Quote from Jalee on October 2, 2024, 6:31 amI know you may not appreciate my input, but I did have abnormal high MCV for four years. Higher than 100 is indicating red blood cell size is larger than normal and macrocytosis. The good news is your MCV of 93 is normal, usually the scale is anything from 80-100 is normal, some scales start to classify it as enlarged at 95. And it makes sense if you don't have any symptoms of b12 deficiency either. Folate deficiency can cause this as well. However, I wouldn't worry about an MCV at that value. It took my doctor 2 years of it being over 100 before she even recommended I go to a hematologist for further tests.
Even then, he didn't even recommended b12 supps. I had to do that on my own and in the end, I think it may have been lithium with b12 that ended up helping, as I had supplemented with b12 and folate before with no change in macrocytosis. Not really sure 100% though.
I do think reference ranges are too wide because it includes less than healthy people. This paper:
"Blood Chemistry and CBC Analysis –
Clinical Laboratory Testing from a Functional Perspective"
says anything over 89.9 can be b12 or folate deficiency. So by the time it's 100 it's probably pretty severe! Copper deficiency was also mentioned, so could be copper dysregulation when it gets higher than optimal.
I have been having some symptoms of b12 deficiency, tingling in my hands and feet and also my arm falling asleep from sleeping on it at night. Someone said on another forum that was her sign she needed more. So maybe mine is just borderline all the time from not absorbing enough everyday, Chris Masterjohn said we need to be getting animal protein throughout the day to absorb enough as we don't absorb much at one time. That would really suck for those people doing intermittent fasting! I think that's a recipe for deficiencies! But a supplement would be easy anyway.
Uploaded files:@jessica2
I have never gotten any of those lab tests. I should have done homocysteine, but I was already doing too many in one go. Maybe next yr. I decided I will just use a supplement and see if it helps anything.
Update:
Been doing much better lately after working out some family issues. I think stress plays a larger role in our health than we want to admit.
Saw a comment somewhere that dry eye can be caused by oxalates and I had a lightbulb moment. I had greatly increased my oxalates on the beans protocol as black beans are considered very high in oxalates per serving (although still nowhere near the level of spinach). So I stopped eating black beans and tested out lima beans because being off all soluble fiber I felt some mental health issues coming back. Lima beans are very low in oxalates and are white! Another bonus! They actually taste pretty great! Reminds me of mashed potatoes a little, but I don't like them as much as black beans. Then it seemed like I was sleeping better and less itchy. I will continue trying to limit oxalates. My eyes were still dry though. So I went back to the drawing board and was reading some more about mineral balancing and saw that dry eye can be from adrenaline and magnesium can help adrenaline. Well I hadn't been taking or using mag oil in a very long time (and oxalates bind mag and calcium!), so I tried mag oil again and my dry eye got a lot better at night!! Then yesterday I decided to have halloween candy and soda. I could feel my adrenals being pushed hard, felt wired and didn't sleep well and my dry eye was terrible by morning, eyes are sore now. So yeah sweets can definitely push the adrenal glands. Karen Hurd right again!
But anyway other than that it's just been a very stressful yr and I don't know where I'd be without the soluble fiber. I think my diet prevented me from crashing with panic attacks that I usually get from terrible stress. We were in the path of hurricane Milton recently, went right over our house. And I came out of it much better than I thought I would. We had a peace that everything would be okay and it was. I did have brain fog for about a week after. And I wondered why we moved to a place with terrible hurricanes! But, we are here for a reason and I'm glad we did.
I was trying to eat more nuts as per Karen Hurd's recommendations but my guts just can't tolerate them yet. Had IBS twice trying to eat them. So I'm accepting the reality. Learning to accept reality can be difficult when you have such hope in things getting better! Peanuts and almonds are very high in oxalates too! So I stopped peanut butter too. I will report back on the results of going low oxalate as I think it may be an issue for those of us with mystery rashes and chronic illnesses. I do still think if you can heal the gut you can tolerate basically everything including spinach. But that's just not my reality right now. Accepting and moving on!
Hi Janelle, great update. Sigh regarding legumes. I just love them but they do cause lots of digestive upset even after all this time with me. I can't help but think that I might be one of those people who are just not legume people. My best diet is kind of dull without them, but there it is. I guess there are benefits to a simple diet, easy to shop LOL.