This is a post from My Health Journey, an ongoing series where I document my health progress. Follow along to see, month after month,  how I implement my recovery protocol, handle stressful situations, eliminate food sensitivities, incrementally train my nervous system to handle more stress, and ultimately, how my method continues to allow me greater and greater freedom, happiness, and health!

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I recovered after the parasite detox reaction and had an excellent month! I’m going to resume the anti-parasite protocol now. I traveled a great deal this month, which made it ill-advised to continue with many negative symptoms.

This was my lowest pain month yet during my recovery. I had my fifth day where I had time without pain in the last twenty-five years! This was the first time I was pain-free and it wasn’t soon after an extended fast or a massage. It’s surely a good sign for my continued progress. I suspect part of the reason for the lack of pain is I didn’t have access to my weights. Weightlifting is still one of my top pain triggers, albeit a weak one now. I think as I continue to tease my pain, it will continue to cause me less pain to lift.

I also started a big diet shift, transitioning from a moderate carbohydrate paleo diet to a cyclical Mediterranean ketogenic diet. The most significant change is eliminating starch from my diet once or twice per day in favor of a lot of fat from fish, avocado oil, and olive oil to get into ketosis while avoiding the saturated fat risk that could come from my APoE-4 gene. I’m trying this even though my last sixteen months on a moderate carbohydrate paleo diet were the best I’ve felt in twenty-five years. Despite that success, I suspect that my drop in pain during that time isn’t necessarily because of the increase to moderate carbohydrate intake from relatively low previously.

I decided to give this diet a shot to see if my pain drops even further and to lean out. I had bulked up to 175 pounds as part of my muscle-building goal for the year. That was a gain of 21 pounds that was almost entirely good weight! Now I have more muscle to burn fat, making it easier to lose the rest of my disability-era excess.

I made modest improvements this month with lifting compared to my last health update due to the aforementioned regular traveling I did. However, I still set new personal records on all of my lifts, but only by about five pounds on each and two pounds on my chin-ups. I can now deadlift more than my body weight for the first time. Also, I integrated running up a hill at least five times per day. That should help train my exercise-induced asthma to better tolerate playing sports, which is a goal I have for next year.

I ended the month with my sixteenth five-day water fast in the past three years. I lost 9.9 pounds and 5/8ths inch off my waist this time. Surprisingly, this fast was one of the hardest I’ve done. My energy level was lower than usual, and I had more pain associated with the latter part of the fast. I suspect this could be due to my transition toward being a fat-burner on my ketogenic diet not being complete when I started the fast, but mostly because I had moderately tweaked my back, causing pain just before the fast began. I still felt great at the end of the fast, but the back pain kept me just shy of being pain-free.

However, I didn’t have any autoimmune symptoms or typical pain at the end of the fast, so that’s another big win! I think I would have had more pain-free time had I not had the minor back injury.

I’m eager to see where the diet change leads me in the coming months. I suspect I’ll be feeling even better by the time of my next health update!