Years ago I noticed virtually all my symptoms were worse after meals, and this led me to experiment with fasting. As a result I learned that not eating for about three days would relieve most of my troubles: electrical hypersensitivity, brain fog, fasciculations, nasal congestion, anxiety, reddened complexion. etc. Unfortunately within 5 minutes of eating, regardless what or how much, all my symptoms would return.
I puzzled over this for years, convinced the main problem had to be in the gut. Yet it was so odd that the triggering should occur with chewing and swallowing, before the food could even reach the small intestine. When I asked my integrative MD at the time about it, he suggested it might be due to some sort of dysautonomia. I now believe he was partly right.
Apparently other people have noticed the phenomenon. Cort asked Dr Logan the following question in a 2009 interview:
I’ve always noticed that abstaining from food is helpful for me for short periods. On the converse many ME/CFS patients experience a considerable letdown 10 minutes or so after they eat. It seems that food does make a difference but this is occurring long before, one would think, food reaches the gut. Do you have any idea what’s going on here?
Eventually I lost the ability to control symptoms with fasting, however before this happened I had a couple experiences that provided a bit more information. One was that GI/liver flushes expedited my symptom washout; instead of it taking three days to become asymptomatic it only took 24 hours if I'd done a flush. The second was I found myself asymptomatic the day after a 24 hour flu. While sick I ate nothing, drank only water, and vomited a whole lot. Then to my surprise I awoke the next morning to the sounds of birds chirping, feeling perfectly healthy. I’d always put off eating as long as I could whenever I got into this state because I knew I’d revert back to my sick, old self as soon as I did.
It’s worth noting the liver flush involved consuming epsom salts, olive oil, and grapefruit juice, and that this didn’t trigger inflammation. It was just the reaction to chewing and swallowing food that would do me in.
I wonder if these purges weren't expelling toxins in the bile that would normally be recirculated (like what Shoemaker describes) and this helped my system settle down, thereby speeding up the symptom washout. Perhaps it gave my antioxidant/anti-inflammatory systems a chance to catch up. However there has to be some immune/autonomic irritant that persists under the surface in order for things to then kick off again from just swallowing food. I suspect the autonomic shift that eating triggers accelerates an inflammatory process and then presto, you’ve symptoms.
I’ve also observed therapies that relieve my oxidative stress, or those that stimulate the parasympathetic system can calm this eating reaction.
I've no doubt all my reactivity leads to a good deal of oxidative stress. And the oxidative stress leads to more reactivity. It has always seemed to me that my system is just really irritated by a number of stressors which perpetuate the cycle. What I’m quite sure of now is that eating is not the problem. And I don’t believe a leaky gut is responsible either, at least not solely.
So what I’ve learned over the last few years has shed some light on the whole thing for me:
My electrical hypersensitivity turned out to be caused by reaction to ambient toxins (presumably mold). In a pristine environment I had absolutely no EHS. Practicing moderate avoidance has rendered my EHS negligible and it has also caused me to regain the ability to tolerate medications. And my food sensitivities lessened in intensity. It's interesting how all this stuff fits together. So this was a symptom that could be turned off with fasting, yet the real problem is the inflammatory response to mycotoxins.
On another front my brain fog, anxiety, fasciculations, and complexion problems are actually related to my babesia infection, which seems to be my worst irritant. All these symptoms clear when the bug’s activity is suppressed. Again these symptoms I know to be connected to babesia were the same I could turn off with fasting. Also my EMF sensitivity was better when treating babesia. And even the reaction to eating was somewhat reduced.
I’m probably confusing the hell out of you with all this, but I don’t know another way to convey my reasoning without relating it to my experience. Suffice it to say all the symptoms have their particular stressors that don't immediately relate to eating. Moreover there is a cumulative inflammatory effect whereby inflammation from one source could somewhat worsen inflammation and symptoms from another. For me it was a matter of identifying and eliminating the stressors, which is still a work in progress.
I’m convinced the exacerbation of symptoms from eating is nothing more than an incredibly alluring distraction from the real issues.
Have you tried water fasts? Perhaps a liver flush would be an interesting experiment.
