CFS, Fibromyalgia, Fascia, HRV, BCAA & Magnesium Threonate

Biotin -> Collagen -> Glycine -> BCAA

This post is an update on my journey healing myself from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Fibromyalgia. In some ways this post is a continuation of the post I wrote called “My Nutrigenomic Analysis“, 11 years ago. A lot of the methylation support supplements I was taking didn’t pan out as having long lasting beneficial impact as I had hoped. Since that time I had mostly given up, and quit experimenting. I had experimentation and health research burn out. I even quit taking virtually all supplements.  Then a couple of years ago I started experimenting again, and over that time I have had success’s and failures I would like to document and report on, for record purposes and in case it helps anyone else out their suffering form something similar.

A couple years ago, I was kiteboarding in the Turks & Caicos, and I was having real issues with my skin, coming apart in my hands from all the water exposure. A fellow kiteboarder recommended I try supplementing with Biotin. She said she used high doses for her horses to help regenerate their hooves. I said I already take Biotin in my multivitamin, and she insisted I take a significantly higher dose. So this is what I did, not only did my skin dramatically improve in it’s integrity many of the tension headaches I was suffering from on a regular basis diminished in frequency greatly.

It got to the point where if I felt a tension headache coming on I could pop a biotin pill and the oncoming headache would just never arrive. Biotin thus greatly reduced much of the fibromyalgia tension I felt specifically around my spine. It worked most of the time, I started taking it daily but not always.

Great slide deck on Biotin’s biochemical mechanism of action here

After much somatic psychology training I have learned to sense fascia and muscles in my body and be able to differentiate them somewhat. When the fibromyalgia tension was at it’s worst in the past I assumed it was always muscle pain, but now I felt perhaps it was the fascia themselves that were in pain and perhaps nutrient deprived. So I went on a mission to support my fascia.

I started with Biotin, but then also experimented with taking several tablespoons a day of Gelatin and then Collagen as this is what fascia are primarily composed of. In fact taking a large heaping tbsp of collagen, seemed to be as effective as Biotin. Taking this one step further, the primary amino acid in Collagen is glycine, so I began taking mega doses of glycine 5 -10 grams a day. It seemed to have a similar beneficial effect.

It had been said that consuming 10 grams of glycine per day can increase collagen synthesis by up to 200%. So this got me excited.

The problem I then ran into however was that glycine primarily acts as an inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system, particularly in the spinal cord and brainstem, and so I started feeling very drowsy and groggy taking it. This made the whole CFS thing worse, while my Fibromyalgia got better, so it just did not become worth it going this way.

For some reason I tried switching to taking large doses of BCAA’s instead. 10g -20g a day. This worked very well. Most of the fibromyalgia symptoms greatly diminished, and tensions headaches were very infrequent. To this day I still take my 10-20g of BCAA daily. It has dramatically improved my recovery in the gym and considerably improved my strength gains as well when it comes to weight training.

While I seem to have gotten rid of the majority of my Fibromyalgia, the Chronic Fatigue still remained. I had wrongly assumed my fatigue came from all the pain the fibromyalgia induced but that simply seemed not to be the case. I was mostly pain free, still some residual spine tension, but not oppressing tension headaches on a daily basis which are extremely fatiguing in their own right.

The HRV connection

See my post on Paradoxical HRV & Training HRV for more on this,

Magnesium Threonate

When searching for supplements that could improve my HRV, one of the top most recommended ones was Magnesium. I tried Magnesium citrate first, but that gave me diarrhea. Then I tried Magnesium Bisglycinate, and that helped I could feel a marked relaxation in my central nervous system, but it also made me drowsy and groggy from the glycine, so this was a no go. Researching all the various forms I then stumbled across Magnesium Threonate the only form of Magnesium to readily cross the blood brain barrier. And this worked phenomenally well. Tension in my spine I had felt ceaselessly for decades melted away overnight. My spine and neck muscles have improved substantially in their felt sense of flexibility. My overall energy also dramatically improved. It became very obvious I was deficient in Magnesium especially in the grey matter regions of my spine, and it was as if my whole central nervous system had been locked in the on/sympathetic arousal position for the last 2.5 decades. For the first time I felt like I could really relax, and the CFS that plagued me all this time could go away.

The Magnesium Threonate has almost entirely eliminated the brain exhaustion I had felt on a regular basis. It’s a strange phenomenon for me, as I used to fall asleep at night specifically from brain exhaustion. Now my brain is energized and alert, and so drifting off to sleep from relaxation is something very new to me. It feels like my brain and nervous system need to reorient to and entire new way of being. I feel like this might take several weeks. I also used to be able to tell time, through the exhaustion and limited energy I had, now I feel a little bit like I have entered a more timeless state of being. It’s almost like I don’t know what to do with myself, since having very limited energy really forced me to prioritize only the utmost important things.

Another unanticipated benefit for me is I have much better glucose/insulin control. I would periodically get incredibly strong hunger cravings, and would need to carb feed every 3-4 hours. This all went away with the Magnesium supplementation. My appetite has dramatically diminished in a good way. I used to get strong dark chocolate cravings as well, and my hypothesis is that given dark chocolate is one of the foods highest in magnesium, perhaps I was craving the magnesium in the chocolate more than anything else about it.

Both Dr. Peter Attia & Andrew Huberman specifically recommend taking Magnesium Threonate for improving sleep.

Peter Attia has a great synopsis on Magnesium on one of his paid episodes here: https://peterattiamd.com/ama54/

Peter Attia takes a couple forms of Magnesium, and spreads his doses out throughout the day, taking anywhere from 600-800mg elemental a day

• Slow Mag Mg 2 – 4 tablets a day
• Magnesium L-threonate (400-500mg which is 144 mg of elemental magnesium) before bed every night

The following video is a great summary of how Magnesium Threonate works:

L & D Phenylalanine

After watching the following video I decided to try taking about 1500mg a day. I got the same kind of results as Dr. LeGrand. The first day after trying it, in the evening as I went to go to sleep, I was able to just calm my mind to an incredible Zen like degree. Normally my mind is racing, with compulsive thinking, taking this supplement felt like I had the power to just turn all that off and just be clear in my mind. I feel much more clear during the day as well. The clarity helps me maintain focus and motivation, and also not burn out so quickly.

L-Phenylalanine can be turned into L-Tyrosine which can be turned into epinephrine, nor-epinephrine & dopamine.

My Lief coach pointed out to me that with a COMT mutation you are likely to metabolize epinephrine, nor-epinephrine & dopamine faster than normal. So taking this essential amino acid would likely compensate for that particular genetic polymorphism. I have a double variant +/+ leading to faster break down of catecholamines.

Other Research Notes:

glucosamine (GlcN) and N-acetylglucosamine (GlcNAc)….”GlcN inhibits hyaluronan and SGAG synthesis while GlcNAc stimulates hyaluronan synthesis. GlcNAc-accelerated hyaluronan synthesis is associated with upregulation of hyaluronan synthase-2.”  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2785807/