Philosophies:
- There is no magic pill. You don’t WANT there to be a magic pill. What you want is to use this thing you’re struggling with as a way to make you totally different. Let it make you antifragile.
- You could hope for months and years for something that’ll take you back to who you are. This feeling faded within months for me. I soon realized that I wanted to be better than who I was before. I wanted this journey to change me and turn me into something better. You have to make the pain, suffering, and doubt worth it.
- Real food is better than supplements.
- Trust people who've helped at least 3 people like you. Ideally, they've helped themselves, too.
- Trust is just a way to source experiments. Ultimately, your body and your body’s experience is important. The tricky thing is that sometimes you may feel worse to feel better (killing bad bacteria feels bad, but actually could be good).
- So, you need to use journaling.
- Run the scientific method on yourself. If you want to get really nerdy with it, you can use something like exist.io, but journaling helps.
- Follow what you want. You can choose to eat whatever food you want as long as you are also comfortable with the consequences. Following what you want makes the feelings of being trapped or stuck in amber go away.
Blood Tests
- Here's how to do it: https://requestatest.com/lab-tests-california (if your doctor doesn’t recommend it and they usually can’t/won’t, which means insurance doesn’t cover it).
- Types of Blood tests
- 1. Histamine Intolerance (may not get this one)
- Gut issues are known causes of histamine intolerance, and symptoms could indicate a histamine intolerance.
- 2. Mag-Zinc-Copper (RBC Magnesium not serum Magnesium)
- RBC Mag test to get a more accurate picture of magnesium in my blood. Some symptoms, abdominal pain, fatigue, tingling in hands/feet could be indicative of a copper deficiency. Tiredness and wavering appetites could be an indication of zinc deficiency as well.
- 3. Omega 3 blood
- Omega 3s useful for gut related issues and fatigue I've described elsewhere.
- 4. Thyroid Comprehensive Panel
- Fatigue could indicate thyroid
- 5. Iron Panel
- Useful to rule out any anemia.
- 6. Vitamin Panel (Vitamin C, B Vitamins—folate, b12, Vitamin D, Vitamin A, Vitamin E, etc)
- A limited diet over a series of years could create certain nutritional deficiencies that I should address in some form or another. Each of these vitamins is useful to know in some form.
- 7. CMP (including hemoglobin A1c)
- Especially interested in the liver values. It is extremely important with the leaky gut, sibo, and other issues I have to keep track and manage my liver. In addition, the fatigue and tiredness may be related to blood sugar.
- 8. CBC w/differential
- This standard test
Other tests:
- GI Map or GI360
- Good for identifying parasites, lack of probiotics, etc. Wouldn't take recommendations on what to do, but understanding it is helpful.
Habits (things to run experiments on)
- Sun (first thing in the morning)
- Walk after meals
- Emotional Release (allowing anger, sadness, fear, etc. through your body)
- Nervous system exercises
- This includes “Shaking it off.’
- Deep breathing/pranayam to calm your nervous system
- Body/somatic meditations
- Nerva or meditation before meals
- Morning stretching & joint exercises
- Drinking water with meals vs. drinking 30 minutes after (I found drinking water with meals is bad for my low acid)
Diet:
- First
- Broth/Water/simple Fodmap/Paleo diet for a couple of weeks to get to a place where you don’t have symptoms. This will help you stabilize.
- Second:
- Add foods and see what triggers bad reactions. Stop eating food if it triggers bad reactions.
- Kill bad bacteria:
- Anti-microbials (I relied on Mikalea from Bella Lindellman to help me here)
- Oil of oregano
- Allicin
- Berberine
- Eventually:
- Different colors
- Not too much at once (practice eating until 80% full eventually)
- Smoothies
- Fermented foods (kimchi & kefir are especially good).
- Avoid bad food (alcohol, processed, etc. as much as you can, especially early on)
- Overindex on:
- Vitamin C
- Vitamin D
- Magnesium
Supplements
- There are a few trusted brands. Rely on those for most of your supplements. Then run experiments
- Thorne
- Pure Encapsulation
- Life Extension
- If you eat beef, beef liver is full of great nutrients I'd experiment with it.
- Basically, everyone is magnesium deficient. Take a magnesium supplement. I take thorne’s magnesium glycinate before bed.
- Different types of probiotics (experiment with soil-based + spore-based + yeast based)
- Probiotics are not a permanent fix; they have fleeting effects.
- I don’t have as much knowledge here because this stuff changes around a lot. I played around with
- Florastor (maybe this is better: Pure Encapsulations – Saccharomyces Boulardii?)
- Visiobiome/VSL3 (look up their lawsuit I forgot which is the original blend)
- I heard good things about this.)
- Play around with stuff like:
- Betaine HCl: Replace low stomach acid, often seen in chronic gastritis, heartburn, and acid reflux.
- Take it right before and see if it makes digestion easier for you.
- Digestive enzymes: Break down food and help prevent malabsorption, especially in exocrine pancreatic insufficiency.
- Prokinetics: Increase gut motility (if the food feels stuck) — a slow gut transit underlies constipation and can be responsible for dysbiosis like SIBO
Sleep:
- I’ve found that sleep is extremely important in healing. There are many ways to troubleshoot your sleep problems. Here’s what I’d focus on experimenting with first:
- Getting morning sunlight in your eyes 30min-1hr upon walking
- Lowering bed & room temperature to get deep sleep
- Stop eating 2-3 hours before sleeping.
- Dosing magnesium glycinate before sleep (you can experiment with theanine as well, but it’s less well-founded).
Good Practitioners:
- https://bellalindemann.com/
- URL:https://bellalindemann.com/