Tyronene/T3 adderall like effect
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@DonkeyDude I think it's terrific you're thinking about offering potentially helpful ideas to your type-1 friend. I have had only limited success sharing the 'sugar is not poison' message and other Peat-inspired diet/exercise/mental-outlook recommendations with people I’m close to. It's a work in progress. Enough progress has been observed, however, to not give up on communicating Peat's ideas to others. We've had some threads on the theme of communicating Peat's ideas to the as-yet uninitiated. And I'll look forward to hearing anyone's success stories on that front -- hopefully yours!
There were at least three excellent type-1 posters at RPF: Taramander, JohnHafterson and another from early on (whose name I’m forgetting) that posted 30 or more times in the early RPF years. [Does anyone know if Taramander or JohnHafterson on bioenegetic.form? If anyone's private-messaging them on RPF, I hope you'll invite them to contribute here.]
There are probably others, too, whom I’ve overlooked.Taramader's and JohnHafterson’s posts are a rich source of type-1-relevant posts with much of interest to non-type-1s, too. Here’s an example where JohnHafterson gave some supplement recommendations:
https://raypeatforum.com/community/threads/what-supplement-s-actually-work-for-insulin-resistance-high-fasting-glucose-a1c.43848/#post-747422
You might look up those two on RPF and copy and paste some of what they’ve posted into a document for your type-1 friend.I’m sorry to hear that your friend isn’t feeling good about diet and glucose management. I’ve been there. It’s a difficult-to-describe variety of “demoralizing experience”, watching one’s body go out of control, the slight to one’s ego of not having been able to get the desired glucose test result, the stress of willpower (which I seriously discourage – see below) and food guilt -- plus the physical sensations of lethargy and slow circulation (plus something else that feels awful sometimes when sugars go way too high) -- and then the extreme physical sensations during hypoglycemic episodes, which include loss of taste, walking feels spongy or like there’s no more terra firma, losing all cognitive capacity, physical spasms and social embarrassment going hypo.
As far as recommendations for your friend go, I’d suggest to eat whatever candy he wants and just take more insulin to cover the additional carb content. (I was extremely resistant to that line of advice, which my doctor friends frequently gave to me, encouraging me to eat birthday cake with everyone else or stop carb restricting so strictly.) So I can’t be confident how any recommendations would be received. But the Peat world has so much quality-of-life boosting potential for type-1s (and everyone, I’d suggest) that we should probably creatively try to do our best to introduce it to people we care about. I’d think starting with the pleasure of all the food restrictions your friend could let go of if he was willing to ignore what docs/nutritionists recommend and eat more fruit, candy, ice cream and nutrient-dense food in general (except for the damned pistachios!!!).
Unfortunately, nearly all the doctors and nutritionists I’ve run across that specialize in type-1 push nuts and seeds very heavily (protein and relatively low-carb, so they think it’s a good diabetic food even though in Peatdom we know differently). I used to eat bags and bags of pistachios and pecans and walnuts – some of the highest-PUFA and easiest-to-oxidize (go rancid). Dropping nuts and seeds from my diet 10 years ago was a major change.
To a diabetic, nuts or meat or cheese all look like “free foods” where I don’t need to inject insulin immediately if I eat it, whereas I’d need a unit of insulin to cover one apple or ripe orange. Injections are painless (they miss the nerves) more than 2/3rds of the time (based on the density of nerves and fineness of the needle). So in my view, diabetics accustomed to injecting shouldn’t mind taking more frequent injections. Most of us who pursued very strict control were taking micro half- and quarter-unit corrective doses 15+ times per day in any event, even when carb restricting. And there’s no pain from taking more insulin, although there is increased risk of hypoglycemia. That risk must be squarely acknowledged: eating more carbs requires more insulin which, in turn, means that the absolute value of any fixed percentage error in one’s dosing leads to potentially greater deviations from blood-glucose targets. A 10% error with a 5-unit shot would mean I took a half unit too much or too little. A 10% error with a 10-unit shot would mean I took an entire unit too much or too little. Even an extra half unit could lead to a serious bout of hypoglycemia.
