by Gerald, December 8, 2018 – age 63

I have now been supplementing my diet with MePA for a little more than three years. My dose has varied because I have used myself as a guinea pig for various experiments with the vitamin. A high priority for Helen and me has been to keep our dose high relative to most users so that if there were to be any negative side effects of the vitamin they would show up in us first. Theory says there should be no negative side effects when the vitamin is taken in modest microgram amounts, and neither of us has experienced any negative side effects to the present time.

I have still not noticed any improvement to several aging-related symptoms mentioned in my testimonial in Aging: Cause and Cure: thyroid dysfunction, grayness of hair, and eyesight. Thus it appears that the vitamin affects these things slowly, as is known to be the case with aging itself, or not at all. It is also possible that the MePA dose is yet too low and that some aging-related symptoms will be found to respond more rapidly at higher dose. The first experiments to measure proper dose are just beginning to yield possibly meaningful results, so the proper dose question may soon be able to be settled.

On the positive side of the ledger, several rapidly felt beneficial effects of the vitamin mentioned in Aging: Cause and Cure have definitely persisted. As my experience with these beneficial effects has increased, my appreciation of them has only grown. I will update these below. They are difficult to prioritize because I find them all to be significant practical blessings. But let me start with the first indication I had, three years ago, that MePA was, indeed, the vitamin I had so long been seeking. I am referring, of course, to cure of my CIDP.

Cure of CIDP

There has been no return of CIDP symptoms to the present time.

I don’t often think about CIDP anymore. But, while rummaging around on my computer the other day, searching for a file from long ago, I bumped into a checklist I had drafted for Helen and myself for administering home infusions for my CIDP. Suddenly, it all came flooding back. The checklist was a full page long. The needed infusions took Helen and me several hours to carry out, twice each week.

The infusions were a blessing, of course. They enabled me to have the strength I needed to button my shirt, feed myself, get out of a chair unassisted, navigate the two porch steps without peril of winding up in a broken heap at the bottom, and walk up to a mile unassisted. Most importantly, they enabled me to carry on with my Bible/science research relatively unimpeded.

But what a great blessing now, to have all this and more—I can even jog or run whenever I feel like it—with no infusions. It is wonderful not to have to plug those four hypodermic needles into my flesh twice each week. It is wonderful to now do as I please with the hours the infusions previously claimed each week.

I am tremendously grateful that my CIDP has been cured, restoring me to a level of strength normal to healthy males in their early sixties.

Rapid Healing

Every time I injure myself, I marvel and give thanks at the speed with which I now heal.

In the most recent episode, I accidentally mashed the end of a finger between two steel pipes. The right half of the fingernail rapidly turned dark purple. It was pretty painful all that day. I wondered whether the purple half of the nail might separate from the finger. But the next day, only a thin purple line remained under the nail, and there was only slight residual pain. The following day, it was difficult to distinguish the finger which had been injured from neighboring fingers.

The blessing of rapid healing also shows up repeatedly after a day of strenuous physical work or other unaccustomed physical activity. It was common, prior to the vitamin, to wake up the next morning with aches and pains. These would typically take several days to resolve. Now, when I wake up the next morning, there are no aches and pains.

Refreshing Sleep

Sleep continues to be of higher quality than it was before the vitamin. The result is that I need less sleep, giving me more usable hours in a day.

Most nights, I sleep soundly for 7 to 7-1/2 hours, waking once to go to the bathroom. I wake feeling refreshed and ready to get to work.

It is still possible, at times, to experience insomnia, especially in the early morning hours. In my case, this seems to result from sleep having been so sound and refreshing in the first half of the night that the need for sleep is substantially diminished in the second half of the night. This can make it harder to get back to sleep once I have gotten up to go to the bathroom. So I deliberately keep myself as somnolent as possible when I get up at night, by, for example, using a dim night light in the bathroom, and refusing to let my thoughts focus on anything disturbing or absorbing.

In contrast to pre-vitamin days, when insomnia occurs, it does not leave me exhausted and unable to get much done the next day. It is as if the half-night’s sleep I did get was enough to see me satisfactorily through the day. And I have found that I generally sleep the whole next night soundly and without difficulty.

The knowledge that I can now get by for a day on very little sleep, and that I will make up for lost sleep the next night, reduces frustration and apprehension if I find myself awake in the early morning hours when I know I should normally be asleep.

