Wednesday, March 30, 2022

some numbers

My doctor's appointment at Samseong Hospital is tomorrow. You're supposed to fast a day before you go so as not to skew your blood sample; I've been fasting since Sunday, so by the time I hit the hospital, this will have been a fast of over 100 hours. I had a bit of coffee and cream yesterday around lunchtime, and even with artificial sweetener, that was enough to drive up my blood sugar from 88, before I'd had the coffee, to 93 this morning. Still, both numbers are better than the 105 I'd registered a few nights ago, so I expect I'll be in the 80s or high 70s tomorrow morning. 

It'll be nice to eat again; I've actually done at least a 72-hour fast every week this month (this is the thing I didn't want to talk about until the end of the month) in an unsuccessful attempt to get my weight and my other numbers back down, but my body really resists attempts to make it lose weight. I'm still flailing about, looking for a sustainable way to combine diet and exercise. My frozen shoulder keeps me from doing all sorts of exercises that I'd wanted to start doing this year, and that's been frustrating. So I concentrate on walking and stairs training, although I'm going to add a wee bit of jogging tonight—just five minutes. I suspect that intense exercise, especially as it approaches anaerobic HIIT levels, will be the key to breaking through the 100-kilogram barrier and getting down into the 90s over the next few months. I don't know; I'm still figuring this out.

Anyway, here are my latest numbers:

Blood sugar: 93
Weight: 108.6 kg (almost at my goal of 107)
Blood pressure: 136/92 (high)
Pulse: 68 (good)
BMI: 31.7 (at my lowest, I was at 28)
Muscle mass: 72.6 kg
Body water: 48.6% (I thought humans were 75-80% water)
Body fat: 28.7%

Obviously, I'd like to get the body fat down to around 15%, so I have a long, long way to go with that, and it's going to involve stepping up the training, somehow. My BMI is back in the "obese" range after having dipped into the "overweight" category for a short while. Gotta get that back down, too. I imagine my triglycerides are fairly high right now, so as I mentioned before, I might return to a variant of the old Newcastle diet to get back on track. I'll still have my cheat days, and it won't be Newcastle every day, but I'm going to try fasting Monday and Tuesday; doing modified Newcastle Wednesday through Friday; having only a shake, some nuts, and some beef jerky on Saturdays; then eating regular keto on Sundays. I did actually try carnivore for two weeks at the beginning of March, but I noticed no appreciable difference in weight loss despite having some days where I ate nearly zero grams of carbs. They say you need to go a long time before you see results on carnivore (which is about minimal carbs but with no upper limit on calories), but I didn't have the patience to go beyond two weeks, and honestly, I started craving vegetables. What is the world coming to?

So! Hospital visit tomorrow, where I'm expecting bad numbers and a good bit of doctorly preaching, then a post-hospital pig-out (sorry, but it's a tradition at this point), then back to the discipline. I'll be doing a long walk with my buddy JW on Saturday, one of several planned walks as I familiarize JW with parts of the rest of the Four Rivers trail. I'd love for him to walk the entire trail someday, but his job will probably never let him have a whole month off to go gallivanting across the country.

Wish me luck for tomorrow. I'm going to get scolded.



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