I think it’s worth making the case that ice cream (without carrageenan or stabilizers), creamy desserts, gummy bears, even rock candy that’s almost pure glucose can be interpreted as anti-stress medicine, as a nootropic cognitive enhancer, etc. I think so much of my identity was built around drill-sergeant restriction and self-control: it was important to say no to candy and coke in large part to reaffirm who I thought I was and express my well-honed self-control/willpower. What’s going so well for me now is having completely abandoned rigid willpower as a value or goal concerning dietary decision making. Much of my healing came from loving the way food tastes and not interpreting it as a guilty pleasure. Rather over the last 5 years, I have tried, over and over (it actually required some concentration and concerted effort!) to view food as (sounds “woo” but isn’t, I don’t think) life-giving, nutrient-providing, energy-creating, regenerative-building-block-containing sustenance – rather than my old way of thinking in which, by default, every food option was “mentally interrogated” as a potential villain or compromise of my commitment to a “restriction and willpower” mentality.
I think if your friend could eat more freely, take more insulin to cover the increased carbs, get rid of the seeds/nuts, and be sure to test more frequently to avoid a serious hypo, then he might feel more energy.
The life-expectancy numbers are estimated very imprecisely. The first time I tried to buy a life insurance policy from State Farm for only $100,000 cover (after my first son was born), I was quoted an annual premium of over $4,000. I complained and the agent showed me the “life tables” they were using: type-1’s expected lifespan: between 41 and 42. That was more than 30 years ago. The lifespan stats apparently have improved but it’s not a bell-curve shaped distribution. Some proportion of type 1s crash out on dialysis, amputated toes, blind (diabetic retinopathy) in their late 20s or early 30s. With only very modest “blood sugar control”, however the lifespan may be statistically indistinguishable from non-diabetics or at least not much different. The averages include both types of glucose-management profiles.
I used to worry about dying early a lot and that drove some of my militant glucose-control mentality. I’m in a different place with those thoughts now. And the stats (despite the uneven quality of the big epidemiological studies of glucose control as measured by hemoglobin A1cs on lifespan and other clinical outcomes) are noisy and variable enough to justify telling your friend: our bodies are amazingly forgiving; the glucose control used in those studies to establish a positive association with lifespan was not at all stringent control. If I recall correctly, I think they grouped the population of diabetics into a few discrete categories (like good, fair and poor control). When I read them, I was shocked at how high the thresholds they used to define the “good control” group! It may not require that much tight glucose control to live a long and healthy life, so long as other things are working in your favour to limit oxidative stress and glycation measured in the hemoglobin A1c test (if that’s even causative of complications like retinopathy, impotence, wounds that don’t heal, etc). Reading Peat, I came away thinking that orthodox medicine and endocrinology in particular knows a LOT LESS about actual physiological mechanisms that cause problems for diabetics than we were taught to believe.
There is a well-established statistical association between depression and type-1 diabetes. If we accept Dr Bernstein’s statement that virtually all type-1s are hypoglycemic and have a T4-to-T3 conversion problem, some T3 (if you could source it, which isn’t always easy) was the most potent anti-depressive med I ever took. (I never took SSRIs or benzos although dangerous doctors have frequently Rx-ed them to me over and over during the last 30+ years). I tried all the herbal anti-depressive treatments (some with terrible effects) and most of the tamer Rx suggestions from Idealabs/RPF. T3 was subtle at first but lifted my mental tone, energy levels, reduced brain fog, etc. Thus, it might be worth seeing if you could find the link of Dr Berstein talking about how he doses thyroid to type-1s. It’s a big conversation recommending thyroid so maybe this isn’t a good first- or seventh-conversation topic with you friend.
It would be great to get Taramander and JohnHafterson to weigh in along with others. I’ll be keen to hear any updates about your friend and whether you succeeded at coaxing him to eat more candy! You can tell him that German parents give their children glucose tablets before math tests. You can tell him it’s good brain food and promotes wound healing (topically), which there are papers on. The over-arching theme of your conversations might be about enjoying eating, enjoying living, questioning the learned helplessness that the medical industrial complex instructs those of us with chronic illness to surrender to, and engage in some productive self-experimentation to take some matters at least into his own hands: how does eating candy to my heart’s content make me feel? Can I manage the insulin adjustments safely after eating like this for a week?