I am thankful for the improved sleep quality MePA bestows, and I am thankful for the additional productive hours this yields each day.

Almost No Headaches

In the years immediately prior to the vitamin, headaches were a recurring, worsening, unwelcome feature of my life. Now, they are almost nonexistent.

The only headache I can recall taking pain reliever for since starting on the vitamin occurred about six weeks ago. The headache developed in conjunction with a cold or flu. It was not a severe headache, so I ignored it during the day. I decided to take pain reliever in the late afternoon when I began to experience some nausea. Pre-vitamin, nausea had been a sign of impending migraine. The headache did not get any worse, and it was gone the next morning.

Before beginning to take vitamin MePA, my use of pain reliever medication averaged roughly two pills once every two weeks. This has now reduced to something less than two pills per year.

It is a blessing to no longer experience headache pain on a regular basis, and it is a blessing to no longer experience loss of productivity due to headaches.

Colds/Flu More Manageable

Common upper respiratory infections don’t seem to be as frequent or as potentially devastating as they had become prior to starting to supplement MePA in my diet.

I can still catch a full-blown cold or flu and have it take a week or ten days to clear out, but this is now relatively rare. More common, now, is to get just a touch of the cold or flu, with symptoms totally resolving in under 24 hours.

The same is true of the stomach flu.

I was living in increasing dread of these common ailments prior to MePA. I was beginning to understand how elderly persons might die of them. I still live in dread of the stomach flu, but in the several instances of exposure to it which I have had since starting on MePA, only brief, slight nausea has resulted. I am now back to taking upper respiratory ailments pretty much in stride.

Healthier, Happier Skin

The great improvements in my skin which I previously reported in Aging: Cause and Cure have all been retained. It is a very great blessing to be able to take a bath or shower and go through the following day not feeling like large patches of my skin are on fire.

For a few weeks this past summer, my eczema flared up again, following many trouble-free months. This was confusing. Up until then, the vitamin seemed to have made eczema a thing of the past for me. Why had it returned, why in the summer when winters were always previously the worst months, and why had it returned with such stubborn ferocity?

Eventually, I was able to figure out that consumption of an abundance of fresh garden tomatoes was the culprit. When I eliminated tomatoes and citrus (both contain salicylates and amines, which trigger eczema in some individuals) the problem rapidly cleared up. I have now eliminated tomato products and citrus from my diet, and my skin is the best it has ever been.

In hindsight, it seems clear that MePA allowed my skin to be sufficiently normal, for the first time in my life, for me to be able to figure out that I am allergic to tomatoes and probably also to citrus.

Healthier Weight

I made my weight a personal priority a year or so after starting on MePA. Proper weight pays back well for all the discipline it costs—health risks due to excess weight are well known. I did not want to die of stroke or heart attack due to overweight when, by God’s grace, MePA had opened to me the possibility of living for centuries.

I went to the Internet to learn my healthy weight range and my “ideal” weight. This gave me a target of 150 to 155 pounds, at the center of my healthy weight range. I was in the low 170s when I started. I used a calorie counter on my computer to count calories every meal. I adjusted my daily calorie allotment to lose just 1/2 pound per week—I did not want to feel hungry (it is too distracting when I am working), and MePA promised a lengthy future, so there was no rush. I am now comfortably settled into my 150–155 pound target range. I am just now trying to see if I can stay there without using the calorie counter any more.

I tracked fiber at the same time, using the same calorie counter program on my computer. I had been having a lot of trouble with irregularity which I wanted to try to solve. Ultimately, I set my fiber target to 46 grams per day, which works well for me. (Note that fiber requirement is not the same for everyone and that men need more than women.) I quickly found that I had been eating way too little fiber. I preferred foods which were naturally low in fiber, mainly meats and potatoes, which have almost no fiber. Even a typical lettuce salad, for example, provides just 1 gram of fiber! So tracking fiber caused me to slowly change the types of things I was eating, away from meats and potatoes, towards vegetables and fruits and bran cereals. It took a few months for my diet to change and for my intestines to adjust, but, in the end, this not only solved the irregularity problem, it also made losing weight easier since fiber helps one feel full after eating.

The graph below shows my weight for the past year and a half. The dashed line shows 155 pounds, which is the upper end of my target range.