The Healthy Railroader.

This year, I've been on a journey to cure my skin. In my quest to cure it, I discovered in October of last year that my flare-ups were directly triggered by sugar consumption. When I realized that these flareups were caused by sugar intake, I instantly said no sugar, no carbs, and began drinking a gallon of water each day while also taking multivitamins and fish oil. Multivitamins, of course, perform several functions. Fish oil reduces inflammation, improves eye health, and lowers insulin levels in the blood, all of which I was unaware of. The majority of fish oil is derived from cold-water fish source (I prefer an alaskan fish). It’s a healthy fat that your body needs on a regular basis. I try to get this all the time by taking two capsules adding up to about 5000 mg of it in total.

During this time last year, however, I had no idea that what I was experiencing was the direct result of something else. Over time, you want to eat more foods, right? You want to eat and live your ideal lifestyle. Ultimately, this means "get the dopamine that you want." For people who do not know what dopamine is... It is essentially the hormone released into your brain that makes you happy in your daily activities. Whether it's eating, doing something, or chatting about whatever you enjoy. That's neither here nor there. The problem was that for the last 20 years of my life, since I was a child, I had been receiving far too much dopamine, and last year was a wake-up call.

I'm currently learning to keep an eye on my sources and swap them out for healthy ones that will enable me to make a bigger difference in my life. For example, that may involve honing my abilities for job, working out, etc. These are sources of pleasurable, healthful experiences. The issue is that there are challenges every day. To enjoy something that your brain has never experienced before, you must essentially retrain it. For me, cutting down on phone time is crucial. We deprive ourselves of the dopamine release from healthy sources because we use our phones for so long and consume so much dopamine from them. I therefore got rid of items that eat up space and removed my social media apps as of last week.

To be honest, TikTok is one of the apps that I enjoy using more than the others. I get at least 80% of my laughs during the week from that app. Isn't laughter a healing force? Laughter is the medicine that heals the mind, body, and spirit. You could almost heal yourself with it. In reaction to the mindset that "I'm a new person today," I believe that we should learn to laugh at things that have upset us in the past or even laugh at the person we were years ago. And by all means, I'm not suggesting that it’s unhealthy to laugh at different things on the Internet or from different apps and content, but the over-consumption of this content is taking up too much of our time. Or at least I’ve noticed this for me. I've recently thought, "What could I be doing more productive with my spare time when I’m not at work that will build me up?" After I have found that, how can I be more consistent with these behavioral changes?

A?friend taught me the importance of consistency. Our bodies respond well to consistency, whether it comes from learning new skills, writing, working out, or rising early. Now, there are adverse circumstances in which this can appear too. Quite obviously, When you eat poorly?consistently, your body may react by producing fat as stored energy (assuming your consistently sedentary).Over the past three months, it has been evident to me that your body will create more insulin if you regularly give it sugars or overeat. That consistency sets your body up to produce far more insulin, and when sugars are released into your bloodstream they become resistant to the insulin that would normally transport them to the right locations and lower your blood sugar levels. This is showing up as skin flaws in my case. Some of you are not overweight by genetics, you're overweight because of insulin resistance! Poor diet, and no exercise. It's a slippery slope to pre-diabetes.

That’s a pretty hard pill to swallow but I guess your diet and your family’s diet are a huge component of this. I think this is what they mean when people say certain diseases, especially diabetes is hereditary. Now I’m not diabetic, but there are many in my family who are. Do I think that it is a gene? Not necessarily. My hypothesis is, the traditional ways of eating, and the traditional diet that is passed down in my family might have a direct correlation to high levels of insulin and my body not being able to process it. Now... I think that the food is excellent. I love the traditional food that my family makes which includes, a lot of carbohydrates, fried foods and extremely high amounts of sugar.

The Southern North American diet is arguably the most delightful. At least to me, but I digress. To go about correcting this issue, for the last year I’ve been consistently in the gym. When I can’t lift I’m running a mile or two, doing my best by my own time constraints. In addition to this exercise recently, I decided it was time to do something I had never done before to get something I had never had. Healthy skin. Why did I want this? I don’t know, but from that urge to have it, what I found was that I was finally giving my body an opportunity to speak to me. Your body literally speaks to you every day.

I’m one of the lucky ones. Even though I had these imperfections, a lot of people won’t get a sign or symptom that there is something abnormal going on inside of them. So in a way, this was a blessing because it triggered a thought that ultimately went down a rabbit hole. Yes, I’ve met Alice! Today marks the end of my first five day water fast. Each of these days I have consumed one whole gallon of water and that’s it. No calories whatsoever. Pure ketones! For those who don’t know what that is, they're simply energy cells fueled to your body that are pulled from fat cells and the breakdown of muscle cells. That can be a good thing in the first five days, or maybe even more depending on the person. that could be detrimental in people who are not really on the heavier side like myself.

Apparently this is what people mean when they say that they’re on a keto diet. They’re saying that they’re trying to signal their body to go into a state of ketosis where it uses these ketones to supply energy rather than using sugars (glucose) that come from carbs to fuel the body. I'm starting to think, maybe thats why I've been a hard gainer. The Insulin hasn't been able to properly fuel the muscles! Following my fast I am going to drink bone broth to give my digestive system a small window to come back to life. Before consuming the bone broth though, I’m going to start taking a chromium supplement, which can be found on the periodic table. It is a positively charged element that basically tells the insulin how to better work with the sugars.

Hopefully over the next month with consistent use of this it can help my improve sensitivity. See the thing is, the majority of people in the world are insulin resistant and they have no idea. Now this is not a craze like the 2014 phenomenon of gluten-free food. I’m not arguing that some people aren’t allergic to gluten because they can be and the same for dairy (which I take a really hard stance against these days). I’ve completely removed dairy from my diet. Almond milk has been a treasure. Before I became a teenager my thought was that I was probably slightly lactose intolerant after having a lot of digestion issues, but come to find out, what if I wasn’t lactose intolerant and all of the sugar that I was eating from all of the bad foods was just corroding my gut with bad bacteria ?

What I've found from this five day fast is brain clarity. I’m able to think more fluently for sure. My body has went into a ketosis state and also a state of autophagy (a highly conserved eukaryotic cellular recycling process), basically meaning any old or damaged cell will be consumed or rejuvenated into a new and more healthier cell. My insulin levels have dropped way down, and my gut bacteria has totally changed over. I immediately saw a difference in my skin condition. From that I could write a book on all of my research and findings but I’ll stop here. This will be the start of my health trend with my LinkedIn friends and followers. I'm hoping someone might find it interesting, entertaining or could even give me better guidance on where to go in my wholistic journey. I hope you enjoyed reading this and if you have read this far, I definitely appreciate it. Don’t read this far without giving me a like though!