Fasting Update 4

Yesterday I woke up feeling pretty smart.  For some reason I had tossed and turned, but that was OK, I thought.  It was Day 2 of "refeeding."  Nice.  

What is refeeding?  My plan has been to do four days of fasting a week, and three days of refeeding, or regular eating.  This was Day 2 of Week 12.  

So, I took my fasting blood glucose with my glucose meter.  Now, it is true that I had eaten the day before.  I had made a loaf of bread again and it was wonderful.  I have been making "ketone" bread, which is supposed to be low carb compared to store bought bread.  

So after my diligent fasting, and even eating a ketogenic diet on my first refeeding day, I really thought I was going to see glucose perfection.  

What was my fasting glucose?  127!!!!!!!!!!  WHAAAAAAAATT??????!!!!!!!!

That woke me up.  I checked my weight.  Up eight (8) pounds!!  What happened?  Did I wake up on Jupiter?  

I had expected my number to go up slightly with refeeding.  Dare I check my blood pressure?  Well, that wasn't too insane, but it was a little high.  

I decided not to eat.  Maybe never again.  I was too ill.  I sure wasn't eating that bread.  While I sat around staring at the ceiling being disappointed at how my glorious refeeding was turning out, I puzzled over what just happened.  Something similar had happened last week, but it had the decency to wait until Monday to do it.  Last Monday after refeeding on the weekend, my fasting blood glucose started out with a bang at 122.  I would have quit eating, except Monday was already a fasting day.  The night before I had eaten a steak, and felt good about it.  It was delicious and low carb. How could low carb raise blood sugar?  And I remember I had had trouble sleeping.  What's going on?  

I spent the day yesterday sulking.  I watched a video on fasting.  "Will cream in your coffee break a fast?" someone asked in the comments.  I feel like it's a good question and needs to be addressed.  It's funny how so many people wanted chime in and criticize anyone who would do such a thing.  May I just say, at first I had done a total water fast on the fasting days, but after I stopped sleeping for the days that I did that, and I reevaluated the need for it.  If I complained, someone would say, "So what's losing a little sleep now and then?"  A little?  No sleep.  For days.  That wasn't right.  Solution? Quit the fast or add some food?  Add some food.  The facts are, what I'm trying to do does not require a total fast.  It requires a drastically reduced calorie, low carb, low protein, high fat diet with the calories coming from fat.  Just like cream in coffee.  Hey.  Perfect.  The man doing the video replied that what constitutes breaking your fast depends upon what you're trying to accomplish with a fast and your own metabolism.  Some people fast for weight loss, some for religious reasons, some for medical reasons.  In my case, I guess I would say the fasting has been for medical reasons.  I have absolutely had it with rheumatoid arthritis.  I ain't gonna take it no more.  I'd rather starve.  Well, that's handy.  Rheumatoid arthritis is somehow connected to eating.  

Oh, I had hoped that my general metabolism would improve.  My fasting blood glucose had started being 108 on a regular basis.  Not time for an ambulance, but it caused questions.  It really should be like it used to be, around 88.  I wasn't getting older, was I?  I wouldn't take it lying down.  Worst off all, I gain weight if I even smell food.  That wasn't the way it used to be either.  And may I say, my insulin was checked once, and the doctor had said that it was a lot higher than it should be, maybe twice as high.  What happens when one's insulin is too high? he had asked me.  And he told me too.  He said insulin will cause food to be stored as fat instead of being used to fuel the body.  Oh, he didn't blame me.  My problem was ignorance.  OK, he didn't call me ignorant.  He said I lacked information.  What I needed was fiber.  Lots of it.  Thirty grams a day.  Sometime check out what you have to do to eat thirty grams of fiber a day.  I ruled that out.  

No, I'd like my insulin levels to have a learning experience.  With all that insulin my blood glucose should have been beaten back to a lower level.  The body puts out higher insulin to bring down blood sugar.  Which reminds me.  I had checked my glucose and ketones an hour and a half after eating the bread.  Glucose 95, ketone meter 5.5.  I thought perfection was achieved.  Insulin always spikes after eating to handle the way the blood glucose shoots up. If this stops happening it's an indication that your insulin cells are not able to keep up anymore. So now fasting glucose 127? This troubled me.  What in blazes was going on?

