Five months ago my mom suffered a series of strokes that resulted in paralysis on her right side, wheelchair bound and non-verbal.
This is in addition to being previously diagnosed with diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, depression and she was also about 60lbs overweight.
To address all these pre-existing conditions she was actively prescribed 23 prescriptions.
Today, my mom is:
She is still non-verbal, but I can understand exactly what she wants to communicate to me when she has something to say.
She is still weak on her right side, but she can walk around the house without aid. Dress herself in the mornings...mostly. She does need some help putting on her shoes, panties and bra. But if hell broke loose and we had to boogie in a hurry, she'd be able to make it to the car by herself while I packed up for a mad max like departure/adventure. :-) Albeit without a bra, panties and barefoot. But that's OK.
She is now only 15lbs overweight and still dropping.
Her cholesterol levels continue to improve.
Her BP is within normal levels.
Her A1C (diabetes measurement) has improved BIGLY and continues to do so every month.
She is now on only 3 prescriptions. My sisters and I might be adding one more to this in September so possibly 4 prescriptions starting next month, down from 23.
How did we do it?
Diet: My mom now only eats what I eat (and I don't eat fiat food).
I stopped administering all the prescriptions they (her doctors) had her taking prior to the stroke except for the ones they were administering to her in the hospital for the 2 weeks that she was in ER and ICU for the strokes.
For physical therapy she: opens the mail in the mornings, not using her mouth (yes, disgusting) but using both right and left hands. She has to walk when in the house..I used to carry her from room to room bc it was faster, but she is retired and I don't have a boss, so what's the rush?! Even if it takes 10 minutes to get from bedroom to the living room. We also slow dance for 5 minutes every evening after dinner. Last night we danced to some ray charles. And lastly but MOST important, my sister(s) call her every night before bed and asks her about her day.
For her depression, we give her "stuff" that needs to get done throughout the day that she can do while seated at the couch. I.e. fold and sort laundry, open and sort the mail, I take her (and the dogstr) with me everywhere I go. Make sure she goes outside and gets some sun every day (not hard to get where we are presently).
All that to say, considering we were making final arrangements back in March and now we are where we are with her progress, I'm a pretty grateful dude.
Fix the food and you fix two things:
1-America's obesity epidemic
2-America's out of control rising health care cost problem?
Disclaimers:
Not health, medical, financial or any other advice for anyone.
I just wanted to brag somewhere about how well my mom is doing and what is working for her with this community.
I've come to depend on many of you over the last year +, for some grown-up conversations with rational, like minded folks from all walks of life.
I know, it's a long one. So thanks for reading to the end.💜 🫂 ✌️
#MyStrongMom #RecoveryJourney #NoFiatFood #AgingParents Nice to hear 😊 if she needs any additional support, I believe I'm in the neighborhood 🙏
Thank you. Will keep this community posted with periodic updates be they for the better or worse.
🙏🏽
Have a look into giving her some lions mane (good for the brain and nervous system) and other medicinal mushrooms like reishi (good for blood sugar levels etc) as well as cordyceps chaga etc.
You are spot on Henry. I take many of these in pouder form for myself with my morning coffee.
Will start her on that as well.
Maybe research the Stamets stack too. Does involve psilocybin mushrooms but the dose is low and the combination of niacin, psilocybin and lions mane seems to be doing some amazing things to peoples nervous system.
Gingko biloba, ashwanganda and Siberian ginseng might be worth investigating too. The former improves circulation and the other two are good adaptogens and should help her depression too.
Hope she makes a continual improvement.
That's quiet a story.
You can be proud of yourself and I'm sure your mother is very proud of You too.
Chaga powder is a good one too. Improves vit D levels and thus the imune system.
Nostr friends care! 😉
I'm sorry to hear about your mother's strokes, and I'm inspired to hear about her progress.
What I really want to hear about is what is this diet she is now on? And I'm curious what the 23 prescription meds were.
🙏🏽 I've bookmarked this note so that I can list the meds tomorrow, time permitting.
As for Mom's diet, it's this;
Breakfast = 1.5 hard boiled eggs. A sprinkle of black pepper, tumeric, a pinch of kimchi, no salt. A half of a banana and a decaf coffee small, black, no sugar, no cream.
Lunch = fruit smoothie. I rotate different colored fruits every 2-3 days.
Dinner =
A crock pot.
bone broth.
fresh vegetables. different veggies seasonally, locally sourced, and a can of different types of fiat beans.
Seasoning (no salt).
