“Disclaimer: Psilocybin may be illegal where you live. I am not encouraging its use. As you know, I’m not a doctor. I’m describing my own personal experience and journey out of the grips of addiction. Other people’s experience may vary.”

As I stated in previous blogs one of the main benefits I got out of using psilocybin was that my concept of nutrition changed. I decided to commit to a well formulated ketogenic diet for six months. I did this because I want to live a long time but what I didn’t expect was the profound effect it would have on me as it pertains to my problem with addiction.

The first thing that happened was the keto flu. What it felt like was drug withdrawal. It was so similar to heroin withdrawal (of course not as intense) that I almost stopped. Anxiety, depression, restlessness, and lethargy all happened. Whenever I stopped heroin I would experience what is commonly referred to as "using dreams". These are a very specific type of dream that I had not experienced outside of drug withdrawal. Basically it would be a dream where I would use heroin and wake up in a panic attack believing that I had actually relapsed. That’s the description but what I can't put into words are how these dreams felt subjectively. For the first three months of my ketogenic diet I experienced the exact same type of dreams but instead of heroin it was coca cola. These dreams followed the same arc. I would wake up anxious and in a panic. It would take me about 15 minutes to calm down. Conversely the benefits I received after the “keto flu” were very similar, but to a lesser degree, to the changes I felt by simply cutting out opiates. I became more able to not give into activities or behaviors that provided instant gratification at the expense of negative consequences down the road. I started waking up in the morning with energy and without an alarm clock. This informed my whole day. It was the opposite of “woke up on the wrong side of the bed” Waking up on the right side of the bed every morning sets the tone for the entire day. The similarities to opiates led me down this rabbit hole. Let me just throw out a couple tidbits of info.

Sugar gets converted to glucose. Glucose fuels every cell in the brain so your brain views sugar as a reward.

Simple carbohydrates are turned into glucose in your bloodstream causing your blood sugar to spike which causes insulin to spike. This in effect gives you a high followed by a crash. This is something our ancestors would have almost never experienced outside of the occasional splurge on a bee hive's honey.

Even slightly more complex carbs like bagels or starchy foods get broken down into simple sugars which can also make blood sugar go up leading to a spike and crash.

Sugar is EVERYWHERE. If you want to be floored start checking the labels of things you don't think have added sugar. Ketchup, salad dressings, sauces, etc. It's everywhere. It's incredible. It's so fucking bad for us and it's in everything.

Here are some excerpts from a paper I recently read. Now I am not a Doctor so a lot of this was difficult to understand. If anyone knows of a Doctor that I can use as a resource to help me better understand this paper please contact me.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/

"A well-known characteristic of addictive drugs is their ability to cause repeated, intermittent increases in extracellular dopamine (DA) in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) (Di Chiara and Imperato, 1988, Hernandez and Hoebel, 1988, Wise et al., 1995). We find that rats with intermittent access to sugar will drink in a binge-like manner that releases DA in the NAc each time, like the classic effect of most substances of abuse (Avena et al., 2006, Rada et al., 2005b). This consequently leads to changes in the expression or availability of DA receptors (Colantuoni et al., 2001, Spangler et al., 2004)."

"Intermittent sugar access also acts by way of opioids in the brain. There are changes in opioid systems such as decreased enkephalin mRNA expression in the accumbens (Spangler et al., 2004). Signs of withdrawal seem to be largely due to the opioid modifications since withdrawal can be obtained with the opioid antagonist naloxone. Food deprivation is also sufficient to precipitate opiate-like withdrawal signs (Avena, Bocarsly, Rada, Kim and Hoebel, unpublished, Colantuoni et al., 2002). This withdrawal state involves at least two neurochemical manifestations. First is a decrease in extracellular DA in the accumbens, and second is the release of acetylcholine (ACh) from accumbens interneurons. These neurochemical adaptations in response to intermittent sugar intake mimic the effects of opiates."

What I got from this paper is that sugar ticks many of the same boxes that drugs do. My own personal subjective experience with quitting sugar and it's benefits in treating addiction are harder for me to quantify because I was simultaneously engaged in other activities to combat addiction such as meditation, jujitsu, and a cycle of micro-dosing but I sincerely believe that the dietary changes I made played a huge role. This has led me to ask some questions.

"Is a diet high in carbohydrates and specifically refined carbohydrates one of the leading contributing factors of addiction?"

"Can a Ketogenic diet or a slow carb diet be a major tool in combating addiction?"

I would like say that a ketogenic diet is actually much more difficult than I thought to maintain. The first problem is that sugar is added to so much now a days. One of the biggest challenges for me was finding where all the hidden sugar was in my diet. The second problem I had was not overdoing it on the protein. Too much protein will throw you out of ketosis because the body has a process of converting protein into glucose. The third problem I ran across was making sure I got enough salt in my diet. I believe that without something like the Precision Xtra device to monitor blood glucose and ketone levels the ketogenic diet is almost impossible. This device will tell you in almost real time if the salad dressing at your favorite lunch spot has a bunch of sugar in it. The slow carb diet is much easier to stick with and if stuck to I believe it can have many of the benefits of the ketogenic diet. If you are interested in the ketogenic diet I suggest looking into the work of Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Dom D'Agostino. For the slow carb diet I would recommend reading Tim Ferriss's "The 4 Hour Body".

Obviously I am not saying that this is a silver bullet for addiction... but I think it's pretty damn close. Changes to nutrition combined with consistent (everyday no matter what) meditation, exercise, group sports or activities (this is not a replacement for exercise), sleep quality, and in my case, psychedelics were all that were needed to get me off of drugs, anti-depressants, cigarettes, etc. Be smart. I am not a doctor and am not suggesting that anyone do anything without doing their research and talking to relevant professionals. The point of this blog is to show my experience in the hopes that other people can take the info and formulate their own plan. Thank you so much for reading.