After all my work to turn things around I had a fasting glucose that easily qualified as diabetic.  And what else could I do?  I had pulled out all the stops.  I had done everything everyone on Youtube thought would cure blood sugar metabolism and gotten worse.  

I had joined American middle age.  

What happened to my mouse plan?  I was convinced by a study on mice that one could fix one's pancreas, even in the event of Type I diabetes... maybe.   The mice were intentionally made into diabetics, in one study Type II, in another Type I.  In both, the mice developed severe diabetes at 10 weeks of age, with glucose levels above 400, and died at 16 weeks.  Their pancreases were no longer producing insulin since the insulin cells were nearly all destroyed.  In people, this stage is sometimes treated with organ transplant.  

How were the mice treated?  The mice were treated with a modified fast.  Why not a total fast?  Who knows.  I'm guessing the intent was to demonstrate the effect of a modified fast in particular, to bolster the idea that modified fasts work so that people that were put off by total fasts might add fuel to their fire that they could just do a modified fast and put cream in their coffee.  I don't know any such people, of course.  The diet was called a fasting mimicking diet, (FMD), because it was designed to provide most of the benefits of fasting.  If not all.  

And what benefits did they hope to provide the dear little mousekateers?  They hoped to put the mice into a fasting state that would cause autophagy. In autophagy the mouse bodies would wind up eating those old, worn out cells in their own bodies that they could most afford to lose, a form of housecleaning.  It's probably the effect of autophagy that causes people to say that a fast causes the body to detox.  In a sense it does.  After going for a while in autophagy, the study showed that the mice had 1/3 less of their own pancreas.  That would seem to be bad, given the desperate state they were already in.  But their diseased pancreases were then replaced upon refeeding by the body.  The autophagy and fasting stimulate a proliferation of stem cells and the stem cells rushed in to reproduce the mice's pancreases from scratch with neonatal like cells.  

After continuing mouse fast therapy for six months, way longer than the mice could even have been expected to live, these mice had normal pancreases and produced normal insulin.  Their blood glucose levels stabilized to normal.  Rescued mice.

That's for me! I thought, and embarked on a six month mouse FMD diet.  

So here at the halfway point I was very sad.  Yes, my logic had been that if a mouse could regrow a pancreas, surely I could proliferate my own stem cells and regrow faulty joints that didn't hurt anymore.  And, truth be known, it was working.  I would say pain levels are down by 50% anyway.  I had started doing a lot of things I didn't do anymore...hobbies, chores, exercise, and other activities that I had just given up on.  It really was getting exciting.  It seemed like my vision even improved.  Was I making progress?  

I read a book about stem cell therapy.  It sounded fabulous.  Right now I'm not sure where the US is at with that.  There is a clinic in Panama that claims to have success with rheumatoid arthritis called the Stem Cell Institute.  Maybe I should go there.  I looked it up.  $30,000.  Thirty thousand dollars??!!  Yikes.  Well, what if I scraped that together?  Should I do it?  They used umbilical cord cells.  Were those better them mine?  Maybe, being younger.  Well, it was a thought.  They have really had astonishing success with muscular dystrophy.  

I decided to limp along on my own.  Not to say give up.  Why should I give up?  It wouldn't improve anything. 

So then today, the new Day 2 of Week 12, (since I fasted yesterday), my blood glucose was 91, weight down 9 pounds ?!, and I really feel smart again and like everything is working perfectly.  I would even say that over the course of the fast I have lost weight.  That was another odd thing about this fast.  I never seemed to lose weight.  

I still don't know what happened yesterday.  It may not sound like much, but if something matters enough that one fasts for 11 weeks, only to see things getting worse, it's pretty disheartening. My hunch is food allergy.  The main ingredient of the bread that set it off is vital wheat gluten, which has fewer carbs than wheat flour but still tastes good.  Keyword gluten.  Some of us don't do well with gluten. Does that mean no more of my delicious bread?  I'm afraid so.  I'm already bracing for what coconut flour bread tastes like. If it tastes good don't eat it!

But I guess one must face the fact that all these issues came about somehow.  Probably one of the ways is intolerance of certain foods.  Even if the fast corrected the damage, it would be good not to re injure everything.   So back to the drawing board.