Neural Fatigue and Recovery after Major Weight Loss

Ira Warren Whiteside

Hey everyone, Ira here, and uh—before I get too deep into today’s episode, just a quick reminder: I’m not a doctor, so nothing you hear is meant to be medical advice. This is just my personal experience navigating some unexpected roads after a brainstem stroke. Actually, my story kinda starts back in 2014, with that ischemic brainstem stroke. Not fun. It hit hard: sudden slurred speech, foot drop outta nowhere, tons of neural fatigue—I'm talking about the sort of tiredness that just goes way beyond what most folks probably imagine. But I—well, I kept working somehow. I even kept flying. I don't entirely understand how I pulled that off, to be honest. One day you’re on top of the world; next day, you’re tripping over curbs, trying to decipher your own words.

Ira Warren Whiteside

Those first months, learning my new baseline, it all felt like moving through molasses. And at first, I didn’t really have a map for recovery. The symptoms just—piled on. Foot drop, slurring, then the exhaustion, the neural fatigue, which... I’m still not sure how to describe. It’s like, my brain would just say “Nope. We’re done.” And you're stuck until it decides otherwise.

Ira Warren Whiteside

But you try to make sense of what your body’s doing, right? That’s when I stumbled onto the Brunnstrom stages of mobility recovery. I always mix up the order—there are, what, seven stages? Yeah—I think so. But the important thing for me was realizing that there’s this actual pattern to the way mobility comes back. Once I started thinking about my foot drop and my hand curl in terms of those stages, my outlook shifted. I could measure little victories instead of feeling, you know, just... stuck.

Ira Warren Whiteside

So, that was the beginning. 2014 was rough. But I was still getting on planes and working, stubborn as ever, just… learning how to move forward in a different body.

Ira Warren Whiteside

Now, let’s talk about what happened next—because honestly, I wasn’t expecting this. Around 2021, after years of battling not just stroke after-effects but also, let’s say, a pretty serious weight problem, I hit my breaking point. Started at 300 pounds, give or take. I cut almost everything—sugars, seed oils, ultra-processed stuff, even alcohol. I tried a sort of mix between a Carnivore and Keto diet. All animal fat, loads of protein, basically nothing else. Weight started melting off. First year, 80 pounds gone. Eventually hit 155 pounds total, if you can believe it. Sometimes I hardly do.

Ira Warren Whiteside

But—and here comes the twist you probably didn’t see coming—losing all that weight, it didn’t just mean smaller jeans. Some other things started happening. My neural fatigue actually got worse. Like, the tiredness, exhaustion? It ramped up. My foot drop got worse. Elbow got stiffer, my hand curled more. And there was this weird, almost scary experience: watching the fat melt off my knees and even my throat. I’d look in the mirror and barely recognize parts of myself. At one point, I could actually see my knee caps for the first time in... I dunno, decades.

Ira Warren Whiteside

The wild part? Turns out this isn’t just me. When I dove into some of the literature—studies on bariatric patients, for example—I found other folks had these same symptoms. Rapid fat loss can absolutely mess with nerve health, especially those little nerves around your joints, in your arms and legs, even your throat. For me, the phrenic nerve began throwing pain into my shoulder, which I eventually realized was referred pain—so really, my breathing nerves complaining.

Ira Warren Whiteside

This isn’t to discourage weight loss, by the way. There was a ton of benefit, but there were side effects I just did not see coming—some well documented in scientific studies, and still, totally blindsided me. One day you’re celebrating fitting into old clothes, next day you’re asking, “Wait, is my neural fatigue actually getting worse?” It was a real head-scratcher.

Ira Warren Whiteside

This next part kind of ties it all together, I think. See, as the weight kept coming off, the neural symptoms changed—sometimes getting worse before they got better. Third year in, things were pretty bad. But here’s where it gets interesting: as I stuck with the Carnivore and Keto routine, cutting sugars and everything processed, my glucose… actually got higher for a while. Not exactly what you’d expect, right? I might be wrong, but the research suggests this is sometimes caused by “glucose sparing,” especially on low-carb, high-fat diets. It’s like your body switches fuel sources, and you get some weird numbers for a bit.

Ira Warren Whiteside

On the bright side, something started to shift. My brain fog, that cloudiness, started to clear. The weird vision issues I’d had began fading, too. At one point, my ophthalmologist said I didn’t need Avastin injections for my eyes anymore—first time in forever. Even my peroneal and ulnar nerve pain in my leg and elbow, while still there, sort of ebbed and flowed with the recovery. You know how you sometimes have that moment—like, “Wait, am I getting better, or am I just getting used to the new normal?” Well, by about 2025, I could finally say: I was actually getting better.

Ira Warren Whiteside

Honestly, it’s been a complex puzzle—rapid fat loss, neural recovery, and these dietary changes all feeding into each other. I wanna toss out a question to you all: what does the latest research say about how fat loss and diet impact nerve recovery after stroke? Because based on my experience and what I’ve read, there’s so much more to uncover in this space. If you’ve had similar experiences or wanna dig into the science together, let me know—maybe we’ll unpack it in another episode. Thanks for listening, and, uh, remember, your mileage may vary! Stay tuned for more.