I just got over being sick for two weeks straight. This is probably the sickest I have ever been in my adult life, and the longest I’ve been sick, much worse than when I had covid.
Historically, for most of my life, when I got sick, I would be sick three or four days, and then I’d be fine. I usually have the same symptoms: sore throat, runny nose, and then coughing during the final days. It’s never really been a big deal.
In the last few years, however, it’s felt like I’ve been A) getting sick more often, B) getting more severely sick when I get sick, and C) remaining sick for longer periods.
I assumed that was just an aging thing now that I’m in my fifties.
I was completely wrong. This doesn’t happen to people in their fifties. It was for a completely different reason.
This time I got sick, I immediately started coughing right out of the blue. For the next 7 days, I was coughing so hard I felt like I was going to puke up a chunk of one of my lungs.
For that first week, I was also extremely sleepy and could barely keep my eyes open throughout the day and the evening. I spent most of the week literally taking naps or sleeping 12-15 hours a night with subpar sleep because of my horrible coughing all night.
During the second week, I wasn’t quite as sleepy, but I was a little disoriented and again, coughing like a fucking maniac almost 24/7.
Needless to say, these two weeks wiped out two weeks of productivity for me in one of the most key and important times of my life when I’m transitioning to my self-actualized phase, hopefully to complete this phase around April 20th this year when I turn 54.
So why was I sick so badly and sick for so long? What the hell is going on?
Fortunately, I have the answer, because in February, as part of this new phase of my life, I spent many thousands of dollars doing a whole bunch of very expensive physicals where they check everything in your body, including:
a full-body MRI
a heart CT scan
a full genome genetic profile workup
a stool sample examination (for digestion and gut health)
urine examination
blood test examination
massive lipid panels (40 pages)
and so on
I found a lot of interesting things in these reports (I have over 60 pages of reports that I have fed into AI) but perhaps one of the most important things I learned is that I have a case of leaky gut, meaning that many of the nutrients and vitamins I have been taking the past several years are leaking out of my stomach and into my body before being absorbed into my system.
For example, the reports show that I’m actually magnesium deficient when I’ve been taking 400 mg of magnesium with food with fat every day for the past 25 years.
How the fuck is that possible? Well, it’s possible because the magnesium is leaking out of my stomach before it gets absorbed into my body. Not good. Not good at all.
Also, when you have leaky gut, crap gets out of your stomach, invades your body, and makes you sick, and more sick than normal, which explains a lot.
Fortunately, as part of this massive transition I’m making this year into the next phase of my life, because I have all these results from these fantastic physicals, I can now address this leaky gut problem.
Working with three different doctors and AI, I have changed my entire diet and most of the vitamins I take to customize 100% for my genetic profile and to repair my gut, which will take about three months.
These changes that I’m making are severe, complicated, and extreme, so I don’t have time here to go through all of them here, but to cover the leaky gut repair process, these are the changes that I am making to my diet.
I can no longer have any cheese of any kind, at least not for the next three months. Apparently, I am partially lactose intolerant (after 53 years of life I had no idea until these genetic reports showed it) and this has caused some problems with my stomach. Since I have been on a keto diet for most of the past several years, cheese has been my primary source of fat. I have now replaced cheese with avocados, extra virgin olive oil, and full-fat Greek yogurt, which is the only form of dairy I am allowed to eat.
I can no longer have any bread, pasta, or rice even for once-a-week cheat days. Instead, I am having things like eggs, beans, and potatoes, including sweet potatoes, which won’t damage my stomach and will actually assist in its repair.
I can no longer consume mass quantities of dried fruits like dates. I assumed that eating lots of dates would be perfectly okay because they’re all-natural and dates aren’t going to give you cancer. However, the weekly amount of dates I was eating was increasing my inflammation. I’m still allowed to eat dates, but I can have like three or four per day, not the pile of dates that I used to eat. Since eating three or four dates seems stupid to me, I just pulled dates out of my diet completely unless it’s a rare cheat day.
I have completely shifted my entire fruit intake to berries. Berries are the safest fruit to eat in terms of leaky gut, gut health, inflammation, and overall health, so I am consuming massive amounts of blueberries and blackberries instead of things like dates.
You might be thinking that this will assist in my weight loss, and it has so far. My weight loss strategy has radically changed in light of these new results and in light of some things that happened late last year. In a future article, I will discuss what I’m doing in terms of weight loss. I have reoriented my entire thinking about that. But more on that later.
The main objective right now is to completely repair my stomach and digestive system within the next 90 days so I can get my body back to normal, which is a very doable goal as long as I stick with the above diet, the new supplements that I’m taking, and I minimize cheat days to the absolute bare minimum possible.
Not sure if that’s possible (“Chubby Caleb” loves his cheat days), but the good news is that the foods I’m now eating are very tasty to me, and so I have felt less of the need to eat cheat-day type food.
We’ll see how things go and I will update you on future results.
Had the same discovery a few years back. Decided to nuke the site from orbit and switch to the carnivore diet. All of my digestive/autoimmune problems have gone away and, crazy enough, the bald spot on my head is growing its hair back (seriously, wtf).
I periodically test new foods (e.g. I've found avocados are fine), but for the most part I'm all carnivore.
One other interesting note is that the food intolerance tests I had done in Dubai confirmed all of the foods that I'd determined were giving me issues.
Food and its effects on the body are complicated. Finding the right diet is difficult, no doubt. I wish you good luck and good advice.
Wheat causes leaky gut in many people (some say "in almost everybody"). Seed oils can also be a cause; avoid "foods" high in linoleic acid (which is difficult, as it's in almost everything these days, including most commercial chicken fat and pork fat).
What is your primary source of fats now? I hope you have not been advised to "avoid saturated fats." That advice makes good health nearly impossible. I suggest lots of ruminant meat (beef, lamb--but not liver). Given the severity of your event, it might be a good experiment to try a carnivore diet as several other posters suggested, at least as a short-term elimination diet to see what happens. (But again, don't listen to liver bros. Good way to get copper and iron toxicity.)
May I ask, which of the tests you did were most useful?