Alright, so I haven’t updated in a week. I’ve been very busy retooling the way I go about getting business and the details of what exactly I’ll be doing, but I’ll describe that in a different post…
Now, here’s a time line of what has happened with my knee:
1) I hurt my knee originally at the end of August. I then did nothing for 5 weeks (neither making it worse, nor doing anything to help it get better other than rest). Initially, I saw gradual improvement for the first 10 days as the bruising calmed down, but the bruising was replaced by chronic inflammation, as has happened to this knee before. After 5 weeks the knee was only maybe 25% better, and so I decided to start alternate day fasting and taking some herbal anti-inflammatories to try and treat the inflammation.
2) After a week of alternate day fasting and taking the herbal anti-inflammatories (3 fasting days, with resveratrol and boswellia every day), the knee was maybe up to 40 or 50% better.
3) Continuing the herbal treatments and fasting, I saw dramatic improvement in the span of about 4 days, after I had been fasting for almost 3 weeks (9 fasting days). This mirrors my experience when I fasted to treat knee inflammation two years ago – I didn’t see any benefit until about fasting day 8 or 9 then either. I wrote a post about how fasting actually works to reduce inflammation.
4) At the end of three weeks of fasting, I went out and threw the frisbee around and jogged a bit last Saturday, and the knee felt like it was 90-95% better. Then, the next day (Sunday), I decided to go to pickup ultimate frisbee, and I ended up playing most of an entire game… Bad idea… The next day (Monday), my knee was back to only maybe 60% better.
Now, I had been originally planning to taper off the fasting during this past week, but since the setback after Sunday’s game, I have kept going strong. The knee is back to maybe 80% better, but I plan on taking it a little easier from now on, even if the knee feels really good. Clearly, I need to be strengthening my legs as a whole and stretching to support my knee, in addition to treating the inflammation.
Fortunately I have found another trick to help make the fasting days easier: celery. A medium sized stalk of celery is just 5 calories, and a couple of those spread throughout the day give my stomach something to gnaw on, other than my will power. So, for the foreseeable future, I’m going to keep fasting on alternate days, which will hopefully keep working on reducing the inflammation. And I’m also going to more seriously start strengthening and stretching my legs to try and give support to my knees. I’ll post another update on how my knee is doing in a few days…