Another issue is meal timing. I trained myself in my militant-control days to never eat carbohydrate if my sugars were high. The orthodox procedure: take corrective insulin; wait thirty minutes to 2 hours (however long it takes for sugar levels to return to normal); then eat the carb-containing food. That’s probably still best practice in the sense that you generally need less insulin overall if you do it that way.
The relationship between insulin and blood glucose is not linear, however, despite what nutritionists teach (e.g. one unit of insulin covers about 15 grams of carbohydrate). It’s decidedly non-linear in practice! When my sugars are very high, I need more insulin to move down the glucose scale a fixed number of points or to cover intake of more carbs than if I am starting at euglycemia.
When I read about Peat’s story of some doctor in Europe in the early 20th century before insulin was discovered/invented who kept his type-1s -- with raging out-of-control high blood sugar – ALIVE, by feeding them kilograms of sugar per day, I started trying it! Now when I have very high blood sugar, I take huge amounts of insulin (for me) and drink orange juice or grape juice or eat white rice to taste. These high-glycemic-index foods would have been among the worst choices from my previous mindset, predicated on the goal of minimizing the time and, thus, area under the deviation-from-euglycemia curve.
In other words, eating sugar when one is already too high makes one’s deviation last for a longer period; it should result in more glycation and more rapid progression toward complications from high blood-sugar.
I’m no longer convinced this orthodox view is correct. My corrections from highs now usually coincide with some carb intake (sometimes I’ll even have a coke! because I have acute sugar cravings whenever I have extreme hperglycemia). My corrections are now more dangerous in the sense that I have to take substantially more insulin and thus bear more hypo risk if I overshoot. But my subjective sense of the stress experience along the correction path is that it’s easier on my body (in other ways perhaps having to do with less inflammation and stress hormones, although I’m just hand-waving and guessing here) to eat sugar or carbohydrate all along the adjustment path from hyper- to eu-glycemia.
For your type-1 friend (from my post just above), the following also might be worth passing along:
I now have occasional stints with very high sugar intake: maple syrup/brown-sugar/refined-sugar/molasses. And my hemoglobin A1c (3-month-average) glucose levels are now higher than they were before when I was carb-restricting, but I think that's a fair trade-off. Fewer hypoglycemic episodes now on the high-carb Peat-inspired diet has led me to have far fewer bouts of extreme/dangerous hypoglycemia. That's because of my more cautious dosing of insulin after reading on RPF about all the stress hormones that hypoglycemia causes. My doctors used to get angry at me for keeping my glucose control "too tight": I aggressively took lots of corrective insulin doses, which led to many hypos (several per week for 20 years or more). I always thought the doctors were too worried about hypo and not worried enough about complications of hyper. Thus, I always fought with them arguing that my frequent hypos were a reasonable tradeoff in favour of avoiding dialysis, blindness, impotence, etc. Now I have fewer hypos and my blood-glucose tests look like a "well controlled diabetic" from orthodox medicine's point of view. My bet may go badly and I’ll get one of those complications from high blood sugar. But I don’t think so. My circulation, androgens and regenerative tissue repair are too good for those aging processes to unfold by the mechanisms in the textbooks. The statistical associations are there, but the biological mechanism for accelerated aging isn’t there. Therefore, I believe there’s virtually zero probability that I’ll wind up blind or on dialysis or impotent.[Repeated from my previous post above, for your type-1 friend and for everyone to consider is my statement against willpower. What do y’all think?]
One of the most unhealthy behavioural traits that developed from my two decades of strict keto and other restrictive diets before was “great willpower”. I was a strict drill sergeant with myself about all food intake from age 17 until 40 or so. I was good at it, and very positively reinforced for applying strict willpower in many domains of decision making. When I discovered Peat, I applied drill-sergeant tactics for at least 4 years. I think there were some powerfully good results even in those first years -- from more calories, fruit carbohydrate and PUFA restriction. But the big breakthrough -- when my metabolism started feeling “healed” and re-calibrated at a significantly faster/warmer basal metabolic rate -- only occurred once I let willpower go. Free feeding to taste and abandoning the self-defeating and stress-inducing practice of willpower with respect to food is one of the most pronounced shifts in my Peat-inspired regimen and I think it has played a critically positively role in my healing.Regarding my insulin regimen: On average, 50 to 100 units daily, depending on carb intake. I take 12 units of basal (long-acting) twice per day, plus variable amounts of fast-acting insulin depending on the carb content each day and other factors (e.g., stress causes the liver to dump glycogen and sometimes type-1s will throw a very high blood sugar even after having eaten no carbohydrate or after fasting). But generally, I’d say, I take about 5 units of fast-acting insulin with most meals, up to 10 if it’s an especially carb-intensive meal. With four or five meals plus small corrective doses after testing 10 or 15 times during the day, my total insulin intake could reach 40 units most days and 50 or 60 on exceptional days (e.g. if I eat 250 grams of brown sugar or a pint of maple syrup!). I recently upped my basal dose (without a clinician weighing in on it) to 15 units twice per day, because I am consciously eating more frequently and I’m not on the road at the moment (so I can easily have juice/candy with me at all times, in case a hypoglycemic episode strikes, e.g., at the gym), which means it’s a safer time for me to experiment with upping basal insulin dosing.
