This formula turns out to be more about what has already happened than what needs to happen in the future in order to regain good metabolic potential. For older persons the rehab might be practically the rest of your life. To make this workable, I use 7 years as a maximum since this formula is only useful if it helps you be patient with steady, but sometimes intermittent, improvement.
Young people have a different problem with improving metabolism: their formative years were influenced by a more degraded food supply and exposure to more environmental estrogens. Younger people are more resilient, but their potential for metabolic robustness can be generally less. I see many college students who look haggard and wasted at a very young age.
Make a general plan, experiment cautiously, write down your results so you can eventually make a seasonal or annual plan, then adjust.
5. E pluribus unum, from many, one. A physical-biological view of the body is that it is a definitive, but open part of the immediate environment where it lives and also is affected instantly by distant movements, even if these are small effects. The physical-biological view calls these defined, but not absolutely independent, organisms self-organizing. When talking about a function of a cell or tissue these are sometimes viewed as fields of energy, phases, or coherence. Fields of biology are approximations. They are more a convention of language than the description of a discrete function because in this view there are no completely discrete or independent functions. Still, we have to have a way of talking about things that language is not adequate to describe. This is where some fun is in this view, experimenting with language and genuinely reaching out to someone who is using different language to see if you are saying the same thing or not. It’s genuine engagement.
If the body is an only approximately definable organism in its environment, then for the body’s health, environment always contributes as a support or a threat to health, or some combination of both. The physical, geographical, social, emotional environment makes a significant contribution to whether the body functions smoothly, or degenerates more quickly, ages, and dies. Of course, this sensing of unity is socially risky because it has historically been the purview of psychology and religion. Although psychology is steadily developing neuropsych it will perhaps be surprised at where that leads.
If the body is an integratable part of its environment, then the extent to which a body moves smoothly in its environment by doing work, thinking, socializing, having sex, teaching and learning, there is a deep satisfaction of being a part of a continuous whole. For the thriving liquid crystalline body this would mean taking time to cultivate a rich social life and getting outside in nature a lot, especially on warm sunny days. A significant contribution to physical biology is made by men who studied plant photosynthesis because this would be the model for turning sunlight into carbohydrates instead of the animal metabolic reverse [bioluminescence]. Spending time outdoors lowers the stress hormones.
6. Stress hormones are deceptive; they give euphoric sensations in the short-term. Adrenaline feels great; until the nervous system becomes exhausted. Cushing’s disease shows us what happens when cortisol is chronically high. Endorphins raise pain threshold when physical demands exceed metabolic capacity. Serotonin delivers a kind of indolence. But what is functional and feels good in the short-term can have vicious effects in the long-term.
I recently saw a film about Robert Oppenheimer leading the Manhattan Project. He was characterized as “living off martinis, cigarettes, and coffee.” Yesterday I read in the AP news that Fabiola Gianotti has become the new head of CERN. The article characterized the high-theoretical physics work atmosphere as, “. . .coffee fueled collaboration, sleepless nights, and absent mindedness about proper eating.” This is funny because it suggests how physicists don’t take their own biology seriously. Apparently, to them the principles that govern large bodies have no connection to the principles that govern microscopic, biological processes; or if they do they are not known or are irrelevant. We are not so different from these physicists when we consider how we feel.
In the long-term the stress hormone cascade interferes with sleep, digestion, resiliency, they make it hard for moods to be even, make it easy to be anxious and over-stimulated, to store fat in a Cushing’s distribution, to be depleted of coping skills and libido, to make us run longer and harder, and to not have the energy for immediate self-destruction. In this sense they are protective, but protective of imminent organismic catastrophe, not sound metabolism.
The parasympathetic system becomes as deranged as the sympathetic nervous system does. This can cause IBS, tremors, brain fog, migraines, among others. In the exhaustion phase one is simply terrorized by her own stress hormones and functionally wrecked if there is no relief. Judgment is impaired.
Estrogen is a special kind of stress hormone because it facilitates adaptation and shock for an organism on the verge of incapacitating dysfunction, at least when it is high. Even if the dysfunctions seem to develop slowly they are a biological alarm. Estrogen contributes to fibrosis, edema, symptoms of oscillatory dysfunction, toxicities.
Cortisol is anti-inflammatory, and also pulses when blood sugar is low, providing glucose when glycogen stores are low and carbs are not made available. It is cortisol that drives that wide-awake-at-3am phenomenon. Cortisol also facilitates insulin resistance and fat storage, especially the fat roll under the breast bone, because your cells don’t know that you can just go to the refrigerator and get something to eat to prevent or lower cortisol. So go to the refrigerator and lower the cortisol. Go back to sleep. Wear sunglasses when you open the fridge.
