
Fasting, Longevity and Metabolism - mehdiyac
https://mehdiyacoubi.substack.com/p/the-long-game-8-fasting-and-metabolism
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oxAAAFFB
I’m gonna drop this here because it’s tangential and I think very important.

I have a history of asd, migraine and rashes. As well as getting sick a lot
and having weird health problems.

About a year ago I went though one of those once or twice in a lifetime stress
events. On the same night as the event, I experienced disturbed sleep. My
sleep never went back to normal. Shortly after, I started to experience
psychotic symptoms, usually around night. I had happened to read a doctors
testimonial earlier about keto and psychosis so I tried it. It fixed both my
sleep and my psychotic symptoms. Within one week of starting keto I was
completely back to normal. Due to side effects of keto, namely “keto rash,” I
was forced to stop. I ended up starting and stopping a lot. The correlation
between starting and stoping keto and my symptoms was exact. I have a
background in biology and I actively looked for any other correlation. There
is zero ambiguity that keto was responsible for my astonishing remissions. I
was diagnosed by a psychiatrist With psychotic depression and prescribed anti-
psychotics, so the symptoms were real. Obviously I never took the medication.
He brushed off my observation about keto.

As time went forward the psychotic symptoms became small enough to just ignore
even when off keto, only bothering me occasionally at night. My sleep never
went back to normal while off keto.

I started to return to a normal life when a few months later I encountered
another health problem. I moved into a new house and because I’m cheap I
bought a fixer. The fixer had mold. I stayed inside with a noticeable musty
smell. I made sure to air it out and had plans to remediate it eventually. I
googled mold health problems and nothing really came up so I assumed it was
fine. But I started waking up with strange headaches and shaky hands. Then I
started waking up with brain fog and headache. Then finally I started having
bouts of ridiculous depression Along with the rest of what I’ve mentioned. I
would have a 2 hour bout of those symptoms every other day roughly. The
depression was so intense and so painful that it made me want to kill myself
immediately. I have never experienced anything like that in my entire life and
it was so bad that I think depression is not even the right word for it. The
second time it happened I went to the ER. They scanned my brain and did tests
and found nothing. My doctor said that nothing was wrong and that I just had
depression and recommended antidepressants. But that didn’t explain all the
strange symptoms that came with the depression which included extremely dry
throat (oddly), weak limbs, and other smaller things. At this point I was
emotionally exhausted because I felt very deeply that my brain was horribly
broken in some way and there wasn’t a single lead to follow. Based on the
circumstances of my life, I decided to throw in the towel. I have never
committed to suicide with so little hesitation. I was completely tired of and
done with life. No family anyway. But after thinking for a while, I decided I
should just travel away from where I live and completely remove myself from
any kind of environmental contaminants just on the off chance that it was
something in the environment and that removing it would reverse the symptoms.
I really didn’t think it would work, but it did. It took about three weeks,
although there were still shadows of the symptoms sometimes.

I had already looked into mold and there was nothing reported in mainstream
sources. Oddly, some very sus homeopathic websites had articles that described
my symptoms exactly. But they were littered with BS pseudo science and didn’t
have any treatment options besides eating clay and other nonsense.

I have been interested in ASD ever since I realized I had it. I have a case
that is not obvious so I was not formally diagnosed until my mid twenties. So
I was googling ASD research and I happened upon this new study that attributes
ASD to something called cell danger response. Hypothetically, atp can be used
as a signal molecule and cells can get stuck using atp for signaling rather
than carrying out business as usual. I wasn’t too sure until I saw that they
had done a trial with an old drug that blocks atp receptors on the surface of
cells and showed marked improvement in autistic children. Small n but
qualitatively meaningful and certainly warranting a larger study. It also
lines up with one very peculiar quality of autism which is that it can be
temporarily put into remission with TMS in some people, which indicates
dormant brain networks rather than destroyed brain networks. Phase 2 trials
are about to begin.