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@T-3 said in Tyronene/T3 adderall like effect:
stress causes the liver to dump glycogen and sometimes type-1s will throw a very high blood sugar even after having eaten no carbohydrate or after fasting
This is the exact "profile" of the guy I know. He has an extremely stressful lifestyle and seems to be disappearing before my eyes; I assume cortisol is aggressively breaking down his tissues in order to supply glucose. The doctors told him his type-1 might be caused by stress and since then he has only ramped it up.
Thank you for your informative posts. I greatly appreciate what you do here and I do hope I can make some use of it.
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@DonkeyDude said in Tyronene/T3 adderall like effect:
I assume cortisol is aggressively breaking down his tissues in order to supply glucose. The doctors told him his type-1 might be caused by stress and since then he has only ramped it up.
I hope you can convince him to look at food in a new light and take a step back from medical orthodoxy.
I'm not sure how easy it is for a doctor who hasn't felt what "running on cortisol/adrenalin" for years on end feels like to 'get' it or give useful advice. Running on stress hormones may even feel like it’s “working well” for a while (a decade more wouldn't be out of the question) before serious problems emerge. "Running on stress" isn't a single-toned feeling. It’s variable. Sometimes manic/quasi-euphoric and sometimes catatonic/exhausted/fogged.
I don’t think most doctors have much insight regarding sympathetic/parasympathetic dominance.
Do we think we understand how ephedra/aspirin/caffeine promotes weight-loss while (counterintuitively) raising cortisol (counterintuitive because long-elevated cortisol levels are positively associated with weight gain)?
When I was running on stress hormones (stress-hormone-dominant), I used to pride myself (foolishly) as “king” of the all-nighters: I could stay awake for longer than most others could, and I took pride in being able to push through extreme stress running on cortisol/adrenalin. I think I used sleep deprivation, fasting, arguments/yelling, stressful gym routines to produce cortisol, which made me feel something I thought I wanted to feel (in the first decade of being stress-hormone dominant, before I crashed metabolically and psychologically). It would have been hard to talk me out of my cortisol habit at that time. I knew that I liked to do intense/extreme things, but I don’t think I had any self-awareness that I was using endogenous stress hormones like a drug. Behaviorally or economically, the stress hormones brought some (short-term) benefits (e.g. staying up all night to complete a work/study task). Long term, it brought exhaustion, inflammation and much worse.
It would be helpful if the medical orthodoxy would collect information during routine GP/endocrinologist visits to help us measure and track sympathetic/parasympathetic hormonal balance. Hopefully someone will chime in with how to use routine blood panels from GP visits to track sympathetic/parasympathetic tone. And while we’re at it (expanding our diagnostic wish list), wouldn’t it be great to be able to see a complete thyroid panel in real time (including reverse T3). It would be valuable to us self-experimentation enthusiasts if we had more real-time sensors to get high-resolution hormone measurement (faster and at more points in time).
I think you’re right that cortisol eventually destroys healthy tissue to liberate building blocks for energy production, responding to long-term hormonal alarm signals that there is insufficient energy. I don’t think it will be easy for his doctors to provide diagnostics to test our theory. They could run a 24 hour cortisol test (salivary) and a thyroid panel, but I wouldn’t trust them not to get side-tracked (even or especially if they are a “lifestyle medicine” practitioner…lots of carb-restriction advocates in that segment of the doctoring world). Maybe try to rule out Cushings Disease.
