When Weight Isn’t About Calories (Mast Cell and Ion Edition)

Inducing a hard gut reset to clear sludge and end the war inside my cells

I lost ten pounds in a week without changing my diet.

About a year ago, my limbs and torso began to inflate. Nothing dramatic at first, but steadily—bizarrely—despite no change in how I ate or exercised. And it just kept going. I knew there had to be a key. Was it insulin? Estrogen? Did I need to do a cleanse or twenty?

I tried GLP agonists, keto, metformin—which landed me in the hospital due to gut bleeding—and from there, the rabbit hole widened. What the hell could be going on? Eventually, I started to see the bigger picture. And it involves mast cells and ions.

Mast cells are tiny, twitchy immune cells embedded throughout the body. They’re turned on and off by (yes, you guessed it) serotonin. With chronic dysregulation, mine had likely been exploding (“degranulating”) every time I ate—releasing floods of neuroimmune sludge containing fluid, debris, and inflammation. My torso was holding a kind of molecular grudge against nourishment. My gut was simply the ringleader, glitching and declaring all food and water an act of war.

My body, it turns out, was trying to protect me by drowning my tissues.

Mast Cells degranulating.

Serotonin and the Internal Insurrection

There’s another serotonin receptor no one talks about. The 5HT1A receptor. It was dysregulated during the injury. It tells your nervous system the crisis has passed, calms, and restores parasympathetic tone. It keeps your gut moving and your immune system from carpet-bombing the lining of your intestines. I have not had this capacity internally for about five years so I would simply avoid eating until I crashed into hunger or sleep. When it got to the point where I could only have broth, carrots, or turkey, essentially an antihistamine diet, something needed to change. But the answer came very slowly.

When 5HT1A is switched off, mast cells interpret everything—stress, food, light—as potentially inflammatory and then publish the full scandal to every tissue in your body. In my case, they flooded me with histamine and prostaglandins whenever I ate even something as mundane as a carrot.

Motility Is a Political Act

So, I decided that I would start taking 5HT1A/4 agonists to see what happens to my ability to eat and, well, move less like someone 50 lbs my senior. 1A for parasympathetic action, HT4 for an accompanying drainage switch.

I used saffron and a drug that is marketed for chronic constipation in the elderly 🙄. And it all shifted. Fluid. Mood. Immunity. My face. Consciousness. I suddenly felt like I’d achieved the second level of this insane N=1 discovery system. And I seriously couldn’t believe what I was experiencing—the literal “off switch” for my cellular war.

The off switch opened internal drainage valves. I was able to experience hunger (and eat without pain), my torso softened, my jaw reappeared. I looked in the mirror and saw someone who hadn’t been visible in, well, at least a year. The system was getting unstuck.

I’ve long suspected that my mysterious water retention was about nudging ions in and out of membranes. Something deeper in cellular fluid dynamics. After testing nearly every diuretic, antihistamine, and electrolyte balance known to humankind, I figured out that the receptors appear to shift something we don’t often think about. Chloride.

When chloride isn’t secreted properly into the gut, it stays trapped in the interstitial space, pulling water with it. That creates a kind of cellular biochemical edema from stalled ion gradients and lymphatic stagnation. By stimulating 5HT4 and using 1A to chill out those cells, the chloride is secreted throughout internal channels, flushing water properly again. This, combined with mast cell stabilization, turned off the switch that had kept me looking and feeling puffy, heavy, and strangely inflamed. The gut wasn’t just just clogged—though my hospital visits confirmed that was a factor—it was electrically hoarding water.

Bloated with Cellular Misinformation

So if you’ve tried everything—diets, detoxes, drugs, mindset resets—and you still feel heavy, inflamed, alien in your own skin, let me offer this unlikely possibility that perhaps your cells have the wrong switch flipped. For me, triggered years ago by another medication.

And maybe the weight you’re carrying isn’t “weight” in the fitness-influencer sense, but a build-up of cytokines, histamine, cortisol, unreleased bile, a decade’s worth of stress, and unnecessary shame.

All it took was a year of trial-and-error, a few trips to the hospital, a few interactions with mostly clueless professionals. And some next-level, otherworldly determination and patience that I can’t even take credit for. It felt borrowed. Something older, deeper, that refused to let me give up even when every signal said this was permanent. Evidently, that isn’t quite so.