the state of the Kevin

No real hunger right now, but there are cravings. And just as when I was doing the Newcastle diet, I've been torturing myself by watching cooking videos on YouTube. The videos are paradoxically satisfying and crave-inducing. It's weird.

Over the first two days of this fast, there were occasional, random hunger pangs. Right now, though, it's more about the cravings, which are more of a psychological issue than a physical one. You don't spend years eating a certain way, building up certain bad habits of mind, and then suddenly switch all that off. That's impossible. I'm still learning what it means to be truly self-disciplined, and it's obvious I have a long way to go in that regard. In the meantime, I have to deal with the echoes of my bad habits in the form of cravings.

Internally, I guess I'm experiencing autophagy by now, and it could be that I'm even in ketosis at this point, i.e., I'm burning fat instead of carbs, although I've got a ton of triglyceride stores thanks to all the fat hanging off my body, so there's a chance I'm still burning sugar.

I need to buy a ketone meter. They come in two varieties: there's the breathalyzer, which is considered inaccurate by many experts, and there's the finger-prick kind, which is like the blood-glucose tester I already own. The brand favored by many of the keto YouTubers I watch is Keto Mojo, but Amazon is saying they're currently out of stock, and the Keto Mojo website itself won't let you order a device if you're outside the United States. This is as stupid and navel-gazing as any number of poorly designed Korean websites that fail to recognize the existence of foreigners (as an example: Korean names are usually three syllables long, but my full name in English is 18 characters long, and some Korean websites won't let me enter my name in English). Folks, we live in a global world, like it or not, so websites need to be globalized, and international shipping always needs to be available. Upshot: a ketone meter is still a long way off. I know there are pee-on-this ketone test strips, but those are generally considered inaccurate, too, though they might be better than nothing.

Anyway, ketone-measuring aside, I think I'm in the autophagy phase, and I might also be in ketosis by now. I've pushed back my walk time to sometime after noon, so I'll have morning numbers to report in just a few minutes. About those numbers: keep in mind that I'm on meds like metformin, and the meds definitely affect my numbers. My BP might be high, but without the meds, it'd probably be even higher. Should I report normal BP figures (around 120/80 is classic BP), this should be taken with a grain of salt because of the meds. Until I'm totally off meds (whenever that might be), I can't report totally accurate figures. I suspect my numbers, while on meds, need to register as lower than normal before the docs decide to take me off some or all of my medication.

So expect numbers, however skewed, in a few minutes.