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The Causes of Long Covid

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Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#111

Post by lend000 »

Cloonic wrote: post #87
lend000 wrote: post #22

I had a long process with this that mostly manifested as exercise intolerance and general inflammation/discomfort, and sleep struggles. I made no progress for 2 years, lost most of my muscle (I had been very active before) and started thinking "is this how it's going to be forever?". After not finding anything promising from traditional medicine or supplements, I finally made some dramatic life changes. I'm fully pas…

How do you prepare/deal through a water fast? What kind of supplemens would be needed for the water? Can I read up on this anywhere? I'd welcome a suggestion over surfing the many many pages I found through a simple search. A book or paper reccomendation to read up on would be nice as well

Honestly AI overviews are a pretty good guide, ask about a 3-5 day water fast. I was nervous going into my first one, but now I don't worry about it. The main thing is to drink a lot of water and have 1-3 LMNT electrolyte packs (unflavored, no sugar) per day, depending on how much you're sweating/exercising (which you absolutely can do, especially the first 2 days).

You can expect to feel colder as your body doesn't conserve as much heat, and after ~2 days more lethargic physically, but your mental energy may actually be higher. I don't sleep as well when fasting, so 3 nights is about my limit. That being said, you feel rested on less sleep, because your body is probably producing a lot less waste.

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#112

Post by lend000 »

_nalply wrote: post #73
lend000 wrote: post #22

I had a long process with this that mostly manifested as exercise intolerance and general inflammation/discomfort, and sleep struggles. I made no progress for 2 years, lost most of my muscle (I had been very active before) and started thinking "is this how it's going to be forever?". After not finding anything promising from traditional medicine or supplements, I finally made some dramatic life changes. I'm fully pas…

How do you manage zone 5 cardio 4x a week without PEM? I thought up to 3x a week and never consecutive days is the maximum.

Zone 5 is usually 1-2 minutes out of a longer 30 minute cardio session for me, I do it as a final sprint. I am not talking about repeated hill sprints where you would get 10+ minutes of zone 5 cardio in a session, which I agree would not be something a normal person should do 4x/week.

From my own experience, it seems like hitting that Zone 5 briefly is a good nervous system reset (overrides any dysfunctional breathing and heart rate effects from long covid); it's less about training the heart, although that's an excellent side effect.

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#113

Post by kranke155 »

timr wrote: post #108
kranke155 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to me like a performance at this point and not serious analysis. It’s true I conflated this with long covid. It’s not a long covid study. I am tired and done with this. You made several errors in this comment. Your biggest error is the lockdown one. This makes no sense whatsoever - the controls also lived through lockdown. If this is the rigorous analysis you’re bringing to the studies you read, I’m not su…

> the controls also lived through lockdown. If this is the rigorous analysis you’re bringing to the studies you read, I’m not surprised none of them pass the muster. You've missed the point. I'm not suggesting that the other factor or factors has to be "lockdown". I'm just giving examples that illustrate the idea: even if you assume that the differences between the control and the experimental group are non-random an…

Yes of course.

It’s lockdown and now no lockdown. Could be anything. All observational studies are wrong. The stated limitations are fatal flaws. You heard it here first in HN. All medical research is fatally flawed, says user “timr”.

Good luck with that.

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#114

Post by Earw0rm »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #88
Earw0rm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep - people wonder why we can't treat ME/CFS, we don't even have decent biochemical markers for "fatigue" vs "energy", beyond trivial stuff like blood oxygenation and lactic acid. Nor are there much in the way of markers which will determine whether a competing athlete is going to have a good or a bad day. For example, we have a concept of "energy" for which calories is a rough proxy, but there's no particular reaso…

> we don't even have decent biochemical markers for "fatigue" vs "energy", beyond trivial stuff like blood oxygenation and lactic acid We do have devices that can measure mitochondrial energy production. There are two I think, forgot their names.

