Fasting Journal : Off plan, Day 10
Things just didn't work out how I planned. Fortunately, although it must seem like I am orthorexic and OCD about things, I really don't care much if things go sideways. I look at the long flow of progress.
But it doesn't bode well for my plans to do OMAD starting in the morning, well... not starting int he morning, but having OMAD tomorrow at about 5:PM
I woke up hungry at 3:AM, and again at 5:AM, and again at 9:AM. Finally made it to noon and had bone broth followed by bacon and eggs. Then my salad at two. But then I fell asleep in my chair.
I think I've noticed that my salad makes me sleepy. I did check my BG when I started feeling sleepy and it was 102 about 40 minutes after I ate. Who knows how high it eventually went. I think my salads are setting me back somehow. I'll have to be more aware and test with more focus.
Then I finally got my meat cooked at about 7:30, so that's really an 8 hour window if anything.
I will give OMAD a fair test if I can, but already I'm thinking that my previous method of Extended Intermittent Fasting was more suited to me.
I just confirmed that vegetable matter indeed does give me bloating. Mushrooms, pickeled radish, lettuce, seaweed, fermented chili paste and I can't get off the toilet either.
I seem to digest it fine, and I throw a wide variety at my gut. Head lettuce, dark green salad greens, sauerkraut, olives, avocado, clover and broccoli sprouts, radish and cucumber. Usually with either hard boiled egg or salmon salad with homemade mayo/salsa dressing.
But I do feel bloated almost immediately afterwards, end up having a large burp, and after about an hour I'm nodding in my chair. Could be the quantity, because I had been trying to get my potassium levels up. So I'm going to try smaller salads for a week as I start OMAD, with a view towards giving them up to go full carnivore.
I digest them fine as well. I do try to keep a little exposure to vegetable sources so that I don't gain sensitivities to anything. After consuming that meal, I can see the meal sitting in my gut from the pictures people took (it was my mom's birthday).
It is more about feeding the bugs in my gut that want to try and digest the undigestible fiber I think. Crapping 3 times a day isn't something I miss. I forget how much time bowel maintenance can take as an omnivore.
I can't really explain what the issue is because I'm still recovering from that meal more than 24 hours after I ate it. My stomach just isn't as flat as it was before the meal. I'm wondering if there is some sort of inflammation that comes along with the fiber. I'll have 1 or 2 habeneros mixed in with a tortilla-less quesedilla, so it isn't nightshades. I've heard your gut biome can weigh ~2 kilos so maybe it is just the flourishing of all those bugs in the lower intestine.
It's a curious thing.
In fact, that curiosity is my real motivation. I don't really worry about my digestion this much, except that it presents an interesting puzzle. Since I have to buy food anyway, it becomes a hobby with little added expense.
I think the human body is adaptable enough to make do with just about anything. For an individual, unless they have unusual problems, there's little evolutionary damage that can be done. My child will survive whether I burp or not. But messing around like this gives us some data on the question of the optimum human diet. Thanks to the internet, we are on the verge of being able to aggregate that data into meaningful information.
Hmm, that doesn't sound like you're digesting it well at all! Bloating, burping...
Yes, I meant that my bowels seem fine. No gas or diarrhea. Obviously there is something going on with my actual stomach though. I had been thinking Bile insufficiency or other gall bladder like problems. But I did a couple of weeks of using prepared bile salts with my meals and that didn't change things. I still take bitter herbs in my water just in case and I do have another ultrasound on the 25th to check for gall stones. I don't have any gall bladder pain, but it's something my doctor was happy to check given my history.
The salad meal is fairly fatty due to eggs, avocado and my dressing, but all my meals are fatty and I don't have problems with them, which argues against gall bladder. This problem has only really been apparent in the last four months or so, and the main change is that, because it's winter here, I have been using baby spinach leaves from the store to replace my homegrown kale and dark lettuces. Maybe a little more oxalates than I should have? It's something I haven't done in previous years.
That's not something that can be reasoned out, so exclusionary testing is what I'm going to be trying next. First a few days of the half sized servings to see if it is just a quantity thing. I've really been pushing the size for potassium. Maybe I'm simply swallowing too much air.