Sunday, October 4

PāNu + HyperNutrient

I wrote in my last blog post about my Hyper-Nutrient plan. That is going fine.

Here's a few trivias so far.

Vitamin C is not actually a vitamin you need a little of, but a liver enzyme you need a lot of. Somewhere between 'conspiracy' and 'ignorance' is the Vitamin C subject in our world, much like the carbohydrate issue. Google it, and Linus Pauling, and read everything in sight for about 10 nights and a couple weekends, and you will be on the same page with me about it. Summary: I am taking as much of it orally as I can without flushing effects.

How much you can take before the 'excess' starts flushing (the runs, to put it plainly) depends apparently on how much there is inside your body for it to take care of. (And it takes care of a LOT of stuff. This is one amazing enzyme.) So far I'm able to take about 16g per day, 3-4g every few hours, without side effects. This implies that there's a lot of work to be done inside I guess. I would attempt actual treatment with larger IV doses, but all the docs I see who do that are in California for the most part.

Vitamin D is a hormonal precursor, which as it turns out you also need a lot of (especially if you're very fat), unless you are living naked in Argentina. I take around 5-10,000iu per day, but have taken up to about 50,000 without any noticeable side effects. When I first began taking it (around 5,000iu) I had a marked increase in my "sense of well-being". Haven't really noticed anything specific since then one way or the other.

I've also been taking double-doses of calcium, magnesium, potassium, the spectrum of B vitamins, Vitamin E, and vitamin K2. And a multi which has Vitamin A (that has a toxic dose that isn't real high so I avoid much supplementing with that one). Oh yea, and co-enzyme CQ10.

More on results further below. Tomorrow starts week three of my eating plan experiment and this is the week that I add in all the "other" supplements. I am already pretty tired of taking pills and this is a zillion more. Oy!

PāNu

Just before/during the first week of this current eating plan experiment I happened upon the PāNu blog. (I cannot figure out how to make that "ā" with HTML so have had to just 'copy' it from his site. I hope your browser can see it.) This is the website of Dr. Kurt G. Harris M.D. who, after reading Gary Taubes's seminal book Good Calories, Bad Calories ('The Diet Delusion' in the UK), decided to go public with a blog partly in support of the cause.

The detail of Dr. Harris's plan is here: http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/

In a nutshell, it's lowcarb, with no grains/legumes/sugars, no veggie/seed oils, fairly high-fat, with some degree of Intermittant Fasting, and Vitamin D3 supplementation. Three points on his plan that I am not abiding by currently are 9, 10 and 12, which are grass-fed meats, exercise, and removal of the last shred of dairy (cheese). All the others I am not on track with.

Now, nearly everything on that list I have done at one time or another over the last 2.5 years (of not losing any real weight I might add). But I haven't necessarily done them together. So that part, that is a change for me.

I have added this eating plan to my "Hyper-Nutrient" plan currently going on and am doing them together.

Since reverting back to low carb, I lost from the water-gain (404) down to what I believe is my 'real' weight (384). Anything beyond that I consider actual body mass of some kind lost, not fluid.

My eating plan, aside from hypernutrient, had an expected problem: eating very low carb (<30 carbs/day), each time I've tried this for the last 2.5 years, I feel like crap. Just really BAD. More to the point, I cannot sustain it. I go off into carbs almost immediately, even lowcarb versions (e.g. peanut butter), anything. So over the last 2.5 years I've tried a little bit of everything. Add in some dairy. Add in some fruit. Add in some legumes. Everything I have tried to increase my carbs has led to me going off the wagon. Or, in the case of legumes, I could stay on that one just fine, but I didn't lose a single pound of weight.

I know myself by now. In the first case there's something actually wrong and I'm miserable and my body's reacting to fix it. In the second case I'm being triggered. Nothing has actually worked very well for me and it's been a long time. Maybe VLC would still work for weight loss but that's a little like the low-fat/low-cal approach: if you cannot sustainably live on that, for whatever reason it might be (in my case, a mystery, maybe hormonal), then it doesn't matter.

