[alecst]

Yea. Many of the comments hurt me to read. I'm trying to remind myself that they come from a place of curiosity and wanting to rule out confounding variables. But they do make a lot of assumptions about me and things I know and/or do.

To answer your question: I hesitate to use the word "cure", because 3-4 months on, I'm starting to wonder if certain things have begun to slide back, or if it's just been a challenging week. Time will tell.

A datapoint that I did not mention in my first post was that there was a negative, persistent, digestive side-effect that paralleled the positive mental changes. As that has faded, so have some of the noticeable mental changes. I'm still doing better, but maybe with less energy than a month or so after the fast. I hope not, but maybe this is something I'll have to repeat every now and then.

[jb_briant]

Negative persistent digestive state could be related to the new digestive context you created after a 2 week fast, which is a huge event in a life. How much, how often, what and when you eat should be adapted, following your feedback rather than theories. Alimentation is specific to each. Good luck dude, you can fully heal!

[celiacFun]

Just a thought from a random stranger but you might want to consider the possibility of celiac disease. It takes a couple months for antibodies to build up so the time scale you mentioned here stood out to me. Celiac disease has huge impacts on mental clarity and energy.

[stewarts]

Have you done any experimentation with pre/pro-biotics? Just wondering if your fasting adjusted your gut biome, but now as you've resumed whatever diet that biome is being modified based on the fuels available to it.

[mtgentry]

Yeah might be worth regularly eating foods like kimchee or kefir. Or high quality yogurt. It seems to help with my psoriasis which is related to inflammation.

[codr7]

I'm pretty sure vegetable sources are way more potent than yoghurt, fermenting your own veggies is not that complicated. Nor is making your own yoghurt. The thing is, it's alive, so shelf time matters a lot.

[e40]

I wonder if shorter fasts between the long ones would make a difference?

Ignore the hurtful comments. A good portion of people don't have much empathy for others, combined with the anonymous nature of this forum, makes people say hurtful things.

Good luck on your journey.

[alecst]

Thanks, I appreciate that. And by the way, I had the same thought as you. I’ve been doing monthly 5-day fasts just to see what would happen. So far not much to report, but I’ll wait until 6 months have passed to draw conclusions.

[crdrost]

At the most extreme end of the other side, Buddhist monks, in addition to not eating meat (or, often, aliums like onions and garlic), also don't generally believe in dinner—they have to eat all their solid food for the day before noon, so you could view this as fasting for half the day every day.

(There are some caveats... At least for the Tibetan monks I knew, morning prayer is early at like 5am and comes with a sort of pita bread and tea, bedtime is closer to 9pm, and during these 9 hours there will be more tea. With a little googling I am able to confirm that some of the "pita" (pao balep) is consumed at the lunch tea, and I think this is after the lunch meal, so it might be 1pm. I think there's none at the evening tea that you'd have around sundown? Also in terms of calories the Tibetan tea is “bulletproof,” consisting of a very long steep for the leaves to extract maximum bitter flavors, that get mixed with a bunch of yak butter and salt. So liquid calories are very much a thing for them.)