I wonder if a large volume of milk, tropical fruit, candy and other dairy should be among the first ‘food offers’ you make, regardless of whether he goes to the doc or not. The calcium in the milk would hopefully be perceived by him as soothing, calming and grounding.
Best of luck!
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@T-3 Great post and thank you for taking the time to update. I had some questions from your first post on this thread but you have since answered all of them. Out of interest, have you noticed any change in your salt requirement when using high dose t3? Some people notice edema with t3 and I am wondering if this is related to salt intake.
It hopeful to read of someone being so positive about "peating"
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@T-3 thanks for sharing your experience in such great detail! I still have just been doing about 8-16mcg daily diluted in water sipping on it throughout the day. So far I haven’t experienced any racing heartbeat or anything like that. I of course was hoping this would be my panacea and cure me of all my ailments but it seems I haven’t been so lucky. Mentally though, T3 has helped me tremendously. It also seems to make me feel much lighter. There were times before where I just felt so heavy and would require effort to even lift my legs to walk up the stairs from the heavy feeling but now I feel light on my feet again.
I do not feel I’m dosing it properly because everyone says to take it with food but I have not done that. Since I have such GI problems I have completely stopped eating before or during work for the past several years as it’s just too much of a risk for me. I don’t want to fast all day, but the way things have been for me it was impossible not to. So I have been sipping on the diluted t3 throughout the work day while fasted although not truly fasted as I have sugar from 24oz of redbull. My overall feeling of well being and mental clarity and hopefulness is still great on it. I wish that I could eat during the day with it but that’s something I’m afraid to experiment with.
Not sure how bad it is to be taking t3 on a prolonged empty stomach like that.
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@bubble I experience a similar subjective feeling of "lightness" in mental tone and also in how agile I feel I'm able to move my legs. Great that you're seeing some positive effects.
I don't think there's any reason to avoid food with T3. Orthodox clinicians prescribing T4/thyroxine often say to avoid taking it with calcium (i.e., better on an empty stomach), but Peat said otherwise. In the case of T3, I've never heard anyone talk about food interfering with absorption. In fact, taking T3 with larger meals especially (or some carb intake) would be more in line with what Peat wrote.
Why are taking T3 on an empty stomach? Is it to help your sensitive digestive tract? Have we seen reports of people experiencing digestive upset from T3? I don't think I have.
Given that you don't have racing heartbeat, it sounds like you could try titrating up to see if benefits increase? I hope the T3 experiment brings more of what you’re wanting from it.
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@T-3 i take it on an empty stomach because I cannot eat at work. Eating often causes GI upset for me which I cannot risk happening at work. That’s why I take it on empty stomach just because I don’t eat all day until night time.
I noticed today the effect on mood is quite profound it gives me almost a very subtle euphoria. I am happy/content with just simply living with a positive outlook whereas for past 10 years I have experienced daily dread and doom feelings especially if any obstacles arrives in my path.
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@bubble That's a very nice result for mood and mental tone. My dad suffered from ulcerative colitis since I was a kid and I am highly sympathetic as to what it's like being at work or in public while trying to keep one's gut happy. Challenging is an understatement. Hopefully there will be improvements quieting that inflammation forthcoming.
Do I understand you correctly that, despite your digestive tract sensitivities, taking T3 on an empty stomach while at work is causing no digestive irritation?
I always thought T3 was as easy on the gut as any supplement/med. Of course it would be good to know if others have experienced otherwise.
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@T-3 yes it doesn’t cause me any gut related issues now. Redbull doesn’t either which I also drink during the day. It would cause me issues previously before I started taking B1. B1 was one of the things that healed my gut near instantly from immense daily pain and discomfort. I actually could not believe the effect it had.
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I've used both (Ritalin rather than adderall mostly) and can see where you're coming from in regards to it alleviating anxiety and boosting productivity like addy (although I've often found adderall to be one of the most anxiety inducing drugs I've used).
Semi off-topic, but interestingly enough, adderall (not sure about ritalin) inhibits TSH, which in turn suppresses follicular release of T3 and T4. Amphetamines are seriously nasty and I would only ever take them with a heavy stack to mitigate the negatives. I would be interested to see how a dose of T3 to normalise levels would effect the adderall experience.