So I never really did get a clear plan of what I was going to eat except 'low carb' without stress on the low part, high fat with some stress on that just for vitamin absorption, and hope like hell I can find some way back and forth to avoid ending up under the wagon. When I found Harris' PāNu I decided to make that my official eating plan, to the degree I could, along with the Hyper-Nutrient supplementation, and this includes eating twice a day (~3pm & 9pm).

In week 1, I lost 3.5 pounds.
In week 2, I lost 3.5 pounds.

Kinda odd it's the exact same amount each week. And unlike my normal lose/gain-a-ton / or almost nothing, which is mostly fluid. I have reason to believe this is actual fat loss.

Weirder still, I feel ok. Not energetic, but not tired. Just 'ok'.

It has been a really long time since I specifically had weight that I felt was fat loss. Now maybe seven pounds is not damn much to be celebrating about at my weight, but it is the first genuine fat loss I have seen happening off my body in a really long time!

So much of my existing plan was so similar to this already that it's hard to see what has changed, aside from doing all the points "at once" rather than irregularly depending on what I was trying, and adding the supplements of course, and mild IF. I don't know if I can credit some weight loss to a ton of sudden Vitamin C helping with something, to some jungian body exercises I've done, to the shift to some degree of intentional IF, or to PāNu having caused me to combine my habits in a certain way.

Regarding IF, I have taken the last week to eating these coconut bites that are 1 Tbsp coconut oil each, eating just one bite with a vitamin dose, then another a few hours later, etc. so when I am not eating food I am actually getting a tiny number of calories in. Probably same/less as anyone who drinks coffee with cream. My goal is to keep my metabolism from falling into 'off' mode which it seems to do abnormally well, while still keeping macronutrients low. Since my weight gain has come from eating once a day and most my weight loss from eating many times a day, I'm looking for a compromise there to see if this works. So far, at least, it is.

I will update this with progress.

But given how I have kvetched about feeling betrayed and confused and lost and demoralized, I thought I should be blogging about actually trying something that seems to be working for me. Here's hoping it keeps coming together!

PJ
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13 comments:

Rishara said...

Congrats on the 'real' weight loss! That's gotta feel so encouraging. And yes, 7 lbs is 7 lbs and is awesome.

Aunt Juicebox said...

You have so much info, I'm going to be reading for hours. lol I have been increasing my vitamin D, and I am up to about 2000 a day. What are you taking the vitamin K2 for? Something specific?

Jezwyn said...

Glad you're finding your way! All sounds good except your misled fear of metabolic slow-down - Brad Pilon reported on the myth of starvation mode just recently:

http://conditioningresearch.blogspot.com/2009/10/intermittent-fasting-and-starvation.html

So unless you enjoy the coconut bites for their own sake, don't worry about boosting the calories :) If what you eat in your two meals satisfies you, and at least 55% of your calories are from fat, you're all set!

And if you want to save money and number of pills, I highly recommend Mark Sisson's Damage Control Master Formula, available from http://primalnutrition.com/ It covers EVERYTHING, although it's low in Vit D3, so I supplement (but only to 10k, in winter, since that's the latest safe maximum proven).

All the best for your experiment!

kanishk said...

Glad you're finding your way! All sounds good except your misled fear of metabolic slow-down - Brad Pilon reported on the myth of starvation mode just recently...
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jimpurdy1943@yahoo.com said...

The PaNu blog said:
"Fruit is just a candy bar from a tree."

Well, yes, in most cases, fruit have been cultivated to be candy, but there are some worthwhile exceptions.

The non-sweet fruit, like avocados, tomatoes, and red/yellow/orange bell peppers are good, probably because they were from the Americas and were not aggressively cultivated for sweetness.

Carne! said...

Keep this up. 7 pounds is a lot at any weight. Good job :)

Anonymous said...

I think it's interesting what you said about the vitamin C. I'm seeing a chiropractor who encouraged me to take tons of powdered C a day for healing (I have a bad hip). He said take up to 3000 mg a day unless I get diahreah and then just cut back. No one has ever told me that before...we'll see..He lives in central TX..no CA...yay for country doctors!

PJ said...

