Skip to main content

Fat Fast is Calming my Stomach

I don't know much about inflammation. What I do know is that immune cells can run amok, mistaking your own tissue for invaders, damaging it and inflaming it. It's also called autoimmune reaction and it can be systemic, throughout your body. And it's miserable.

Food, especially wheat and dairy, is a major cause of inflammation for some people. We focus on carbs around here, but it's funny proteins that cause problems from paranoia to arthritis: gluten, gliadin, whey and casein, for instance. The proteins can also come from your own body: serious injury can cause a release of the DNA from your mitochondria, tiny organelles in your cells, but with their own DNA separate from yours.(1) Interleukin-6 is an inflammatory protein your body makes; homocysteine (another protein) may cause inflammation when there's too much of it.

How do we get these rogue proteins under control? Tess wrote a post on systemic enzymes, calling them THE BEST anti-inflammatory supplement. (Emphasis in original.) I have some enzymes at home, but they're not systemic, and my stomach was so painful and bloated that I didn't want to wait on an order to get here. Besides, I have a hard time swallowing pills, and some enzymes are hell on your tongue. So I'll keep the systemic enzymes in mind as a backup plan and figure out a way to get them down the hatch if I need them.

What else is a good protein slayer? Probably ketones.How to make ketones? Fasting is one way.

In a study of men and women observing Ramadan, a month-long period of intermittent fasting among Muslims, homocysteine, interleukin-6 and especially C-reactive protein (an inflammation marker) decreased compared to a control group.(2) I don't know whether the study measured ketones, but since the subjects fasted for 12 hours at a time, they might have been in ketosis. Ketones, says Dr. Michael Eades, "stimulate the process of chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA). What is CMA? It is 'a cellular process that allows cells to remove proteins, organelles [like mitochondria -LM], and foreign bodies from the cytosol [the watery interior of the cell] and deliver them to the lysosomes for degradation'."(3)

Some people love intermittent fasting. I HATE it. I ended up going on a binge when I tried it--and I've never been a binge eater. So how to crank up the protein-slaying ketones? The new fat fast,(4) of course. I once joked to a friend who does juice fasts now and then that she ought to do a bacon fast. I had no idea there really was such a thing.

I was at work when I had the idea and realized the lunch I brought was too high in carbs and protein. Luckily, I had a jar of coconut butter and had about 1/3 cup of it instead of my lunch. I downloaded the book Fat Fast Cookbook tonight and had the deviled eggs (one serving, or two eggs halves) and some coleslaw. Those were the fattiest eggs I've ever had--full of mayonnaise, bacon and avocado. I thought, this is how food should be--full of fat, not dry. You eat every few hours (which I prefer) and stay around 1000 calories per day. It's a fast, so it's a temporary and not permanent way of eating.

So I've spent half a day on the fat fast. The book doesn't make any claims about inflammation or helping your stomach, but my stomach feels normal. Not hungry or inflamed as it was this morning and has been for awhile, just normal, even after eating a bunch of raw cabbage. Back when I had an acute infection of H. pylori, the bacteria that cause ulcers, I wished I could just stop eating for awhile. I think this fast is as close as you can get to that without starving yourself or taking drugs. You don't have to put much of the food into your sore stomach since fat packs a lot of calories into a little weight. Simply eating causes inflammation.(5) The only bummer about the Fat Fast Cookbook is that so many recipes call for sour cream or cheese, which I love but can't eat--it's those funny proteins. Even though it's after 10pm and I don't feel hungry, eating a regular dinner is a habit and it was a mental adjustment to have just a snack.

I've felt calm but sharp and alert with no headache on roughly 20 grams of carbohydrate since breakfast. So much for needing 130g of carbohydrate a day to run your brain--but regular readers already knew that.

  1. "Deadly Inflammation, but No Sign of Infection" by Lauren Shenkman, Science Now, March 3, 2010.
  2. "Inflammation and Intermittent Fasting" by Dr. Michael Eades. Protein Power blog, August 13, 2007.
  3. "Ketosis Cleans our Cells" by Dr. Michael Eades. Protein Power blog, February 27, 2006.
  4. The Fat Fast Cookbook by Dana Carpender, Amy Dungan and Rebecca Latham. CarbSmart Press, Sparks, Nevada. 2013.
  5.  "Inflammation and Diet" by Dr. Michael Eades. Protein Power blog, July 10, 2007.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Great post, Lori. I wish I could find coconut butter in a local shop, maybe I'll have to order online. Doing a fat fast-type diet helps me with all sorts of things. Ketones are good.
tess said…
I'm glad you're feeling better! I love the FF cookbook, though it IS dairy-heavy.... Your ice-cream recipe strikes me as a perfect "meal" on a hot summer day, before bedtime. Do you have the Enig-Fallon book, "Eat Fat Lose Fat"? There's a good-sized section on coconut-based recipes which are probably adaptable to fat-fasting use.
Lori Miller said…
Your friend's experience inspired me, too.
Lori Miller said…
Haven't seen that book; I'll check it out. Some ice cream probably would be good tonight.
tess said…
i just finished reading the reference articles -- interesting stuff, especially the last! no wonder i feel better when eating less....
I just read about the fat fast and it sounds intriguing. I have been using the typical fat-fast mini-meals as snacks, and trying Peter's cooked eggs mashed in butter.
Lori Miller said…
Tess, there's such great stuff on Dr. Eades' blog. If I had access to only one web site, it would be his.
Lori Miller said…
Good call on the ice cream: the lemon is 89% fat (without pistachios); the XXX chocolate is 87% fat.

