Thomas Grillo

I may not get the answer I want to hear but I have scoured the internet trying to find out what Thomas is up to with no luck.  
Has anyone heard from him?

I exchanged email with him in 2018 regarding the possibility of lessons, but he indicated that his health and schedule did not allow for this. I hope he's ok, he seems like a kind soul and great player

me too! I sent him comments on YT and didn't hear back

Amethyste it's good to hear from you!  In these trying times I tend to think about all of the amazing souls that I have come in contact with in this fragile thing we call life.   Hope all is well 

Hello all. A lot has been going on with my health over the last few years. And to make it more difficult, my site was down, for who knows how long.
After a lengthy fight with the hosting company, I've finally gotten my site restored.

Once I've learned how to use the new web editors, which are bloody hard for me to see, I'll try to update the site, as it's years out of date, now.

My vision has worsened to the point I'm no longer able to install the modules, and I'm having to find a better way to see the monitor, for lessons on Skype. Tried a lot of stuff that didn't work, unfortunately. Once I've worked that out, I'll also bring y'all up to date on that. This has also impacted my ability to edit videos, hence the reason there haven't been any vids, since about 2016.

I've also been experiencing heart, and respiratory (diabetic related) issues, which have slowed me down, considerably. Lost a lot of potential gigs, a couple of years back. There was also a close scare with a false cancer diagnosis, resulting in multiple biopsies, which also impacted my production, and performance schedules.

And now, there's covid19.

Fingers crossed, I'll eventually get everything sorted, soon.

Hope y'all are well.

Thanks for your patience.

Thomas, I'm so sorry about your health issues.  It's great to see you back! 

Thomas, good to know you are still breathing. That diabetes stuff destroys every organ in the body. I know this for fact.

My addiction today is to Coke zero because diabetes also gives us an unquenchable thirst.

I still use FrontPage 2000 to make web pages, old school

Take care, 

Christopher

(Assuming we're talking about diabetes type II. I know nothing about type I.)

(This post is bound to be badly structured, as I'm frickin tired. But I'll be off to relatives the next days, so...)

(while it may seem presumptuous to assume you have not heard of these things - it is my experience that a lot of patients do not hear of these new developments, as doctors do tend to not keep up, or may regard it as "not yet solid enough", but if risks of an experiment are low (esp. if monitored by a physician), and time is short, why the hell wait)

Have you tried diets and other measures that reduce general tendency of the body towards inflammation, which is what's eating away at your organs?

With the aim of slowing down the overall decay, retaining the ability to do stuff longer.

For instance, a ketogenic diet, esp. in combination with intermittent fasting (done right).
For people with existing diabetes, it needs to be taken into account that blood sugar will be lower than usual during fasting periods and medication needs to be adapted to not make it dangerously low.
There's a lot of stuff out there about moving people out of pre-diabetes or preventing it with, among other things, intermittent fasting, but I have not found much specific to diabetics., not much solid anyway - then again, this angle of it is new to me.

While I was starting to look at this from the general angle of "do stuff to reduce inflammation if you have an affliction the severity of which is closely related to it"... I got curious for more tailored answers.
So here are some links that specifically address observations of fasting & diabetes.

This site mentions some first positive findings, but doesn't seem to link to studies, only to other pages on the site?
https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/fasting-diabetes

https://diabetesdietcures.net/intermittent-fasting-for-diabetes/

There's also current research suggesting that the eating vs. not-eating time windows with regards to your circadian rythm can play an important role with regards to insulin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zXks8iePes
-
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/intermittent-fasting-surprising-update-2018062914156

I do not know if this "still matters" for someone with far progressed diabetes.
But I'd say, what's there to lose in just throwing every known, attainable alleviation from burden put on the body by physiologically suboptimal habits,
and seeing what happens after a while.

Physical excercise also adds to that (reducing inflammation, actually increasing NAD+ levels).
"move it some!" May sound trivial / commonplace, but there are some effects that physical activity of certain kinds has that are known only for a decade, and help retaining health in unexpected ways. (as mentioned in "Lifespan" by David Sinclair, PhD)

Some keto diet links:
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/keto/
https://diabetesstrong.com/ketogenic-diet-and-diabetes/#Is_a_keto_diet_safe_for_people_with_diabetes

(it's a bit old study but my first search engine hit, I'll just throw it in to indicate "yes, there is science hinting at this", not just some wild ideas)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1325029/

If suspected inability of restricting types of foods and frequency of food intake is a concern,