Protein changes every 3rd day which is how long my crockpot lasts. I rotate between, white meat, read meat, bone meat, muscle meat, organ meat (usually beef liver), or fish every 3 days when the pot empties. Protein is always grass fed, free range or wild fish.
So every week the two of us go through 3 pots of (I call it fuel) food.
The only difference between Mom's diet and mine is that I eat more, I add salt to my servings, my coffee is not decaf and I eat all of my food for the day between 2-6pm depending on my schedule for that day.
Exceptions are when my family comes over and cook. Which is usually a Saturday or Sunday type of event.
I've been eating a lot of rice (brown or basmati), blackbeans, and sardines with olive oil and sriracha sauce. Kind-of my staple food now.
Also pumpkin seeds, almonds, tea (coffee gives me the shits), sweet potatoes, bananas, apples, dried prunes.
Oh, I'm also making and drinking cabbage juice.
I've recently quit coffee, and most bread but sometimes I have pita bread or macaroni with pasta sauce.
I eat breakfast late and dinner early, but my feeding window is probably closer to 7 hours than 4.
i didn't see any mention of meat. didn't you say you raise and slaughter sheep ?
meat should be the foundation of human diet, especially when you have access to 100% grass fed organic meat.
also it's not so much even what you eat but calories in vs calories out. my guess is his mother is improving not because of what she is eating but how much ( or how little ).
if i tied you down to a wheelchair and only allowed you to eat 2,000 calories a day you would also lose weight even if your entire diet was nothing but junk food.
Ever since the gout, and given how many purines are in sardines, I'm getting almost all my meat from the sardines. I'm not strict, I get some elsewhere from time to time. I still run sheep for the dog, for my friends, for the market, and as a supply of food I can rely on in hard times (a lot more food than what most people store in buckets and cans for emergency situations).
i have Gout too, and i was also told to stop eating meat - instead i just started eating even more.
Gout is caused by being fat bro. Think about it - tribesmen who eat 100% meat diet don't get gout. Kings who were eating nothing but Cake were always getting it.
Gout is just a symptom of diabetes.
You will have to either lose weight or die. Simple as that.
Not eating meat will only make you feeble.
doctors are trained monkeys. they can only tell you what they were taught. and what they were taught is meat = bad, and they were taught that because calorie for calorie meat has 10X more carbon footprint than plant food ( plus factory farming is unethical ).
also they can't tell you that you're fat because they don't want to offend you, and also if you lose weight they will lose a customer.
even if protein can trigger a gout attack ultimately when you die it will be from obesity and diabetes and not from Gout.
Gout is your wake up call that tells you that you have bigger problems ( like heart attack and stroke ) coming down the line. Your response should be to lose weight, not to cut out protein.
Cutting out protein of course is actually likely to make you gain weight because protein is more satiating than carbs.
not eating meat because you have Gout is like taking blood pressure meds because you have high blood pressure
it's treating the symptom
the underlying cause in both cases is obesity
address the root cause or die
Vegetarians historically did it for ethical reasons. Pythagoras because he believed animals have souls, Plato too, Benedictine monks ate fish because fish don't care for their young so the parents won't be upset if you eat their children (!), etc, etc. Even Alex Gleason does it for ethical reasons.
YET epidemiological studies show vegetarians living a very long time, and it's pretty obvious when you know a lot of them (I grew up a Seventh Day Adventist, many of my ancestors lived to about 100), and track health gurus and see the vegetarians living past 100 but the meat heavy promoters dying in their 60s. I've got a huge list of people, it's super obvious, but people just refuse to accept it because IMHO they like to eat meat, so their active brains construct reasons and logic to defend this position... which is the common backwards way most people think.
I'm not saying a little meat is bad. It isn't. Pure vegetarianism has problems with iron, B-12, protein quality, and probably other things. That's why I'm not a vegetarian.
And while I agree with Pythagoras that animals have souls (that is to say, they are conscious aware beings)... they don't after they are dead. After they are dead, they are meat, which is good as a food.
there is something called "healthy user bias" that confounds these epidemiological studies.
namely in a society in which it is believed that meat is unhealthy and vegetables are healthy those who are health conscious will eat vegetables and those who are not will eat meat and the result will be that vegetarians will live longer than meat eaters simply because they are more health focused overall.
by contrast if you look at different cultures / nations ( as opposed to different individuals within same nation / culture ) then Koreans eat the most meat ( they eat dogs too ) and live the longest ...
as for Ethical Vegans most of them are just afraid of death but pretend to do it for ethical reasons.
per Nietzsche morality is always rationalized after the fact from self interest
I think that is likely true.
That is a good point.