http://relievemypain.blogspot.com/2012/07/non-dairy-low-carb-lemon-ice-cream.html

http://relievemypain.blogspot.com/2012/12/xxx-chocolate-ice-cream-low-carb-non.html
tess said…
i have a gripe with Mike Eades -- he doesn't post often enough. ;-)
Lori Miller said…
Agreed! I wish he'd quit arguing with Twitter trolls and write some posts instead.

Popular posts from this blog

Dana Carpender's Podcast; Dr. Davis on YouTube; Labor Day Sales

Dana Carpender, who's written several recipe books and other works on low-carb, has a podcast and is still writing articles at carbsmart.com. She's a terrific writer and amateur researcher (otherwise known as reading , as Jimmy Dore jokes ). I use her book 500 Low-Carb Recipes all the time and I'm looking forward to hearing more from her. I've embedded her podcast on my blog (click on the three lines at the top right if you don't see it, or go to Spotify or other podcast source if you're getting this by email). Carbsmart.com doesn't seem to have a blog feed, so if you want to see the latest posts there, you can sign up for notifications at their site. Dr. Davis has been putting a lot more videos on YouTube, so I've added his channel to the lineup. Click on the three lines on my blog if you don't see it, or go to his channel here .  * * * * * Primal Kitchen is having a Labor Day sale-- 20% off everything. They sell high quality collagen powder, con...

Fasting blood sugar & insulin have crept up!

It's pretty bad when even conventional medicine thinks your blood sugar is high. I had lab tests done last week, as I do every year, and saw things were going in the wrong direction. Photo from Pixabay . Uh-oh.  Ideal blood sugar is about 70-90. Your blood sugar can be high because you're stressed or ill, but I felt OK. I can't blame it on cortisol, which was smack in the middle of the normal range. And my A1c, which reflects blood sugar over the past few months, shows that whatever is going on has been happening for a while. My insulin is more than double what it should be. Oddly, my triglycerides, which typically indicate carb consumption, were good.  I don't have an explanation for the triglycerides. I should have suspected something was wrong, though. I've felt very tired and a little sad for the past few months. Unlike many people with higher than ideal blood sugar and insulin, I had only gained about three pounds.  Regardless of my good weight and triglyceride...

Interview: The Microbiome's Effect on Almost Everything

Mark L. Cannon, DDS, MS joins Bret Weinstein of the Darkhorse Podcast for a discussion about the oral microbiome and its downstream effects on everything from acne to Alzheimer’s. Dr. Cannon is a pediatric dentist and professor of otolaryngology (ear, nose and throat medicine). It's an hour and 44 minutes, but well worth your time. Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjkOgCXiMeE

Avoiding a Nightmare by Using Math

The answer lies in trigonometry. -Sherlock Holmes Don't worry if you never learned trigonometry--the answers here lie in arithmetic. Medical test results often come back positive or negative, as if the result were a certainty. Of course, there is the accuracy, but if the accuracy is 99% or so, what does that really mean? That you should get your affairs in order? Before you call your probate attorney, let's take an example from the book Calculated Risks by Gerd Gigerenzer. Let's say you're a 40-something year old woman with no symptoms of breast cancer. You have a positive mammogram. What are the odds you have breast cancer? Using some assumptions about test accuracy and rates of disease based on real data, the odds that you'd have breast cancer are one in eleven according to Gigerenzer. (If you were way off, don't feel bad--most of the physicians Gigerenzer tested were way off, too--and they had the data in front of them. Not that that's comforting in every...

Lousy Mood? It Could be the Food

Here's a funny AMV(1) on what it's like to be depressed, apathetic and overly sensitive. Note: explicit (but funny) lyrics in the video. Hearing this song brought a startling realization: I used to be emo, but with normal clothes. Sulking, sobbing and writing poetry were my hobbies. When I was a kid, my mother said that she wouldn't know what to do to punish me if I had done something wrong. And yet things got worse. Over a two-week period in 1996, my best friend moved away, I lost my job and broke up with my boyfriend. I lost my appetite and lived on a daily bagel, cream cheese and a Coke for the next few months. I had tried counseling, and didn't find it helpful; in fact, I found reviving painful memories was pointless. Not thinking about them, on the other hand, worked wonders. Later on, so did studying philosophy and learning to think through emotions instead of just riding through them. But what's blown away all the techniques is diet. Since I s...