The Winner: My Adrenals!

While much of the country is probably suffering through too much cortisol, I think I am finally making enough. I quit taking it a few days ago when my face started getting puffy, I gained a couple of pounds that wouldn't budge, and I noticed my heart beating a few times: those are clear signs of overdoing hydrocortisone. I'm feeling back to normal now and my face doesn't look like the Pillsbury dough boy.

What finally brought this about? It could be that about a month ago, I really started cleaning up my diet. I haven't been perfect, but I stopped going out for lunch at work and getting anything from the deli except meat, cheese and roast chickens. I stopped buying chocolate chips under the pretense of making low-carb cookies. I also bumped up my kelp tablets to four per day and added L. casei shirota bacteria to my yogurt. After some five years, when I went through an incredible amount of stress with parents, relatives who were worse than useless in helping with their care, moving across the country, working at five jobs in one year, and being nuked with antibiotics, I am close to regaining the health I had before all that.

I even feel like working out. A few weeks ago, I started training a couple of days a week. I do some intense 15-minute strength workouts from Youtube. I'd like to have less pain from standing for long periods (I spent a few hours canning salsa over the weekend and stood out in the cold for almost an hour this morning to vote). But there's a lot less snap, crackle and pop in my back now.

The mental clarity is continuing--I finished an online course on Athens and Sparta, scoring 95% on the final. It was a pleasant surprise to find Victor Davis Hanson giving some of the lectures. My current course is on the Federalist Papers. Studying these subjects helps the Electoral College make sense--direct democracies didn't go so well (ask Socrates) and concentrations of power led to tyranny.

I'm very happy that people have had the freedom of speech to criticize government dietary advice, and that the big tech powers that be had no interest in silencing us. Much respect to the people who made greater sacrifices than standing in the cold to secure those rights.

Comments

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...

Collagen-filled Low Carb Burritos

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In Defense of Fast Food

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Pain, Pain, Go Away!

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