On Knees And Inflammation

Alright, for an update to my earlier post on alternate day fasting, I have kept up with the fasting and taking the resveratrol and boswellia extracts to fight the inflammation in my knee.  How has it been going?  Well, the knee is feeling better.  Not perfect yet, but better.  I am going to try and go for a jog later today to see how it responds to that…

Many of my friends (especially my girlfriend), don’t understand how I can make it through the day without eating.  To be fair, I am eating – I’m just limiting myself to 500 calories.  I don’t think I could make it without the 500 calories, but nonetheless, its still not easy.  Fortunately, I have discovered a few tricks that have made it a lot easier to manage.

First off is an herbal supplement called hoodia that is an appetite suppressant.  The Kalahari Bushmen of Africa would gnaw on this plant when they would go on long hunting expeditions where they wouldn’t eat for several days.  Now, you can buy the extract of the plant in capsules, so I take two of those in the morning when I wake up and two in the afternoon.  The effect is pretty dramatic, and it severely cuts down on the gnawing, all consuming sensation of hunger.

The second thing that I do, is I drink a teaspoon of canola oil right when I get up.  Now, I don’t really like canola oil, for other reasons I may write about at some later time, but I discovered some pretty interesting research from a crazy Berkley professor named Seth Roberts that led me to do this.

Basically, Roberts is a madman with a spreadsheet.  And I mean that in the most positive way possible…

What Roberts did, is over the course of many years, he took massive amounts of data on himself.  When he went to sleep, when he woke up, what he ate and when, what kind of mood he was in at regular intervals throughout the day, etc.  Then, with years worth of this data adding up to thousands of data points in excel, he was able to tease patterns out of it.

What kind of patterns?  Well, for example, he had bad insomnia for years, and by looking at the data and seeing what kind of things had happened right before or right after nights where he had insomnia, he was able to come up with a list of factors that caused or abated his insomnia.  By avoiding or emphasizing those factors, he was able to effectively cure his insomnia.

Now, obviously his data is only specific to his body, and the exact things he did may not work for anyone else, but there is a high probability that some of the things he did would be effective for at least a percentage of other people.

So, where does the canola oil come from?  Well, he was trying to lose weight, and through making hypothesis and looking at his data, he was able to come up to the conclusion that hunger is connected to flavor, not calories.  We don’t crave calories, we crave flavors, which our body has learned to associate with sustenance.

The extension to this is that if you eat flavorless calories, then your body will receive sustenance without triggering the hunger response later along.  If you get no flavor, then you’re body won’t know what to crave when it later wants calories again, and therefore it won’t give you the sensation of hunger.  You’re basically tricking your body into not giving you the hunger sensation…

In making this discovery, Roberts found that drinking a small amount of canola oil (or other flavorless oil), was the best way to get a burst of calories without any flavor.  He also discovered that it was a lot easier to drink oil if you floated it in a small cup of water first – you don’t get that oily mouth feel…

So, in addition to taking the herbal anti-inflamatories, and hoodia supplements, I’ve also been drinking a little oil every morning that I fast.  Has it helped?  I think so.  Its hard to separate the effects of the hoodia and the oil, but the one day that I didn’t take the oil in the morning felt a bit harder.

Ok, so that’s how I’ve solved the hunger issue, which works pretty well.  I can generally make it to 6 or 7pm on just the 50 calories of oil as long as I take it easy and stay pretty inactive.  There is no question, however, that my ability to act and think decreases dramatically by mid afternoon.  I can withstand the hunger, but my brain and body aren’t able to continue functioning at a peak level.  But that is to be expected, of course, and that’s also why I am doing this as a temporary treatment for an acute problem, and wouldn’t do the fasting thing unless it was for a specific reason.  As soon as my knee is better, I’m definitely going back to eating every day.

The one thing that I do have to say, however, is that never have 450 calories felt so amazing as when you haven’t eating in 28 hours…