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Joel's Log
Joel, things that help me in this marathon are fresh air, exercise, sweating and showering immediately, sunshine, drinking water, showering before bed, keeping the eyes, nosrils, teeth clean. Peeled apples and a nice mantra like "all is well". The spa life, FTW!
Update new Blood Values:
Arena, I'll pop in and say you sure aren't alone. I spent some time on another thread waxing on about a return of a hated symptom, and blaming it on tomatoes. But how do I know it was the tomatoes I ate this week, and not the 10 years of cod liver oil I ate in my forties finally doing it's worst?
It seems endless.
I guess the short answer is serum isn't everything. I think we know that.
It seems so very hard to get off of VA Overload Island.
And are all problems fixable? I mean, there is hope. But damage happens. Should I just be glad I've halted progress on some fronts?
I also think we all do see or feel progress here, or we'd be gone.
Quote from Arena on August 27, 2020, 1:40 pmExactly this, @lil-chick! If I take a step back and think about the discussions on this forum, we are just a bunch of guys trying to get better, some are ahead, and some are way back, like myself, so many scientific articles floating around, some of the people understand them, some are trying and some are not trying to understand them, but I can’t shake off the feeling that we are all just floating in outer space having no idea what we are doing, I just hope this VA chord leads back to earth, but until then, why on earth are we not feeling continously better when VA serum levels drop if that was what happened for Grant!
I don't think we have seen any levels posted below 30ug/dL yet, @bella is close, and she feels much better close to this mark. The mark set by some is to get to 20ug, but I don't recall anyone getting there yet. I think alot of us are really toxic and getting down to and below 20ug will take a loooooong time. I wish I had easy access to testing, I have no idea where I am at. Feels like at close to 2yrs low VA, I am half way there.
My health has improved significantly and my serum retinol is still high. I don't follow a restrictive nutritionally unsound diet though, cutting out food groups and worrying about tiny amounts of carotenoids is doing it wrong IMO.
After a year and a half I'm still full of vA but I saw major benefits soon after going low vA. When the process takes so long I think we tend to forget about previous symptoms and how we felt. Dropping intake of vA is an immediate relief for the body.
I’m going for the slow approach to reducing vA in the body. It’s accumulated for years so I’m not going to get rid of it overnight. I’ve eliminated the major sources of incoming vA & am supporting my detoxification pathways for outgoing vA so it should slowly reduce.
@are - I shall try & give you my current take on your question about what is actually happening.
Anything that knocks this vA detox process off the slow & steady can cause bottlenecks in the system with corresponding increases of certain forms of vA in the blood and therefore symptoms. For example, anything that agitates vA dumping from the liver can put too much vA into the system for the body to cope with (Garrett Smith work) so too much sun, exercise, stress, for example, can cause a flare up in symptoms. Even if one is not ‘agitating’ vA from the liver too quickly anything that slows down the enzymes for the processing/detoxification of vA can cause problem back ups. These things are many (see GS detox programme). A back up of retinaldehyde can cause B1 depletion which can cause particular symptoms (I’ve definitely had this one). Then if one is not actually getting the vA ladened toxic bile out of the body then this can just re-circulate. Soluble fibre & Karen Hurd’s work I’ve found useful for this (however need to be very careful to start slow). Unfortunately blood tests only measure one form of vA - retinol - they don’t measure retinaldehyde, retinoic acid, retinoic acid metabolites, retinyl esters (storage form that can leak into blood). A panel testing all those could be so helpful in all this but it doesn’t exist.
What I’m trying to say is that all sorts of things can go wrong with the vA detox that can create symptoms. I feel I’ve done many things wrong over the last 2 years (I could make a list!!). However, each time when I think carefully I’ve done something to either agitate the amount of vA coming out the liver or block it’s processing (4 key enzyme steps). Life gets in the way of always being sensible I find, but slow & steady is the least painful way to do the vA detox imo.
Great post, @JAJ, And I agree. Even before attempting lowered VA I can see looking back that what I called my "lack of resiliency" was doing things that stirred up VA. You don't need to be on a lowered-VA diet for detox woes to be going on.