100 Pounds Ago...I Started Learning How to Love Myself More Than the Pleasure of Food by Charles A. Postma - HTML preview

Chapter 2

My Fasting Abuse Phase

It did not take long for me to realize that I could use fasting to literally have my cake and eat it too and not regain all the weight back. This is a hard chapter to write because just like anybody else I do not like to admit being stupid. I learned the hard way that sugar can destroy the body faster than fasting can heal it. By the end of my first year I had lost about 40 pounds and as we closed in on the holiday season, I started a new hobby. I started making chocolate truffles. I already knew from my early low-carb days in the 1990’s that sugar caused heart disease and strokes and not saturated fat, but that did not stop me from eating copious amounts of sugar. I learned that I could eat whatever I wanted for a week and then fast off the gained weight the next. Eating sugar without worrying about weight gain was emancipating.

My butterscotch chocolate truffles were the best my daughter had ever tasted. And this is a woman who has traveled the world including Europe, the truffle capitol of the world.

I did not lose any more weight during this time, but I was in sugar eating heaven without gaining back anything I’d lost since January the year before. This went on until May 6, 2018. I woke up that Sunday morning with a numb face, slurred speech, and left hand and leg that I could feel slipping away from my control. I was having a stroke! The inflammation caused by my sugar consumption finally clogged my blood vessels to the breaking point, literally. It was an ischemic stroke in the right thalamus region of my brain. My wife took me to the hospital and by early afternoon I was feeling much better. They had not given me anything to that point, but they had taken a lot of blood for testing. They discharged me and we all thought I’d dodged a bullet, but the next day the stroke “evolved” and not in a good way.

Suddenly my eyesight was blurred, I could not walk, and had more difficulty with speech. Back to the hospital I went. This time I was there for 3 weeks with therapy to hopefully get my life back. When the therapists would come into my hospital room, I would tell them “to show me no mercy”. I was willing to work hard to get my life back! Even on the weekends when the techs weren’t there, I would find someone to walk with me to do laps around the hospital halls. Getting up from a fall was a priority for me so I wanted to practice doing so. The techs would not allow me to lie on the floor without a pad to protect me. Well, the pad made it impossible to get up. I finally convinced them that if I fell there would certainly not be a pad to break my fall. From that time on I had no problem getting up from a prone position.

In rehabilitation they would not let me shower alone. I had to have a shower “supervisor”. I was still a bit overweight at 220 pounds and the supervisor had to be a beautiful young lady as if I wasn’t self-8

conscious enough already. I warned her not to dwell on the memory of my anatomy as it could put her in need of therapy.

I continued with therapy after I left the hospital. It was important to me that I pass the tests for driving safely again so I focused on those skills as much as I could. Three to four months after the stroke I was done with all therapy and was officially approved to drive again. In that time, I went from having a left hand that I could not even pick my nose with, to fishing with my grandson including the task of securing a hook to the line. At my last visit with the neurologist, he told me that I did have some cognitive decline which I immediately challenged because he had no pre-stroke baseline to support that opinion. He sheepishly agreed with me, but to be less confrontational with him I said that we do have my wife’s subjective opinion that I was an idiot before the stroke, and she has confirmed several times since that I still am.

With the stroke behind me I studied neuronal autophagy to use fasting to repair what I could and to get my stamina back. The post-stroke life for most survivors is physically very taxing. It was amazing how fast I would tire just from being awake. We had to hire someone to mow my lawn. By the end of the therapy, I had about 90% of my life back and unless I told someone, they could not detect that I was a stroke survivor. Today I would say I am 100%, however, complications of the stroke in the next chapter plague me to this day. And my wife still thinks I am an idiot.