The corollary to short-term euphoria of stress hormones is that lowering stress hormones is not complicated, but it can be deeply miserable, at times as cellular oxidative metabolism is being rehabilitated. Chronic cortisol/adrenaline-produced motion obscures the discomfort of less used cellular oxidative energy pathways. It’s not that the oxidative metabolism can’t function, bodies are tough. But recovering oxidative metabolism is partly a matter of intelligently assessing whether feeling worse is a step toward restoring oxidative metabolism, or something else.
Anyone who has ever taken dexamethasone or predisone for inflammation will recognize the brief, but significant lowering of cortisol and its depressing misery when it is discontinued. People who tend toward depression should know this and take it seriously before they lower their stress hormones. You can live a lifetime on mainly stress hormones, but you'd have to ask yourself if that life could be better and longer, if less frenzied. You also might get the flu or an outbreak of fever blisters in winter when you first lower stress hormones because lowering cortisol temporarily lowers your inflammation-fighting hormones.
The first blush of stress relief seems magical, too easy. It is well known among people who try Ray Peat’s dietary and supplement suggestions, applying them in ways unique to their conditions, that extraordinarily sound and restorative sleep is one usual result. The so-called “epic sleeps.” But if stress is longstanding, lifelong, or the adaptation is thorough, then rehabilitating a metabolism with Peat principles is serious business. It takes time, tremendous patience, fortitude, an independent, almost haughty disposition, and great resourcefulness. It develops the whole organism in its environment, not just the body.
Stress hormones are deceptively pleasant. Popular and professional medical thinking have taken this pleasantness itself and its measures as signs of health and wellness. After all, adrenaline can raise your temperature and pulse, too. There is a reason why prima facie evidence is called that; it doesn’t provide a full account. Recovering your cellular oxidative metabolism, using it more than a stress metabolism, can restore functionality and cure many degenerative symptoms. But it takes a fuller accounting, understanding, of the body in its environment to do so. This is the basis for self-knowledge, the perennial political problem.
7. Physiological increments in metabolic support are still support. We are accustomed to thinking of treatment for distress and disease in pharmaceutical proportions: pharmaceutical treatments control symptoms by impairing deeper functional capacities of the human organism. They are strong. Often they don’t even control symptoms. They need to work quickly, demonstrably, massively, not efficiently, in order to justify their costs. If they are patentable and strong, but passive in the body, then the patent owners can maximize profit while minimizing risk of a drug becoming the immediate cause of a disease. If it is even a slightly remote cause it doesn’t matter because death certificates record only immediate causes.
Physiological supplements, like sugar, salt, pregnenolone, progesterone, sometimes T3, bag breathing, fill deficiencies or retrain hormonal feedback loops. It is their constancy and persistent availability that mitigates stress, less their absolute amounts.
Being socialized to a pharmaceutical view of symptom control it seems at first unbelievable what a little salt, sugar, and bag breathing can do. The shock of discovery and the improvement in metabolism these simple practices yield drives a subversive change of mind. There might even be some paranoia when a person first discovers how effective these tools are because one discovers quickly that the establishment and media are either lying or don’t know what they are talking about.
8. Distress is traumatic to the metabolism. The metabolic distress of a high-pressure life is not different in kind from body trauma, but only different in extent. So, the most basic practices of emergency medicine in controlling shock from trauma are not different in kind from simple steps I can take to reduce the shock from my everyday, small traumas from stress and distress.
The exception here might be that ER medicine uses a glucose drip, in addition to saline, to support the capacity of a traumatized body to metabolize its stress and find a way to stabilize itself. I’m going to use fruit, sucrose, or fructose powder instead of glucose because I want to minimize the load on the liver and pancreas and I’m not seeking to maximize insulin, but to make sugar available in abundance to cells. I’m going to use salt in fruit juice and take magnesium to keep minerals replete.
I’m going to lower serotonin, give my body an excess of calories and eat something if I wake up in the middle of the night to stabilize blood sugar, get some sun, socialize. I may quit a stressful job or re-arrange demands. At first, it’s just a kind of triage. In a matter of time it should become a matter of fact, the metabolism uses sugar better and you feel fine and even sexy. No rehab is perfect and some techniques for mitigating stress may be needed intermittently.
9. The food supply is so degraded that if I read food labels without knowing they were labels on food items, I might not identify them as foodstuffs at all, but derivative of other sectors of industrial production, such as solvents, plastics, or building materials. In this regard PUFA get the greatest blame for impairing human metabolism, slowing it down, contributing to obesity, even mental derangement, lowered body temperature, slower metabolic function, and vulnerability to degenerative disease as a result of a slow metabolism.