Aunt Juicebox: For years there was something called 'Activator X' which was a chemical -- something, nobody was sure what -- which seemed to 'activate' a lot of stuff that Vitamins A and D3, in combination, set up. It turns out Activator X is (drumroll) Vitamin K2. It is important to have those three together. Further, A and D3 actually affect each other so that if you take a lot of one, the other compensates. So when people warn about the great dangers of too much Vitamin A, they often should be saying there's a deficiency of Vitamin D3 as that's the real problem. And it takes K2 to 'activate' a lot of stuff those jointly do. So that is why I take K2. Not for any specific health reasons, just as a result of reading about this stuff.

Caveat: I am not a medical authority. There are tons of awesome blogs of people who are, so seek them out. :-)

I take 10,000iu or more D3 a day. It is my opinion that my fat level as well as food intolerances create more than enough work for D3 to do in my body. Also that I am part native and grew up in the sun in Southern California coast, and now living indoors 24/7 nearly all year. (You really can't get enough D3 through just sun unless you live naked in Argentina and are otherwise healthy anyway, I suspect. Humans did not involve living and working inside clothes and buildings, except those in the frozen regions where they live on D3 sea foods.)

Jezwyn, thanks for that link. Sometimes there are complicating factors that leave me so confused about what was REALLY the cause of XYZ. For example, I have gained nearly all my weight when eating once a day. Yes, true, however, this also tends to reflect being profoundly sleep deprived, stressed out, and eating a ton of crappy carbs and then falling asleep. It's pretty clear that maybe this would have annihilated my metabolism whether I'd been doing it once or six times a day, but for some reason I've long held the knee-jerk reflex -- maybe partly in resentment that I've gotten fattest while feeling I'm eating least and pushing myself hardest -- that 'not eating often enough' was invoking the infamous 'starvation reflex'. But I'm starting to think that is logic that goes with the recommendsations for tons of carbs every day -- sure, when sugar is your primary 11-servings-a-day food group, you're going to need to eat regularly or your blood sugar would be nuts. For people who barely eat any carbs, maybe the 'eat many times a day' doesn't make sense.

The only part I haven't got around yet is the longstanding 'given' that protein only lasts 3 hours in the body after which it has to use the body itself for food; that was the base of bodybuilding's eating many times a day, wasn't just to bulk, but even in lean times was to prevent catabolism. I'm interested to see what those arguing against the 'starvation response' have to say about that (will go read your link shortly).

kanishk, why can't I delete your spam. Blogger either insists I moderate all comments, and I'd rather it be freely open, or be stuck eternally with blog spam. IMO this is unfair.

Jim > I agree, although those things are fruit I usually as slang, as most people do, categorize avocados, tomatoes and bell peppers as veggies. I don't eat veggies at all if I count them as fruit LOL. I know some people have issues with nightshades (the latter two and eggplant) but at least so far (I pray) I don't, as peppers are my favorite thing from the plant world, although alliums are a good runner-up.

Thanks for the feedback you guys! Sorry it took so long to respond!

PJ

PJ said...

Oh yeah I had wanted to add a note about the Vitamin C. Reading all the pages which are variants of the same (to the point of nearly 'single source') rant about Pauling being a quack, I notice there is nearly always this note that "...it began in the 1970s..." There is research around the world from the 30s. Nothing like erasing 40 years of history to make dissing something a lot easier, especially since after 40 years, research had a lot more 'commercial' angle not well served by supporting something super cheap and available everywhere. - PJ

Sue said...

How's it going. Any chance of any update?

Vegan.Bohemian said...

Hey PJ!!! How is everything with you (and your daughter)? I've been thinking about you =) You ALWAYS have so much helpful info! What a blessing you are to so many people including myself =) Let me know how everything is. I'm still here. It's been a bad year for me, but I'm still here and moving forward =) Sending love to you and your little one <3
~Niki
a.k.a. Oh.2.B.Fit

Sue said...

Atkins made you feel unhealthier but the Medifast diet you are on now didn't make your body feel week. Thats weird. Atkins is real foods and Medifast is processed, replacement meals.

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