Metabolic Health

5 Lifestyle Practices Helped Me Reverse Metabolic Disorders and Lower Health Risks.

It might seem difficult or radical to some to implement these practices, but when examined closely, they actually reflect the essence of who we are.

Here is why I wrote this short and personal piece.

Accessing information in the mid-70s and 80s was not as easy as we have now. However, some people still make similar mistakes I made due to a lack of information on those days. Information is at our fingertips now.

My purpose is to show a few critical mistakes I made, how I realized and accepted them, and summarize the solutions I found by seeking truth, sensibly experimenting, and validating each point with triangulation.

I have no intention of boasting about my achievements as it does not bring any value to me. Besides, thousands of others achieved much better results than me for more debilitating conditions, so my modest achievement is a trivial matter in the big schema things.

My aim is to summarize the key points that helped me reverse my metabolic disorders and lowered the risks for the manifestation of new conditions under five headings. This post represents the thirty thousand feet view of my focus on holistic health over the last five decades.

A Brief Background to My Metabolic Disorders

Like many people in my generation, I faced severe health issues in my younger years due to misinformation and unhealthy lifestyle habits that I assumed were healthy at the time.

The tangible issue my healthcare consultants diagnosed was a metabolic syndrome, covering several conditions such as prediabetes, chronic inflammation, and insulin resistance.

These three conditions affected my weight, muscle mass, bone density, sleep quality, debilitating pain, mood, and overall well-being.

The most significant contributors to metabolic syndrome were poor nutrition, sleep deprivation, and cumulative stress. A combination of these three factors made my condition chronic in professional’s vernacular.

A chronic condition refers to a disease or disorder that is continuous and stubborn. The symptoms and effects might last long or might worsen as they progress.

Older people are more prone to chronic conditions. So these conditions might affect longevity. According to National Cancer Institute, “Chronic diseases tend to occur in older adults and can usually be controlled but not cured.”

According to National Council on Aging, “80% of adults 65 and older have at least one chronic condition, while 68% have two or more.” So only 20% of our seniors in North America seem to have a healthy life.

However, my metabolic condition happened at a young age. Paradoxically, I felt better and younger as I got older. Therefore, I’d like to share the principles and practices that helped me reverse my condition and lower the risks with healthy lifestyle habits.

First, I’d like to highlight the critical risk factors for chronic diseases so that my protocols might make sense to you.

Lifestyle choices are common risk factors for chronic diseases. As documented by the CDC, the most lifestyle risks are poor nutrition, lack of physical activity, tobacco use, and excessive alcohol consumption. However, I came across more factors affecting metabolic conditions to become chronic.

From research, experience, and observations, common root causes of metabolic disorders also affecting mental health are:

Excessive blood glucose, insulin resistance, obesity, high blood pressure, elevated cortisol, exposure to toxins and pathogens, nutritional deficiency, inadequate oxygen, impaired blood flow, unmanaged cholesterol, high triglycerides, hormonal imbalances, anemia, imbalances of the microbiome, autoimmune triggers, allergies, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, and emotional traumas.

This is a condensed list from my literature review. Unfortunately, I had most of these conditions and obtained support from various specialists such as hematologists, gastroenterologists, endocrinologists, rheumatologists, nephrologists, cardiologists, neurologists, and psychiatrists. And I paid most of them from my own pocket.

These highly trained and experienced specialists did their best considering their limitations in the healthcare system and contributed to solving the puzzle from different angles with little impact. But they all gave me valuable perspectives to find my own solution.

Nevertheless, gratefully, the real difference was taking full responsibility for my health and making necessary lifestyle changes based on holistic health principles rather than medication, surgery, or other medical interventions.

Here are the five lifestyle practices that let me reverse my metabolic disorders and lower disease risks.

1 — Radical Change of My Diet and Eating Regimen

The most significant impact for reversing my metabolic condition and lowering risks was to change my diet and stop frequent eating.

The practical point was to replace empty calories with nutrient-dense foods. Empty and excessive calories, especially from processed foods, increased my blood sugar and caused insulin resistance leading to visceral fat accumulation and muscle loss.

Nutritional deficiency due to empty calories was the primary culprit. My so-called healthy diet was unhealthy as it broke the sugar balance and did not provide essential nutrients.

My body lacked bioavailable proteins and essential fats in high-carb and low-fat diets. So my radical solution was to change to high-fat and low-carb diets with adequate and bioavailable protein from whole and nutrient-dense foods, including essential fats, minerals, and vitamins.

After replacing carbs with healthy fats, the next radical shift was moving from frequent meals to one meal in a daily eating regimen eventually. First, I stopped snacks. Then I skipped one meal. And Finally, I made a single meal a day a lifestyle choice.

Dietary changes balanced my blood sugar and optimized insulin hormone. Since insulin is the master hormone, it can also affect the other hormones. I discuss the next critical hormone in the subsequent section.