Industrial food production finds any possible use for the discards of its processes. I used to have a professor who characterized capitalism by saying, “If we can’t sell it as apples, then we repackage it and sell it as applesauce. If we can’t sell it as applesauce, then we repackage it and sell it as apple juice. If we can’t use it for apple juice then we repackage it and sell it for cider. If we can’t use it for cider, then we repackage it and sell it as perfume.” Our economic imperatives have brought us to accepting beautifully labeled industrial refuse as nutritious food. Poor Earl Butz gets the denomination as the “get big or get out” initiator in 1973. But the green revolution has generally only driven us to have to find more uses for corn, as Michael Pollan has shown.
It takes a lot of vigilance to secure our bodies against toxic assault. The best foods and sources for mitigating stress don’t have to be the most expensive, but they need to be carefully chosen.
In this regard we’ve been doubly led astray. Many foods and practices that are taken to promote health today are actually destructive of a stable oxidative metabolism, and the things that are purported to be unhealthy, or even dangerous, actually promote a fast and efficient metabolism, a curious mind, and a generous outlook. For example, opinion has shifted very quickly about coconut oil.
This turned-upside-down principle is so persistent in popular media that no one even needs to make a list. If it is a substance or practice that is promoted popularly as health yielding, it’s probably time to look at the history of that promotion. How can the world be so misled? Probably for the same reason that 2 and -2 are alike, and under some circumstances are critically different.
It is practically impossible to avoid all risks with food and supplements. Price is not a guide to quality when choosing food. You do the best you can by choosing the least degraded or what you can afford. Avoid PUFA. Do some homework. Eat and stop worrying.
10. Appetite is a guide to nutritional needs under specific metabolic conditions. If a body is distorted by degeneration, then appetite represents what the body’s biochemistry needs to stabilize itself under conditions of either adaptive stress, or robust health. Satisfying appetite is a straightforward organismic drive. It keeps the species alive. If the appetite is weak or absent, then the organism is in a state of degeneration that cannot be sustained without some change in condition to improve its processes. Sometimes this is just the body coping with an illness. Sometimes it needs supplement intervention. I have found that with stable blood sugar the usual hunger sensation changes, is more subtle.
Fatness is energy wasting under conditions of stress. The metabolism of a fat person is just as hungry as that of a thin person. Fat loss is less a calorie problem than it is a stress problem. Bariatric surgery for morbid obesity is a starvation project and the doctors know this, this is why they prescribe so many vitamin and protein supplements to their patients. At some point these patients are at less risk from starvation than from the side-effects of extremely low metabolism, definitively the incapacity to do what thyroid hormone does. Their hormone systems appear to improve when their stomachs are mostly removed because the metabolism is less overwhelmed by its own need to function on so much food.
Are these patients hungry for 8,000 calories a day? No, they are hungry for their metabolism to work faster, and so the appetite drives a massive front-loading of calories to force it to speed up. Bariatric surgery induces starvation and this does reduce body fat where the metabolism is almost completely destroyed anyway. A degraded food supply makes the calories do the opposite of what the metabolic drive is seeking. A vicious downward cycle. I haven't seen this treated this way as far as I can tell now, but it is consistent with these other principles.
CICO? Yes, but the complete accounting is impossible to do for an open system organism. I don’t think one excess calorie signals the same in the body as 300 – 500 excess calories per day when it comes to stress relief. I think the macros also matter. Most people who eat excess calories as a project to lower stress stabilize with some excess fat weight. This is not an inherent part of this view, and is not endorsed by any experts, but it happens to a lot of people. If they can succeed at reducing stress, then the body would later return to its best lean body mass.
Socially we have become enormously guilty about enjoying eating. Diets have become virtue projects where actual moral virtue is complicated. Denying the appetite is as wrong-headed as indulging it without any considerations for effect. Listen to the body? Yes, when it comes to eating. I have never heard anyone say they have a craving for aspartame. Knowing what the cravings are for is helpful to satisfying them.
Principles of physical-biology tend toward unification of and engagement of an organism with its environment, a fast metabolism, assessing states in light of the fact that stress effects can be deceptively pleasant, toward independence of mind and the capacity to understand the nature of authority. There is help in some inexpensive, available, supplements such as pregnenolone, progesterone, T3, caffeine, aspirin, bag breathing, maybe cyproheptadine as well as controlling stress through the use of sugar and salt, dairy products for calcium and protein, shellfish, some meat, liver, orange juice, tropical fruits. And the carrot. We mustn’t forget The Carrot.
© Celise Schneider 2016
Image: Momentmal, https://pixabay.com/photos/butterfly-insect-wing-lepidoptera-3044121/
Additional citations:
Sugar Issues
Gelatin, Stress, Longevity
Popp, Fritz-Albert and Lev Beloussov. 2003. Introduction to Integrative Biophysics, Marco Bischoff. 1 - 116:Kluwer Academic Publishers.