The Unexpected Blessings of Illness

I would like to apologize to my readers for not writing any new posts for longer than a month. I experienced several very serious illnesses over the past month and only recovered my normal energy and motivation levels within the past week. About five weeks ago, I had a dangerous bout of diabetic ketoacidosis, a serious illness that can rapidly become a very serious medical emergency if not handled properly at home that usually only afflicts Type 1 Diabetics. For an explanation of what diabetic ketoacidosis is, click here.

A week and a half later I contracted a respiratory illness, probably due to the severe stress my body was under due to my bout with diabetic ketoacidoses. When I recovered from that, I developed a severe kidney infection that my doctor thought she might need to hospitalize me for. I was on a fourteen day course of a very powerful antibiotic.

During this time, I began to realize just how much better my new state of health, energy, and especially mental function had been before I got ill for so long. When I was experiencing these illnesses one after the other, I had very low energy levels, no motivation to exercise or take care of my daily responsibilities, and a severely impaired mental processing ability. How I felt through my recent experience with severe illness was how I felt every day for most of my life before two years ago. My worst days through the past month were analogous to my best days four years ago. This realization has enabled me to realize just how much the quality of my life has improved over the past two years.

I am now able to deal with very sad, stressful periods in my life by maintaining a high level of joy and optimism. That is an amazing blessing for someone who has a Bipolar II diagnosis! There is a link here explaining what Bipolar II is. Bipolar II is highly inheritable and seems to respond better to dietary and lifestyle interventions than Bipolar I.

One more of the unexpected blessings of my bout with illness was the chance to read some phenomenal books that have enriched my life and knowledge base regarding my healing journey by leaps and bounds. The one that had the greatest impact on me in several areas was Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. Reading this book enabled me to let go of some of my toxic anger at my past endocrinologists and the quality of my diabetes care over the past twenty-five years. Before the book, I couldn't understand why so many diabetes doctors, including my own, were so against the therapeutic usage of a high fat, moderate protein, low carbohydrate diet in the management of diabetes. Especially considering that both forms of diabetes are basically a metabolic disorder of carbohydrate metabolism, as far as the management of symptoms go. The hostility seemed nonsensical to me, considering that people with pre diabetes and Type 2 diabetes may actually put their disease into complete remission or be able to prevent themselves from ever developing the disease with this dietary approach.

The other book I read that covered some of the same historical information in more depth was The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz. She covered in more detail how the low fat, high carb diet came to become the medical profession's and government's recommended diet even though there had never been clinical trails performed to establish that such a diet was healthier for humans than a diet with the opposite macronutrient ratios.

Good Calories, Bad Calories is almost 500 heavily annotated pages packed with technical scientific information. He wrote a another book with much of the same information in a much more readable format that I am reading to my family called Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It.

I also read two excellent books on ketogenic diets. The first contains all the relevant research and experimental evidence in support of the therapeutic uses of such diets. It is called The Art and Science of Low-Carbohydrate Living by the two premier research scientists in the field, Dr. Stephen D. Phinney and Dr. Jeff S. Volek. The second is basically a how-to manual on how to get into and maintain nutritional ketosis to be able to reap the health benefits for yourself, and it is called Keto Clarity, by Dr. Eric Westman and the blogger Jimmy Moore.

It was through reading Keto Clarity that I realized that I am actually in a near-constant state of nutritional ketosis, and that is probably one of the main reasons why my health, mood, and mental function has improved so dramatically. I was eating a ketogenic diet and in a healthy state of nutritional ketosis without even realizing it! It also helped explain why so long as I have a constant flow of sufficient insulin and well controlled low blood sugar, nutritional ketosis is actually beneficial for the management of my Type 1 Diabetes, not something to be afraid of.

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