Since my last post a few weeks ago where I discussed my high blood sugar test results I have managed to get things under control rather quickly. The amazing this was that all it really took was some chromium, cinnamon and apple cider vinegar (ACV). I haven’t been testing daily but have tested 5 times since getting my meter and each time I’ve been normal and, in fact, have dropped down into the 80’s for the first time since before SIBO. I even carb’ed out yesterday and tested this morning at 98 so high normal but still normal and lower than all my tests since SIBO which were pegged at 99. Along with the normal glucose readings I’ve been steadily gaining weight again. When I went to see my doctor last month I was down to 151, yesterday I was at 157 and I’ve been steadily rising these last two weeks. My body fat percentage has also risen from 11.5% up to 13%.
Category Archives: Health
Dealing with this high blood sugar number
In my last post at the end I mentioned that I’d gotten back blood work and it wasn’t all pretty. Many markers that were bad before – B12, iron, testosterone, AST, ALT, … were now in good shape and my systemic inflammation as measured by CRP was very low but I had a few things that were not so good – cholesterol and blood glucose. The cholesterol numbers had gotten worse in a year since my last check but even then they don’t concern me too much. The HDL number is good and high, the HDL/Triglyceride ratio is good and the LDL particle size actually got bigger. Thus all the cardiovascular risk factors they show on the test come out on the very low end of the very low risk scale. So, even though my total cholesterol is at 299 (up from 254 last year) there isn’t a real cardiovascular risk here, especially given my inflammation as shown by CRP is only 0.27 which is extremely low.
SIBO Symposium 2016
Another record breaking hot weekend in early June must mean it is time for the annual SIBO Symposium in Portland. This year I decided not to attend the symposium live though and instead did some of the sessions from the comfort of my air-conditioned home where I could be at my stand up desk instead of stuck in a chair all day. I didn’t attend too many sessions live and will watch the rest of them over the next few weeks as I have time. Instead I focused on some areas of interest and here are my notes. For a good writeup of the top takeaways of the whole symposium see this great post by Riley Wimminger.
A year without treating SIBO
A year ago I finally stopped taking antimicrobials for SIBO after a solid year of trying hard to eradicate it with first prescription antibiotics, then herbals and diet. I never got a totally negative test last May but it was low enough that we all decided it was not worth trying to keep chasing down the last few points. After the Symposium in June I decided that maybe I would never test negative due to large amounts of m.smithii in the colon so changed tactics to work on my colon flora and ignore the SIBO.
My DNAFit report
In several recent podcasts Ben Greenfield has mentioned DNAFit as a good way to find out what, genetically, you should be doing as far as exercise goes. It got me curious and since I already had my 23andMe data I figured it couldn’t hurt to pay a bit to see what they had to say. The process of importing your 23andMe data couldn’t be easier and $79 later I had my first report, the Fitness Lite report.
Well, no huge surprises in the results really. In summary I am built for endurance, recover moderately quickly and am highly prone to soft tissue injury. I’ve pretty much found this out on my own over the last 55 years. I’m not a power person at all but can pretty much walk or run all day with no problems. I recover fairly quickly from workouts, usually never needing more than a day or so even for very long runs. And yes, I am prone to soft tissue injury and my main complaint is always some form of tendonitis somewhere though since I’ve changed up my training program in the last few months I haven’t been getting plagued by that at all and have been able to drastically increase distance without any injury at all.
Start a SIBO Support Group
SIBO can be a very isolating illness. Suddenly you can’t go out to eat with your friends since you are sensitive to everything. You can’t really go out to a bar with your friends either, drinking is not recommended. Often you just don’t feel like even leaving the couch when your gut is churning and you aren’t sure when you’ll next need to run to the bathroom. Friends and family rarely can understand what is going on since until you experience SIBO you really don’t get it. All of that can leave you feeling alone and a bit depressed, I know it did me. I think the only person I saw outside of my immediate family for months was a string of doctors as I was trying to figure out what exactly was wrong and what to do about it.
Can you breath your way out of SIBO?
Me with puffed out cheeks doing my breathing
SIBO may be happening in your small intestine but in many cases it is specifically a motility problem and thus tied to the enteric nervous system in the gut. The most common cause of SIBO is actually an auto-immune reaction where the body destroys a key protein that is part of this enteric nervous system and drives the migrating motor complex, the MMC. The MMC fires the small intestine’s cleansing wave to flush any unwanted bacteria out. If this protein, vinculin, is destroyed then the cleansing waves to do not fire as strongly and bacteria can back up in the small intestine causing the symptoms of SIBO. The MMC can also be compromised if there is an issue in the vagus nerve, the main nerve bundle between the brain and the gut. The vagus nerve and the enteric nervous system is so important that the gut is known as the ‘second brain’. In fact, there are more neurotransmitters in the gut than in the brain itself, 95% of the serotonin in the body is produced in the gut and serotonin is a key transmitter in the MMC.
Finally, some UBiome results
My gut bacteria ratios
It only took about 3 months but I finally got my first set of results back from my UBiome test back in November. I’m doing a series of three tests each spaced 2 months apart to see if I’m making any progress with my gut repopulation. I really don’t know what to make of a lot of these results but a few I do know what to make of. I did a Genova test in August which had me in semi-bad shape, way low on the diversity index and in the red zone on butyrate and short chain fatty acids. After that test I started heavily in on probiotics and fermented foods in hopes that this would improve. Well, I have to say I think it worked!
Getting fit again after SIBO
In one of my recent posts I talked a bit about exercise in relation to the Primary Foods concept and a bit about how I slowly got back in shape as I healed up from SIBO. I thought this topic deserved a bit more discussion since it is an important part of my life and I know many people who are currently struggling with how to get back in shape after being ill for a year or longer.
Before SIBO I was in the best shape of my life. I had come off a solid year with a personal trainer, I had run several trail marathons and an ultra marathon and was pretty much doing 13+ mile trail run every Saturday. When I got sick all that fitness went out the door. I lost a lot of weight, down a total of 35-40 lbs and with that weight went a lot of muscle mass. With Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV)( coursing through my system I was exhausted and seriously unable to get up and do much of anything so all my cardio conditioning went out the door too. After a year of this I went from being in great shape to being in the worst shape I’d probably been in for most of my adult life.
Sleep, Rest and SIBO
One of the things that I think was crucial to dealing with SIBO, or any chronic illness, is getting enough rest to give the body time to heal. I had been thinking of writing this post last week and then I listened to this podcast with Meghan Telpner on the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast and decided that she said it all better than I could. I’d recommend anyone dealing with a chronic illness listen to what Meghan has to say.
In my case I was used to living a pretty fast paced lifestyle. If I wasn’t at work coding or managing a team at what was the world’s biggest and craziest software company I was out running, hiking, climbing, fishing, biking, etc… basically anything that would keep me in motion. So getting SIBO was a huge shift for me and hard to accept that I had to slow down and get some real rest. Dr. Bowen told me again and again, my new “job” was to relax and heal, not be be doing all the time.