Does ghee facilitate healthy weight gain? I would love to find something that would help with that. Even 5 pounds would make a world of difference. I have always been skinny but I weigh about 10 pounds less than I did in high school, (5’10) and 125 pounds now) putting me into an underweight BMI. I worry about my joints and organ function because I know that being underweight puts stress on those things.
I'm a "hard-gainer" as well, but not as bad as you. I'm 5-11, but fell to a low of 146 lbs. not too long ago. I'm just over 160 lbs. now.
I have a theory as to why I suffered from what I intuitively called "muscle acid." I gained muscle until I was about 20, then it was all downhill. Nerve damage played a role for 15 years, but even after that effect mostly resolved, I could not gain much muscle. My body would not allow it.
Why?
I believe that it had to do with poor mitochoondrial activation. Muscles are, after all, an expression of mitochondrial vitality! They represent cellular energy, and mitochondria *are* cellular energy.
So, how can mitochondria be starved and or dysregulated? If you can figure that out, I believe you can turn from catabolic to anabolic, but will likely have a fair amount of organ and tissue repair before you should try to load up on muscle, which will effectively divert energy from your recovery processes.
I had a friend who was very muscular, but had a heart attack in his 40's. You don't want that outcome. I suspect his muscles diverted lots of Mg-ATP, the true energy molecule of the cell (ATP without Mg is a doorstop in the cell, and no more) from his heart.
In my case, I ingested a heavy amount of dairy. Dairy is, according to Dr. Robert O. Young, ND, the #1 most acidic food there is. Alcohol is #10 on his list.
Anyway, when you ingest acid, you body is smart and will neutralize it. How does it do this?
Acids are electron seeking fluids and alkalines are electron donating fluids. So the body uses electrons to balance the acids, and it gets these from alkaline minerals like magnesium and calcium.
What activate muscle contraction and loosening? Calcium and magnesium!
Is the body siphoning magnesium and calcium from the muscles in order to balance an acidic diet?
Maybe.
The enzyme that activates the air you breath so it can play its role in Mg-ATP production requires copper to activate it. In fact, all oxidase enzymes require copper to fully activate, so your endogenous anti-oxidant enzymes all depend on our copper status.
And your copper status depends on the status of your copper transport enzyme, ceruloplasmin.
And ceruloplasmin depends on retinoic acid and magnesium so the ATP7B enzyme can load copper into ceruloplasmin.
And retinoic acid depends on retinol and light expxosure.
And the rusty metallic iron filings "fortified" into the flour in 1941 are gumming up the whole works. This screws up energy production, and your cells, being very smart, are preventing you from gaining muscle as a survival mechanism to *keep you alive*, or so my hypothesis leads me to believe.
Within the last month or so, I discovered a likely a road block. It seems cells with damaged mitochondria don't just die and get recycled. They effectively turn into what I call "zombie cells" that don't function very well. When enough accumulate, you get symptoms, including neurological ones. And some of these zombie cells flip into anaerobic mode and are then called cancer cells. If a person's mitochondrial degeneration has passed a certain point, it is necessary to force autophagy in order to force the week cells to die off, be recycled, and for new, healthy cells with healthy mitochondria to take their place.
Search the following on Youtube, Podbay, Google, etc. Visit their homepages.
It's all about the mitochondria, baby!
1. Dr. Chris Palmer -- Keto Mental Health
2. Dr. Thomas, Seyfried -- Cancer Keto Glutamine suppressor
3. Morley Robbins -- Mineral Based Mitochondrial Support
4. Dr. Barry Sears -- Zone Diet (but won't force autophagy, keto has to do that. Once the body heals, the Zone Diet will likely work out very well for most people)
5. Dr. David Diamond -- Cholesterol (it isn't bad, but oxidized LDL is very bad!)
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Some pro-tips to help you on your journey, if you have the courage and determination to pursue it...
1. Avoid factory farmed everything. Stressed out abused animals will provide your body with a nutritional stress imprint. Not to mention they are fed copper blockers, magnesium blockers, etc... Eat according to what NATURE provides. Eat like your ancestors 500 years ago, 1000 years ago, and 4000 years ago. Eat the same food as they did, grown the same way. There are some exceptions, but keep them minimal (cod liver oil supplements, fish oil supplements, cold pressed organic EVOO, Udo's Oil, whole food vitamin C complex supplment, magnesium supplements, potassium supplements, etc...)
2. Start by going to a Zone Diet eating style with a magnesium and retinol bias, and then gradually lower your carbs and increase fats until you go into ketosis.
3. Titrate up the retinol and magnesium over time, as well as exposure to daylight (sun bathe and absorbing daylight rays with your eyes (this breaks down retinol to retinoic acid). You absolutely want your liver loaded with retinol (broken down into retinoic acid by light exposure) and magnesium before you start adding copper.
4. Make sure grass-raised and finished pastured animal liver is a weekly affair. You have to eat quality liver. It has everything. I now eat goat and lamb liver, heart, and brain. I've eaten kidneys and spleen as well. I make a delicious goat soup as long as I cut it with some chicken soup broth, otherwise it is too gamy tasting for me.
5. Reduce stress. Stress acts like a mitochondrial short-circuit. You need energy to heal, not an energy sink that drains healing energy away.
6. Try to eat net alkaline every day. Your body uses electrons to create energy and produces acids that need to be neutralized by alkaline fluids. Somehow the body is able to manage highly acidic diets for a long time, but at what cost? Reduce that cost. Maybe eliminate it. Nutrient dense organ meats are only slightly acidic going down, but absolutely alkaline forming once ingested (like a lemon -- very few know this because they don't understand bio-copper and its effect on 40 quadrillion mitochondria in the human body). Nutrient dense muscle meat will be acidic, but not too bad. Factory farmed animals will be much more acidic.
I ingest a fair amount of magnesium bicarbonate that I make from magnesium hydroxide. I also ingest potassium bicarbonate that I buy from BulkSupplements.com. I also ingest sodium bicarbonate. All these are alkalizers adding electrons into my system, and also adding key electrolytes.
7. I also use pure sodium chloride and potassium chloride for my salts. Morton's Canning and Pickling salt resulted in 2/3 better outcomes than sea salts or Himalayan salts per the clinical observation of Dr. Hal Huggins, DDS. That's the best evidence for salt I can find. Almost nobody, perhaps nobody, ever A/B tests their favorite salt against Morton's C&P Salts. Huggins suggested the natural salts lost their electrons millions of years ago and that the toxins associated with them were damaging. I add put potassium chloride because research out of Europe showed positive effects of doing so. It also makes sense to balance sodium and potassium.
8. Stop ingesting toxic seed oils, and stop heating any oil that is not ghee, clarified butter, or animal fat. Stop stressing your body out by making it process oxidized molecules from your system. As Dr. Hugginis used to say, "you have to step out of the shower before you can dry off."
9. Red light sauna therapy appears to be quite good as a detox avenue. Dr. Lawrence Wilson has information on how to set one up on the cheap.
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Well, that's a great start in my book. If you head down this path, do share your results here. Ultimately, I'm a Socratic that simply wants to discern natural law and how to conform to it so that I can better live my life, and to help others do so as well.