Microbiota Reset - A Speed Bump

Prioritizing feeding the gut microbiota has yielded unexpectedly positive results. Both Collette and I have noticed improvements in our skin, sleep, work capacity and focus, to name just a few of the benefits.  And interestingly, these improvements continued for several weeks... until we hit speed bumps. Big, square-edged speed bumps!

Last week I had the first stomach bug that I can remember. Since childhood? Without sliding into the realm of TMI, I awoke one night to an unexpected surprise, and then spent the next few days fending off waves of nausea, fatigue and a low-grade fever. At first I chalked it up to an uninvited food-borne pathogen, but after 24-hours extended into a couple days, that seemed less likely. I then pinned the blame on the norovirus that's been running roughshod through the University of Wisconsin - Madison community. Certainly I had been exposed, though it sounds like norovirus generally runs its course within just a few days. Or could it have been a symptom of a reorganizing microbiota?

I'm hesitant to pin anything on the "healing crisis." In my years of teaching Yoga, I saw a lot of people ingesting gnarly stuff or not ingesting really nourishing stuff in the name of "cleanses." Thankfully the majority of the time, these dietary adherents would return to the dietary middle-path, and most of their untoward symptoms would resolve. Unfortunately, I count myself among these wayward Yogis, who in the quest to improve health, instead compromised my health.

What works for one person often isn't generalizable to others.

The most memorable of these episodes involved raw foods. Various friends shared stories of out-there yogis and yoginis, usually based out of Maui, who subsisted on nothing but uncooked fruits and vegetables. These likely-apocryphal tales included boundless energy, radiant health and mental clarity. In short order I was hooked, and this Upper Midwesterner adopted a diet that sucked the digestive fire right out of my gut. While at first I did feel quite good, likely due to the novelty of the new dietary approach, within a few weeks I was chronically cold, insomniac, and sociopathically flatulent. The raw foods books warned that "healing crises" would occur, and I hardheadedly stuck with the raw foods diet well beyond its logical sell-by date. Thankfully I ultimately regressed to the mean in terms of my eating, though the oversold "healing crisis" definitely postponed my accepting that the raw foods diet, if anything, was not for me.

And so I approach the "gut microbe reset" explanation with a great deal of caution. Perhaps three weeks into this pretty significant dietary reboot my system is resetting? Maybe? Or maybe not? At this time, I don't really know. All I can say with confidence is that much of last week was spent in the infirmary, and now I'm back to full-speed. I've since decided to continue the Microbiota Reset Diet for another three months, because other than the speed bump, the initial results from this experiment have exceeded my expectations.

If any of you are similarly experimenting, I look forward to hearing about your experiences!