Of course, not everyone needs such a radical change in diet. But I had no other options to reverse my chronic conditions and prevent the risks considering my metabolic constraints.

2 — Lowered Mental and Emotional Stress

Even though I always knew about the importance of sleep, I only focussed on the duration of sleep rather than its quality. Until I started measuring my sleep qualitatively and quantitatively, I had no clue about missing restorative sleep.

Since I lacked restorative sleep for a long time, my mental and emotional stress skyrocketed. It became evident when my endocrinologist identified elevated cortisol. As he guessed, the biggest culprit was sleep deprivation.

My hectic lifestyle and ambitious behavior added fuel to the fire. Elevated cortisol made my body more insulin resistant and led to metabolic disorders such as the manifestation of prediabetes.

I was fortunate to detect metabolic syndrome earlier than getting more chronic and causing other complications such as cardiovascular or neurological disorders, so it was possible to reverse it effectively with lifestyle modifications.

Improving sleep quality and lowering stress at home and work address the elevated cortisol issue and make my body more insulin sensitive. It was evident in losing actual belly fat and gaining lean muscles.

Adding mindfulness practices such as working in a flow state, self-talk therapy, and expressive writing further lowered the mental stress.

The following essential item to lower oxidative stress and inflammation was adjusting my workout regimen, which I covered in the next section.

3 — Redesigned physical activities

I have always enjoyed an active lifestyle, including intense and prolonged workouts. However, I was unaware of overdoing them and causing excessive stress, leading to chronic inflammation.

For example, after working all day at work with a hectic schedule, I used to run at least an hour every night, get up early in the morning, and go to the gym to do more cardio, thinking it would improve my health and fitness and shrink my bulging belly.

These excessive workouts with increased mental stress were making me hungrier and causing me to consume too many refined carbohydrates from food and drinks, increasing my blood sugar and growing my abdominal area while shrinking my muscles.

The solution was replacing long cardio sessions with short high-intensity workouts and starting resistance training such as weightlifting and calisthenics. This new protocol significantly lowered the stress.

However, the critical point was not to exercise until my body recovered from the effects of previous workouts. So I learned to listen to my body and act accordingly.

In addition, stopping to run in solid spaces and instead barefoot walking on beach sand or grass and doing intense exercises on a trampoline lowered the oxidative stress and inflammation in joints.

I was doing just the opposite before following the principle of “no pain, no gain,” which was a stupid guide when it came to workouts. The mistake was approaching my body like a machine ignoring its biochemical needs for recovery and rejuvenation.

These practical approaches to my fitness significantly lowered physical stress and inflammation in my joints and overall body.

4 — Refrained from toxins and pathogens

I had no idea my food and some lifestyle factors were increasing toxins in my body. The most significant contributor was the wrong food choices not aligning with my body.

Especially consuming excessive vegetable and fruit juices was the main culprit. I thought they were healthy, as even nutritional scientists of the 70s said so. I believed them naively without challenging their assumptions due to a lack of information and capability.

But I didn’t know toxins from plants and excessive sugar were toxic for my body until I discovered that I was carb-intolerant and had low tolerance to some plant molecules, such as lectins and oxalates, which were abundant in condensed vegetable and fruit juices.

Removing many plants through an elimination diet was an excellent solution. However, later moving from a plant-based to an animal-based diet was the optimal solution to lower toxins and excessive glucose.

This radical solution lowered the stress from the digestive system, reduced inflammation caused by a leaky gut, and made my body more insulin-sensitive and leptin receptive, allowing me to lose excess belly fat and gain lean muscle.

In addition, in my younger years, I used to smoke and consume alcohol, adding more fuel to the toxic fire. I learned that cigarettes did nothing other than fix the lacking nicotine effect in the brain.

Permanently quitting both cigarette smoking and drinking alcohol made my lungs, liver, heart, and brain healthier. I was glad to stop drinking alcohol at a young age before it became an addiction. I knew moderate consumption was not a severe problem or high risk, but addiction could be, considering the sad situation of many alcoholics in my circles.

Later during my advanced research, I learned that excessive alcohol use

“affects cognition in several ways. Indirect effects include intoxication, withdrawal, brain trauma, central nervous system infection, hypoglycemia, hepatic failure, Marchiafava-Bignami disease, and Korsakov syndrome. Additionally, ethanol is a direct neurotoxin and, in sufficient dosage, can cause lasting dementia”,

as documented in this review paper.

In addition, I paid attention to viral, bacterial, and fungal infections that might lead to chronic conditions. I followed principles from holistic health literature to prevent infectious diseases that might affect overall metabolism. So I refrained from toxins and pathogens systematically.

5 — Allowed self-healing with lifestyle choices

The previous steps were enough for me to reverse my metabolic syndrome and autoimmune conditions. However, I did not want to experience oxidative stress and chronic inflammation that might lead to other disorders as I get older.

