Ended up doing a paleo diet, avoiding stressors (some of which are not obvious like just being on your phone scrolling, bad posture/circulation/sitting for too long), improving sleep hygiene, and ramping up consistent cardio exercise, with an emphasis on getting up to 4x/week zone 5 cardio without triggering intolerance.
Since then I've discovered a lot of other things that are great for overall health, like HRV-reset breathing and long-duration water fasts (around 3 days is optimal for me). I imagine those would have been very helpful if I had tried them earlier. A water fast is a complete metabolic and inflammatory reset of the body, and it's not as hard as you might think.
Hopefully most affected folks have recovered and are living normal lives by now, but if not, there are things you can do! It seems like the more challenging those things are, the more efficacious.
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
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.
I thought up to 3x a week and never consecutive days is the maximum.
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.
I also think exercise recommendations are generally too low, especially with respect to high intensity cardio.
This has led me to conclude that perhaps in most cases chronic illness is an emergent behavior from a complex system, namely our body. Now tbh this is kind of a cheap take, because it's not that hard to conclude. But gosh darn it, we're programmers and we deal with complex systems all the time! What I want to see is a complete quantitative mapping of human metabolism, so that we can see all the in-between steps, not just the surface levels. That way curing chronic illness is more about comparing metabolite levels against known pathways and seeing what's regulated incorrectly. There's just not enough introspective capability currently.
My vision is some day a person who's been chronically ill can walk into a clinic, take a blood test, and with mass spectrometry get the level of the around 1800 different intermediate metabolites. That gets mapped to a known good metabolic graph, and it's optimized to find what in-between step is off kilter. They're then prescribed a drug that resets the bad state, and it 6 weeks they're back to normal.
I also doubt that AI will substantially help either. It still doesn't bring any more introspection capability, and if we can't figure out why someone is sick, I have little faith that a predictive AI can figure it out either.
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?
For example Organic Acids in Urine Test gives you some 70-80 metabolic markers, which some folks interpret. There's no large scale RCTs or studies on this, so it's a bit dubious. But I did one and the practitioner correctly read the leaves to suggest some things that were missing and which helped me (glutathione and B1).
The alternative medicine people use these tests because when you measure 80 different things you are almost guaranteed that some of them will come up high or low.
What they don’t explain is that many of them are expected to fluctuate and will show up with very different values on different days or depending on what you’ve eaten or when you’re taking the test.
They like it because they can tell you that you are too low in this thing and therefore you need to take this other supplement, every time someone takes the test.
For someone who isn’t getting answers from regular doctors it feels like a miracle that someone finally tested them, diagnosed them, and gave them something to take with a simple explanation of why it explains everything. This is the perfect recipe for placebo responses, which are common.
The forums are interesting to read because most people who do these and take the supplements will be very positive at first, but then over time they go back and take another test and find the results are completely different because it’s so random.
Organic acids tests are mostly only useful in the context of diagnosing specific genetic deficiencies which produce severe changes in the test results. The minor ups and downs that the alternative medicine people try to use are not diagnostic, especially with only a single test.
The problem with “Long Covid” as it exists today is that there’s no such definition. Literally anyone who had Covid once and feels bad today (and quite a few people who never had a confirmed case at all) includes their set of symptoms in the communal diagnosis. Thus, if you dig into these studies, you always find that the syndrome is a wide-ranging and variable constellation of symptoms, making it impossible for a study to have any systematic legitimacy. Moreover, the results of any particular study are more strongly influenced by the inclusion criterion (if there even is one) than by any other factor.
It’s perfectly possible to evaluate treatments in this situation, and would be a better use of resources - pick symptoms, make an inclusion criteria, and run a randomized trial of existing drugs or therapies. But this is likely to fail, and it’s much, much easier to write papers with unprovable theories and retrospective analysis.
There are actually good, reliable tests for it. However Lyme disease (not Lymes disease) became an alternative medicine explanation for everything vague and many people became obsessed with thinking they had it based on vague symptoms like fatigue. When they couldn’t get positive test results to confirm their belief, the Lyme disease online communities established the idea that the tests cannot detect their version of the disease. It’s a belief that allows anyone to diagnose with Lyme disease in a completely unprovable way.
> and the symptoms vary wildly from person to person.
This belief is an unfortunate result of the online Lyme communities encouraging everyone with any unexplained symptoms to believe it’s caused by Lyme disease that can’t be detected. When the disease becomes redefined as being untestable and causing wildly different symptoms in everyone, it becomes impossible to say that anyone doesn’t have it. If you have any vague symptoms like feeling tired, a Lyme disease community will encourage you do believe that it’s caused by an undetectable case of Lyme disease.
There is a lot of strong evidence that these patients do not have Lyme disease, but they’re always good at coming up with another reason why they have it but it can’t be detected in them specifically
Massaging this kind of data (clustering, etc.) is much lower value than finding fixed criteria that define a consistent group of patients who have objectively defined symptoms that cannot be more readily explained by another diagnosis. This is a pre-requisite for any further study. It can be done, but it’s hard, and it tends to lead to criticisms because you end up excluding a large number of people who fervently believe they have the illness, but don’t fit the objective standards.
Just for example: it’s not enough to claim that you have “brain fog”. A more valid endpoint might instead attempt to classify people based on standardized tests of thinking. Even that has problems, of course, but if you can just claim that you are fatigued and unable to think clearly, there’s a huge problem of confounding (i.e. maybe your symptoms are caused by something else), let alone the unverified nature of the original claim.
The results follow a 2024 study led by Dr Mulu Woldegiorgis that surveyed 11,000 people from Western Australia three months after they contracted COVID-19. Almost one-in-five (18.2 per cent) had developed long COVID. The researchers then monitored the same group of people six months after their initial infection.
“We wanted to get a sense of the trajectory for people with long COVID. After six months, the average number of symptoms remained stable, indicating little improvement,” she said.
and from that study:
In multivariable analyses, pre-existing health conditions at the time of initial SARS-CoV-2 infection and reporting fatigue, shortness of breath, and cough 3 months post-infection were independent predictors of persistent long COVID.
Age, sex, and number of COVID vaccinations were not significantly associated with persistent long COVID.
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 sucks to thing that everytime it might be a chance for that or worse
It has been cheaper to not work for the healthcare system lately. Also because people are a**oles to nurses and the rest of the staff.
And of course people can have both.
Personally, the only long Covid symptom I know of is that I have a coughing fit after every meal (and sometimes during). Some foods seem to lead to worse fits, but anything other than liquid will make me cough to some degree. Sometimes, it’s to the point that I see stars and nearly pass out.
All in all, I got off easy with Covid. It could have been worse.
This might be stomach acid aspirating into your lungs, from GERD or similar caused/exacerbated by Covid, and that may have negative consequences for your health apart from the coughing.
Long COVID may be fueled by inflammation and tiny clots (2026)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260107225532.h...