I can just give one anecdote of a close relative, a large intersection of which has been echoed by a lot of people reporting of their experience with ketogenic diets.
This is not a study, obviously - but this section is not about health effects per se, but encouragment if you think "it's too hard" because of prior experience with any sort of "dieting".
- he used to be obese for well over a decade
- had food cravings frequently during the day, usually snacking often, preferably sweet stuff, or drinking soft drinks
- found youtube channel of a certain "Dr. Berg" with nutrition videos, on "keto" (have not checked out that guy)
- made an adapted-to-vegetarian version of that for himself (basically eating a lot of virgin coconut oil instead of any animal fats, next to micronutrient rich but low(-ish) calory plant foods)
- after some weeks of adjustment, he also tried to add intermittent fasting to that, in his case, the "some days of the week totally off" variant - which he never imagined he would be able to tolerate, but his food cravings had totally vanished, so he went bold
- the once obese guy is now slimmer than I am, as has been for 2 years or so (that bastard!) (I'm roughly middle to high "normal" range of BMI, for whatever that's worth)
- as long as "only a few" things are blooming, he doesn't need anti allergy meds anymore. He's basically "allergic to everything that blooms", and for some reason, that went down a lot in degree. Due to weird climate stuff we had times now where more things bloomed at the same time than usual, and there it got him again.
Again, this is not a study, maybe coincidence. He never experienced any enduring alleviation of this by anything else than the anti-histamin(?) meds before, though.
I just thought I'll throw this in as a bonus, YMMV.

As for longterm drawbacks of ketogenic diet in general, I only once found one study which made it seem possible that it could result in somewhat premature loss of bone density compared to average diet.
I have not heard anything like that again after that, though.
Someone who's being consumed by diabetes also might have other worries, I guess.

There are other diets that do not move your metabolism to perpetual ketosis but apparently still a lot of people reduce their level of diabetes / amount of meds needed.
They have in common and overlap with keto diets in that they eliminate processed, high glycemic index & glycemic load foods, and increasing intake of foods with higher micronutrient content, rather than "empty calories" foods.
I.e. they even eat fresh fruit, next to lots of veggies, but not nutella, ice cream, honey, bread, pasta, skittles, coke. Also common in the anti-inflammation crowd seems to be to not eat dairy (but maybe chicken and fish).

I mention this in case keto diet (main nutrient = fat, keeping carbs very low AND protein fairly low) sounds unappealing, to throw it out there. No serious references at hand.

There was also someting about widespread lack of vitamin-D and diabetes 2, and also autoimmune linked stuff in general. (and diabetes 2 is more seen like that recently)

(some note must be inserted here now to make aware that any significant dietary change may produce gut upset at first, which is often taken as "not tolerating" it, but, the gut microbiome is subject to selection and may produce a more optimized population of microorganisms towards digesting the new diet, which can take a couple days or weeks or so.
Long story short: it sometimes takes the gut getting used to, so one should not give up too quickly if there are not actually dangerous, vs. mildly discomforting, symptoms.)

That was a lot of words above!

For me being Type II diabetic is a slow motion destruction of the body. I was in great shape running at least five miles a day for thirty years. The cells of a diabetic lose the ability to process glucose (genetic) so it builds up in the blood and converts to stored fat along with fat. The glucose build up is what begins the slow motion destruction of the body including the heart, kidneys and bursting blood vessels in the eyes. The muscles become very weak as they get no energy from the blood stream. This is what stopped my daily running twenty years ago.

What medications try to do is turn the cells back on but this only lasts a few years and then again you become resistant to the insulin glucose energy process to the cells and muscles. No special diet is going to turn the cells back on, not even starvation. This double source of stored fat is why a diabetic eventually becomes fat. Not the other way around.

Ozempic is my last med at $900 a month, insulin $500 along with others and they are now failing me. What is quality of life worth?

Christopher

Yeah, I have a notorious difficulty of doing things in less than "a lot of words", esp. if I don't have lots of time but want to get something out there.

Let me add yet more words.

There are currently ongoing trials to replicate in humans what has been shown to work in mice already:
Reversing to some degree age related eye damage by increasing a molecule that's very important in our cells, but decreases with age.
The text about the lab mice also mentioned them being diabetic and overweight.

I do not know details, like by how much damages were reversed and to what exact effect.
And as I said, they're still testing whether / how well this works with humans.
I'm not here to frivolously create false hope.
But I think this is something to look out for.
If all they did was NAD+ boosting by taking adequate doeses of NR or NMN (substances you can already get today, but there are a lot of scammers out there selling fake products, so one has to  trace back certificates to FDA, I've seen forged FDA certs...), and if one has some money for a self-experiment, one might as well try it before the results come out, I guess.
I'm not 100% sure now whether NAD boosting was really ALL they did for the eye stuff or whether it was from the experiment with mental and physical fitness in the lab mice. And don't have the book here.

Some details are in David Sinclair's book "Lifespan" from 2018.

For anyone inclined, here's also a over 2 hours long talk with the author. As these things go, it's not very focused and could probably be condensed down...
Maybe on a rainy day, when you don't feel like Theremin'in or what else you do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOTS0HS7aq4

EDIT:
Oh, that interview has him saying "not important whether you eat night or day" in it - that seems to be outdated.
A recent study showed that blood sugar levels (of a not yet diabetic, not on meds) will be higher during the night if you eat too close to bedtime.
EDIT:
Ok, relistened some of it - the eye stuff, around the 40 minute mark: they're definitely doing more than the NAD boost stuff, which is to treat other effects of aging.
And the currently running trials are to treat glaucoma - I don't know if that sort of damage has overlap with that of eye damage typical for diabetics.
(they plan to do stuff to treat other problems)