Through intense literature, I found that besides improving the defense system, we also need to activate the self-healing system of the body to remove pathogens, toxins, harmful proteins, and damaged cells.

Learning about autophagy and mitophagy processes encouraged me to self-experiment with guidance from health and fitness communities. I met brave and sensible biohackers with solid science backgrounds.

The most sustainable and natural ways to initiate these self-healing processes were time-restricted eating, joyful workouts, and cold exposure.

As I already covered time-restricted eating and intense workouts in previous sections, the only item related to this section was introducing thermogenesis and trying long-term fasting. The practical points from the thermogenesis perspective were cold showers, ice baths, and dry saunas.

Combining these lifestyle habits activated autophagy and mitophagy, improving my cellular and mitochondrial health. Having healthier cells and mitochondria significantly improved metabolic and mental health and lowered the risks of potential disorders.

These natural cleansing systems can reduce the toxic load in our cells, improving our cellular and mitochondrial health.

From my experience, time-restricted eating, intense workouts, and cold exposure in combination can significantly activate autophagy and mitophagy, protecting and improving our cells and mitochondria.

I learned that all chronic diseases are associated with our cells, mitochondria, and genes. Therefore, I prioritized cellular health by allowing the body to self-heal.

Conclusions and Takeaways

These five steps are comprehensive, covering many aspects of our lives, mainly the fundamental needs of our bodies and minds. Therefore, I only touched on the most critical items. One can write multiple books about each item.

These items show a few radical shifts I made. The first one was doing the opposite of what I used to do. The second, third, and fourth ones are usual practices. However, the last one is still considered radical by some people even though those practices have been used for centuries for many years.

The steps I introduced are based on holistic health principles and lifestyle-based interventions. Many people used different variations of them successfully. Most of them are backed by scientific studies.

Even though the protocol might change from person to person, these steps might be customized by anyone and practiced unless there are underlying health conditions such as genetic defects or infections.

The practices might seem radical or difficult to some, but look closer, and you’ll realize that these represent who we are in our most authentic form. For example, we were not designed to eat all day and run constantly.

The key takeaway of this article is first to recognize and accept mistakes. Then take corrective actions by leveraging the literature and experiences of others, experimenting sensibly, and getting timely professional support.

Finally, knowing each of us is unique and has different requirements to recover from illnesses and lower our risks for potential diseases is crucial information.

I shared similar experiences of other people in my circles and compiled those stories in a collection titled Insightful Life Lessons from Personal Stories. I believe you might find some relevant and interesting ones from this collection.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

As a new reader, you might check my holistic health and well-being stories reflecting on my reviews, observations, and decades of sensible experiments. I write about health as it matters. I believe health is all about homeostasis.

I aim to increase the hormonal intelligence of my readers and write about neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, GABA, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, adrenaline, glutamate, and histamine.

One of my goals as a writer is to raise awareness about the causes and risk factors of prevalent diseases that can lead to suffering and death for a large portion of the population.

To raise awareness about health issues, I have written several articles that present my holistic health findings from research, personal observations, and unique experiences. Below are links to these articles for easy access.

Metabolic Syndrome, Type II Diabetes, Fatty Liver Disease, Heart Disease, Strokes, Obesity, Liver Cancer, Autoimmune Disorders, Homocysteine, Lungs Health, Pancreas Health, Kidneys Health, NCDs, Infectious Diseases, Brain Health, Dementia, Depression, Brain Atrophy, Neonatal Disorders, Skin Health, Dental Health, Bone Health, Leaky Gut, Leaky Brain, Brain Fog, Chronic Inflammation, Insulin Resistance, Elevated Cortisol, Leptin Resistance, Anabolic Resistance, Cholesterol, High Triglycerides, Metabolic Disorders, Gastrointestinal Disorders, and Major Diseases.

I also wrote about valuable nutrients. Here are the links for easy access:

Lutein/Zeaxanthin, Phosphatidylserine, Boron, Urolithin, taurine, citrulline malate, biotin, lithium orotate, alpha-lipoic acid, n-acetyl-cysteine, acetyl-l-carnitine, CoQ10, PQQ, NADH, TMG, creatine, choline, digestive enzymes, magnesium, zinc, hydrolyzed collagen, nootropics, pure nicotine, activated charcoal, Vitamin B12, Vitamin B1, Vitamin D, Vitamin K2, Omega-3 Fatty Acids, N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine, and other nutrients to improve metabolism and mental health.

Disclaimer: Please note that my posts do not include professional or health advice. I document my reviews, observations, experience, and perspectives only to provide information and create awareness.

I publish my lifestyle, health, and well-being stories on EUPHORIA. My focus is on metabolic, cellular, mitochondrial, and mental health. Here is my collection of Insightful Life Lessons from Personal Stories.

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