Cell danger response is hypothesized to be a branch of the inflammatory
system. And in reading about cell danger response I was made aware of another
guy who was researching mast cells and micro glia, which are cells that are
central to inflammation. This guy mainly studied mast cells. I listened to a
podcast that interviewed him, I think it had less than a thousand views. He
talked about all these papers he had published about basic mast cell biology.
And it blew my mind. I’ll try to summarize all the important points. Mast
cells are present in the deep regions of the brain that are responsible for
emotions, sleep and other things. Mast cells Distribute inflammatory molecules
like histamine, but critically they distribute way more molecules than just
histamine. The molecules dispensed by mast cells can do all kinds of things,
including dilate or constrict blood vessels. Mast cells are so general that
when deactivated, wounds do not heal, as has been demonstrated experimentally.
Mast cells can be agitated by many different kinds of chemicals and also
stress. But critically, exposure to one specific thing can lower the threshold
of the mast cells to be excited by other things. So at the end of the day what
you have is a system where inputs can interact and create very complex
emergent behaviors. When you combine this with the fact that only a fraction
of the population has problems with inflammation, you have something that
could have eluded medical science until now.

Then this guy said something that really surprised me. He mentioned that mold
can be a big problem with agitating mast cells and that he always recommends
his patients to get away from mold if they are having weird problems and that
it usually works.

And the pieces start to come together. I have ASD. The only comorbidities of
ASD are asthma (which I have a family history of) and skin rashes (I think)
which are both problems of inflammation. Psychosis has been shown to be
closely linked with inflammation in many cases. Depression has also been
linked to inflammation. There is a disease called mast cell activation
syndrome where people get rashes and other symptoms, _usually triggered later
in life by a stressful event_. Bingo.

And then it made sense why keto had helped me so much. Keto has been proven to
have anti-inflammatory effects in at least one paper that studied one ketone
body in particular. And there are also the myriad reports of people’s asthma
and RA improving dramatically on keto. And it fits neatly into the broader
theory that when the body thinks physical resources are scarce, like during
excessive exercise or when running off body fat, it shuts down unnecessary
things, including some parts of the inflammation system. Meanwhile, carbs have
been shown to promote inflammation.

The only study to properly investigate the link between keto and psychosis is
currently underway in Finland and is expected to be finished by December.

The final puzzle piece: after discovering this I had a hunch that my migraines
were also caused by inflammation. And i remembered that after taking lsd for
the first time, my headaches went away for years. So I googled “lsd
inflammation.” lo and behold, all popular psychedelics have been shown to be
extremely potent anti-inflamatories. There is one guy in particular who
studies this and he has published papers and is currently in the process of
commercializing the most potent anti-inflammatory that he has identified which
is actually not lsd but an obscure cousin called DOI. Fascinatingly, the dose
required to get the anti-inflammatory effect is much smaller than the dose at
which the drug makes you trip. And I believe that was the case for all the big
names.

So at the end of the day, I stumbled upon a medical revolution that is still
in the pipes. And it will be a revolution because inflammation is the cause of
many things. Heart disease (yes, really), RA, and many other huge names.

I wrote this marathon post on my phone so please excuse lack of sources and
spelling mistakes.

~~~
mehdiyac
Your story is truly amazing. The level of energy and thinking you put into
investigating what was wrong is mind-blowing.

It shows that non-specialists have a crucial role in connecting the dots and
helping researchers test and try hypotheses.

Are you still on Keto now? How did your symptoms evolve?

You should write a blog post on your story!

~~~
oxAAAFFB
Thanks so much for the positivity. If you google keto rash you’ll understand
why I am prevented from being on Keto for long periods of time. The problem
with keto rash is that nobody has actually figured out what causes it.

luckily my symptoms don’t make keto necessary. But I do plan on winning back
my sleep at some point. And that battle consists of performing some
experiments to figure out what causes keto rash. I’ve already informally shown
that it can’t happen without the presence of sweat by restarting keto after
applying prescription strength antiperspirant to one half of all rash-prone
areas. Without exception, the treated half did not develop irritation. It’s
not a cure since covering yourself in prescription strength AP would probably
be very dangerous and very expensive.

In between now and the time when treatment of inflammation becomes a part of
mainstream medical science, I see myself on keto all the time and taking sub-
psychoactive doses of shrooms and DOI once a month. I’m excited to see what
that combination feels like.

~~~
mehdiyac
For personal health and wellness, self-experimenting is the way to go. It
should be easier to try and see what works for us.

In the end of the day, there's no one-size-fits-all for health and wellbeing,
people should have the tools to experiment and find the optimal diet and
lifestyle.

All the best for your journey!