Also, I'm far more skeptical of the ability to correct for confounders than, say, Walter Willett is. For example, once they found a confounder and adjusted for it and their results changed massively, and an interviewer asked them about this problem, and they just tried to play it down. But clearly, getting the confounders correct is essential... and also impossible.
Nonetheless, I'm also not convinced that this is entirely explanatory.
Koreans are small. It is well known that within a species, the smaller individuals live longer. (Between species, the larger ones live longer). So that one is confounded too.
well you can do controlled studies but those are expensive to run long-term or with large enough sample size and even in the best designed studies there is the issue of who is paying for them ...
culture and family values determine our diet .. we can stay healthy in a very wide range of food choices .. I for example can live only on milk alone ..
i create my own culture and values.
You are both correct, and there are ways for my mom and I to maintain our dietary perculiarires/sovereignty when with the broader family without influencing or drawing needless attention to how much rice or plantains we put on our plates vs how much meat and legumes are on the plate.
How about I eat some osso bucco slow cooked over onions and carrots? I woudln't want to become feeble.
sounds good.
remember your real issue is ENERGY POISONING.
your body has no way to expend the energy you take in ( via calories ) and this fundamental imbalance of energy in vs energy out has a cascade effect of throwing everything else in your body off balance which in turn causes all sorts of damage which creates further imbalance and further damage and so on and so forth essentially creating the downward spiral that leads to bankruptcy from medical bills followed by early death.
avoiding meat doesn't do jack shit to address any of this - it ( hopefully ) alleviates a single symptom.
I fully agree that, as you say "energy poisoning" is one of the major causes of modern disease, is THE cause of diabetes, is the primary cause of gout, and also increases risks of cancer and atherosclerotic diseases. And probably the most important one to correct.
But (and this is where we differ) I also think saturated fat (apoB to be precise) accelerates atherosclerosis. And so limiting red meat (as long as you can do so without gaining wait) is another good target for health.
But avoiding energy poisoning is the bigger of the two levers.
if you don't like saturated fat you can eat fish instead of meat. either meat or fish are both "higher quality" food than stuff like rice and beans. the benefit of saturated fat is it is more shelf stable than fish oil.
as for saturated fat being bad for you - any time you miss a meal your body is eating its own saturated fat from the adipose tissue ...
So you don't buy into this whole "atherosclerosis is actually caused by inflammation and seed oil plant lipids" theory, proposed by eg Paul Mason?
I'm just like your average lazy thinking YouTube watcher, who found this quite in depth talk very interesting and compelling:
Dr. Paul Mason - 'The Clotting Theory of Atherosclerosis and Seed Oil Toxicity (updated)' - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lRXZfs6Sjs
i have stopped going to doctors a few years BEFORE covid.
if you want to be healthy stop eating garbage and lose weight - there is nothing more that any of us can do. don't eat trash, don't be fat - the rest is in G-d's hands.
pills do nothing except improve fake metrics that are specifically invented to prescribe the pills, or to control the side effects of other pills while causing their own side effects.
the entire medical industry is a scam which was obvious to me before Covid but is now obvious to many.
high blood pressure is mostly just a result of being overweight. my grandma was thin but had high blood pressure which was baffling to me - until a nurse pointed out the cuff we were using to measure her BP was too big for grandma - once i bought a child sized cuff that properly fit my 90 lbs grandma magically her blood pressure was fine - and she has been taking meds for it for years.
Grandma died anyway at 98 but ultimately all the pills she was taking were for nothing and her high blood pressure was imaginary. the only thing that actually was of benefit to her was Oxygen because as it turned out when she would experience blood pressure spikes it was actually caused by Oxygen drop, which is why the meds never did anything - but Oxygen fixed the problem instantly.
basically meds are useless. you must address the underlying problem ( for most people it is excess weight, for my grandma it was low oxygen due to her lungs barely functioning ). even then you must accept that nobody lives forever. i wanted my Grandma to make it to 100 but 98 was a decent result.
@Low Information Voter
Thanks for sharing I agree with your understandings as well, 💯.
It would be nice if someone (hint hint 👀) wrote a book describing how that looks in a modern family from day to day. I think there are many that would benefit from these types of experiences.
It's on the list of topics I'd like to write a book about some day when I get bored.
Keep on bragging, this is some awesome stuff. My grandpa died of pneumonia in hospital after he stayed there with his final stroke. Plain walls, no radio, the care was how it in long term in a hospital is. People just end there for good. I remember thinking that I would die there too. We couldn't take care, it's not usually possible to drop everything or pay for professionals. I'm happy to know someone is capable of this fight and bet it's been very hard on you not only in means of the care. You're a good son.
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