It’s been a deeply unproductive and terrible week for me. You saw the six day hole in the Spill. You didn’t get your coffee yet. You know.
I think I am slowly beginning to understand it and I’m investigating ways to fix it. Things are a little better, very early on this Sunday morning.
I’ve been doing the keto and the intermittent fasting pretty militantly. I’ve done a minimal walk most days though not all. I’ve dropped at least four inches off my gut, and I found an ancient stash of jeans that were too small for years but fit perfectly now.
At the same time, I felt lethargic and found it hard to concentrate on the things that really matter. I’ve feared them, in some low-energy way. Early in the week I also started feeling very cold, bodily and in spirit too. Beyond all that, I didn’t feel like I was quite (all) ‘There’.
Based on that video and others, I came to self-diagnose as having a kind of the ‘keto flu’. Normally the symptoms are a drippy nose and tiredness. But some descriptions also match precisely the not-there-ness and the brain fog, which are the parts that have been hitting me hardest–even knocking me into a place of feeling and even being useless. Then that starts cycling viciously, and becoming self-fulfilling.
The answer and the fix seems to lie in the direction of medicating with electrolytes.
Yesterday was my first serious attempt to address the problem. I walked down to the market and got some basic salted beef broth. I’ve been warming it and adding lemon juice and apple cider vinegar and cayenne.
I can go through a quart in about fifteen minutes, and I have, more than once. It technically breaks the fasting and it’s worth it to me anyway at this point. I don’t feel chilled any more and even turned the thermostat back down, and took off a woolly layer. And I do already feel ever so slightly more present in my own skin.
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What I know so far:
–Very low carb eating is doing lots of good things for my health.
–Despite the truth of the above, the way I’m doing it has left me electrolyte-impoverished and fogged my brain.
–I know pretty much nothing about electrolyte replacement, except:
1) It starts with salt.
2) Generally speaking, you want sea salt from ancient seas, mined from under the ground, rather than evaporated from the modern ocean–because modern seas are a cesspool of mercury, microplastics, and other bad shit that definitely ends up in average sea salt.
The list of what I don’t know is much longer. The prime example of this is that the basic salt/sodium electrolyte needs to be balanced with the one for potassium–but nobody seems to know what a good balance is, or even how much potassium human bodies need, or how to get it.
Our beloved government nutritionists say it’s 3500-4700 mg/day.
But the very same authorities have restricted potassium supplements to 99 mg per pill. (So fortyish pills a day, guys, really?)
A whole avocado, a potassium-rich food, has about 700 mg.
One fairly expensive specially formulated electrolyte compound on the market offers 140 mg per serving (in 1/4 teaspoon), as well as advertising itself as “low sodium” at 496 mg of sodium per the same dose.
I am not the only person profoundly confused by all of this, and the answers offered don’t alleviate the confusion much.
So far, I have found a moderately priced salt of apparently impeccable quality, and I have found this recipe:
No idea yet what constitutes quality potassium or magnesium, or why she’s chosen these ratios … also no real clue on whether frequently added things like lemon juice or apple cider vinegar do any real good, or just make drinking salt water a little easier to take.
I’ll see what more I can figure out before I have a chance to shop at a good store in a week’s time, and meanwhile I’ll keep going with the cheap broth mixture, and the sliver of marginally fogless brain power it’s helped me claw back.
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There is a whole cottage industry out there based on using electrolytes to treat keto flu symptoms, including the Fog. Most of it is quite expensive, and I still have no reasons to think the expense would make anything better..