It has been three weeks since I started pigging out in my attempt to gain weight and two weeks since I started to work on my sleep.   How’s all this working?    Well, my weight was steadily climbing and I thought for sure I would be at 160 around now but instead I’ve dropped back a bit once again.   Today I weighed in at 157 and seem to be stuck around 156-157.   This is better than being stuck at 151 and at least my BMI is now 20.5 which is  in the range where I can live with it.    The weight training is working, in the few weeks since I got serious I’ve increased 3 lbs. and have found my quads and biceps both grow by 0.5″ already.    I’m trying to get in weight workouts at least 3 days a week and have really noticed an increase in strength.  I could initially only leg press 180 and just barely and now I can do a set of 200, I think I can actually get to 210 or 220 next time. Quad and hamstrings were at 80, now I can do 100 with them.  It is kind of amazing how fast the strength comes back when you get serious about it and my workouts only last about 15-20 minutes since I’m just pushing the hardest weight I can get off the stack until my muscles just fail.

Sleep-wise things are going much better.  I have hit 100% (or higher when I oversleep) sleep efficiency based on my allowed time in bed each night and am now increasing my time in bed to 7 hours.  I haven’t awoke in the middle of the night to where I need to get out of bed now in over a week.  I haven’t had to knock myself out at all during that time frame either, this is just natural sleep.  This is a record for me in the last few months and I definitely feel more rested these days than I had in August.

The really good news though is that my SIBO really does appear to be gone.  Over the last month I’ve re-introduced a lot of new foods so I have been able to eat a pretty full Paleo diet now, no longer stuck to strict AIP or low FODMAP any longer.  I even eat a few non-Paleo foods like white rice and potatoes but mostly I stick to Paleo starches like sweet potatoes and winter squash.  I’m eating at least one sweet potato a day now, often two.  I’ve added back in some nuts and seeds recently too, another source of dense calories.   I even ate cake a few weeks ago, a chocolate coconut flour cake I made from My Paleo Patisserie and it was awesome.  I did the cake for my 2nd anniversary of getting sick, yes it has been over two years now.  I remember one of the first SIBO blogs I read was called A Year Without Cake and I decided to celebrate the fact I felt better by my 2nd anniversary with cake.  I am still avoiding tomatoes completely,  and stay away from most nightshades in general.  Onions and garlic are still tough too but I do eat them some now.  Other than that there isn’t much in the Paleo diet that I don’t eat now.

What am I doing for supplements these days?  Not much.   I’m still on digestive enzymes but may try to give it up next month and see how that goes.  Mainly I’m doing motility and sleep stuff.  Iberogast with meals and at night.  At night I take a handful of pills with my Iberogast – 3 MotilPro, 1 4.5mg LDN, 1 TripleMag and 1 Cortisol Manager.  Other than that I take a vitamin some of the time and some Alpha Lipoic Acid (ALA) in hopes that my feet will one day get better.  Instead things just keep getting weirder in that department, recently I have had a cool burning sensation like sports cream all through my left ankle going up my shin that just will not go away.   My toes also feel like they are about twice the size they actually are, it is very strange.

I am getting a few tests run now which I should have back later in the month.  I did another 3-day stool test to see if all the probiotics and fermented foods have actually crowded out the nasty m.smithii and e.coli characters and gotten my colon a bit more balanced.  I feel like it has but I want evidence.  I also want to see if I’m still dealing with the blasto and then will have to decide what to do about that. Also getting the IBSChek test this week to see if I really do have the auto-immune type of SIBO which I think I do.  I just want to know.  It won’t really change anything but it will let me know what to expect time-wise on fully healing  from this.

I’ll put the improved diet, sleep and weight to a test over the next few weeks.  I’m going to be heading out on the first extended fishing trip I’ve taken in two years to the Deschutes River in Oregon and the Yakima River in Washington.   We’ll be camping on the Deschutes away from anything and everything.  The guide service we are using is great and is adapting to my diet and meal timing requirements so I have hope this will work.  I’m still very nervous about handing over my food prep to anyone else so this has caused a lot of anxiety in me.   I am packing a cooler full of food and taking some extra backpacking meals just to be safe.   After that week it is the North Cascades for a week but there we will have a nice cabin with a stove and grill where I can prepare my own food so that should be much easier.  We hope to fit in our last backpack trip of the year then too if the weather holds and the stars align.