Yep, we can measure ATP and so on at the cellular level, but we don't have much of a picture of how that maps onto the physical/psychological sensation of "energy".

Like we know at a crude physical level, we can give someone a bit of a boost with glucose and sympathomimetic stimulants, but sometimes it works a lot better than others. And it's ineffective for fatigue syndromes, but they can't be the other mechanical things commonly associated with fatigue either. (lactic acid, micro-tears and so on).

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#115

Post by pas »

smj-edison wrote: post #26

Maybe a bit of a strange take, but after having dealt with chronic illness personally and talked with a lot of others with chronic illness, I don't think classifying chronic illness by symptoms will help with curing, and in fact I don't think categorizing works at all for chronic illness. We've been trying to classify chronic illnesses for so long, and yet in most cases no pattern emerges. This has led me to conclude…

people are doing this for ME/CFS patients, and trying stuff, and ... it's not easy at all. But the signs at least are pointing toward something coherent.

Yes, it's many variants from a disease, but still, like cancer we can tackle them one by one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldg2AdVnlOs

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-46965-1

If it would be easy already data from 2016 would have "solved" it, right?

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1607571113

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#116

Post by prh8 »

sebasv_ wrote: post #15
prh8 wrote: post #6

Sadly, no mention of Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, or even mast cells at all

This is a blog on the root cause. MCAS would be an intermediate mechanism in making you feel sick, but something must have triggered the MCAS. Thats the autoimmune response.

MCAS is the underlying condition, which is then triggered by a Covid infection. This results in an escalation of baseline symptoms, which is what Long Covid is

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#117

Post by wetmore »

motbus3 wrote: post #69

I know someone's case who got it 3 times. The first 2 times full recover in no time. The third one took couple of months and now feels tired all the time, lost all sense of taste and smell, swollen tongue, body pain of sitting still due to the compression of muscles. This person told me it was sure it was related to COVID because there was nothing before or after it and that was the only thing that happened. Kinda su…

I had covid 7 or 8 times lol. Basically 2-3 times a year from Jan 2022 until spring of 2025. Luckily there have been seemingly no long-term effects for me, and it's been over a year since I last tested positive.

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#118

Post by neonstatic »

brational wrote: post #97
lend000 wrote: post #22

I had a long process with this that mostly manifested as exercise intolerance and general inflammation/discomfort, and sleep struggles. I made no progress for 2 years, lost most of my muscle (I had been very active before) and started thinking "is this how it's going to be forever?". After not finding anything promising from traditional medicine or supplements, I finally made some dramatic life changes. I'm fully pas…

Having gone through this too, I also had to accept that a lot (not all!) of it was in my head and made worse by it. When I convinced myself that “this will pass” and “this slow steady plan will get me out of this eventually” was when I finally saw regular progress (progress, not immediate relief).

It's amazing how powerful the mind is and it's also sad that the default setting is to use that power against oneself

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#119

Post by [deleted] »

nurettin wrote: post #29
lend000 wrote: post #22

I had a long process with this that mostly manifested as exercise intolerance and general inflammation/discomfort, and sleep struggles. I made no progress for 2 years, lost most of my muscle (I had been very active before) and started thinking "is this how it's going to be forever?". After not finding anything promising from traditional medicine or supplements, I finally made some dramatic life changes. I'm fully pas…

What do you mean by water fasting? Do you avoid drinking water directly, or do you avoid all food? For example salads are basically sacks of water.

[deleted]

Re: The Causes of Long Covid

#120

Post by neonstatic »

layoric wrote: post #56
mpreda wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Water fast is when the only intake is water (plus electrolites and vitamines). Basically "eat nothing".

> Basically "eat nothing". Thanks for this, reading "water fast" and "3 days" gave me a shot of adrenaline. The "water" prefix is just confusing, the word for abstaining from food is just "fast" for those interested. If this is engagement bait, then well played..

What you thought of (not even drinking water) is called a dry fast. It is a thing, but for obvious reasons is much more intense and shorter in duration.
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