Supplements and activity designed to improve circulation - an experiment.

They are expected to be directly related in that if the blood level is too high this is removed by the kidneys and excreted so as to show in urine testing.

It should not be possible to have a high urine test whilst having a normal blood glucose level, at least as I understand it.

ATM my thinking is that something I am taking, and there is more than one candidate that might have an effect, is preventing my body from storing glucose as fat, at the same time as it's either still releasing it from the liver, or it's converting protein to glucose which it then can't use, so it's being dumped.

Both would assume that it's being dumped before it enters the finger I test blood from, e.g in the first case that the blood from my liver, after the release of stored glucose, is going through my kidneys and having the glucose extracted before it goes anywhere else.

But I suspect that's all biologically illiterate, all I know is that a test strip shows my level is very high, within a few minutes of a blood test showing it's perfectly normal.

Something's going on, as in order to be in ketosis, at all, it's my understanding that the bodies glycogen stores need to be more or less exhausted, something that's backed up by the normal BG reading, and I'm not eating a significant amount of carbs, but they have to be coming from somewhere.

I would, visually, appear to be dropping significant amounts of fat, but my understanding is that wouldn't explain it, as fat isn't turned into glucose as I understand it. It's turned into ketones, which are then used instead of glucose.

The test strips are only 2 weeks old, and did say my glucose levels were normal (i.e. not raised) on the test I did when I got them, when my BG level was 6.2 (I think - it certainly wasn't raised, for a diabetic, but wasn't as low as it's been the last week). So I have no reason to assume that they are faulty, yet.
 
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Today I will be engaging in an 'experiment' - that involves cake.

I've been getting, mainly, increasingly physically functional, in short bursts. Movement is less forced, just happens, at least until I run out of oomph.

I'm working on the theory that last december I'd stopped eating, more or less, and whilst I am eating now, quite a lot, physiologically my body is probably in a similar state, low level ketosis, and that this may explain the correspondences. If my body can't properly burn carbs then providing an alternative fuel source may explain some things.

So today I will be eating cake, crisps, bread, and of course, trifle.

All in the name of science of course.

ETA - first test subject - cornetto - horrible, far too sweet, prefer the ice cream I made last night.

Second test subject - emma's country rock cakes (sainsburys) - fail. I love rock cakes, always have, but whilst I can make several types of scone to masterchef standards I cannot make rock cakes. It's been several years since I had one, so I thought I'd give these a try. Overspiced, over sweet, both too dry and too moist (which is quite an accomplishment) and brown inside. Weird and whilst I persisted with the first one the rest are going out for the birds, if they annoy me.

ETAA - I suspect today may be an expensive mistake. Nothing I've tried tastes good, most of it is either bland/tasteless or over sweet. Sausage rolls - I can see why I came to the conclusion a couple of years ago to make my own but I couldn't be bothered with that today so I bought a couple. I didn't realise mainline sausages rolls had got this bad. I wanted something gooseberry flavoured and the only thing they sold was a gooseberry fool, upon tasting it my first thought was 'needs more raspberry', and the 114g pot is 3-4 times more than is needed.

I'm currently trying to work up enthusiasm to make a bacon and black pudding sandwich in half a french stick, in that coz sainsburys couldn't even get a thick sliced white right and instead sent a toasting loaf!!

But cake, the savory snack food, the small box of celebrations chocolates, or even the crisps and nuts - none of it appeals.

I may be eating chilli on cauliflower rice tonight.
 
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the bacon and black pudding french stick sounds very appealing @Wonko did you manage to have that?

happy birthday for yesterday

Since I cut back on processed food I find a lot of products are too sweet for my taste- tried gluten free bread and that was very sweet. I had some crisps at Christmas and they were some ridiculous flavour like gin & tonic or something and they were horribly sweet.
 
That 'eperiment' was a dismal failure.

The only thing I actually liked was some darjeeling, bought largely out of desperation as what I actually wanted, silver needle, is so expensive.

The bacon and black pudding sarny, with added mushrooms and fried cherry tomatoes, was okay, but ti was the wrong sort of bread, which spoiled it a bit.

I also got half a dozen rolls, one of each type of 'speciality' roll that sainsburys sell that I hadn't previously tried. These went in the freezer a couple of hours ago not having been looked at.

There's 5 cornettos in there, had one at just after 10am and hated it - ice cream left at the end of a day, never happened before.

I bought 3 scotch eggs, there's 2 left, there's the only pork pie I bought left, the trifle is untouched, crisps, untouched, yogurt, quiche, untouched.

I've had 1 sausage and one cheese and onion roll, the bacon sarnie, a scotch egg, a gooseberry fuel, a handful of chocolates, and some nuts. And one small, 240g cake, which was okay, for £2, but was only really eaten coz I had nowhere to store it as they package these things so once opened your stuffed, not strong enough to pick up and re-box but no way of enclosing it so it can go in a fill fridge or cupboard.

I haven't been hungry and what I have eaten has generally not tasted nice.

My numbers suggest that yesterday was a bit enthusiastic, just a little, but that would normally make me want this type of food, and may explain why I ordered so much of the damn stuff for delivery so early in the day.

But then not to want it, any of it, and for what I did eat to taste so, wrong,?

Even the beer is untouched, put in the fridge and then ignored, or rather worked round to fit the other stuff that I wasn't expecting to need to store, in the fridge.

This butter coffee, the only thing I'd had before the shopping turned up, is clearly powerful stuff.
 
the appetite thing is weird isnt it i go between feeling mildly nauseous and not hungry in the morning and eating a massive meal and some grazing in the evening. i would eat earlier but I just cant face it and I reckon that my appetite is worse the worse I feel. but i have enough appetite in evenings to maintain and exceed my calorific intake needs. Maybe it was the amount of stuff you had that was overfacing you?
 
NelliePledge said:
the appetite thing is weird isnt it i go between feeling mildly nauseous and not hungry in the morning and eating a massive meal and some grazing in the evening. i would eat earlier but I just cant face it and I reckon that my appetite is worse the worse I feel. but i have enough appetite in evenings to maintain and exceed my calorific intake needs. Maybe it was the amount of stuff you had that was overfacing you?
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Nah - a few years ago that lot would have been a light snack while I waited for China to deliver.

I knew the rolls were probably excessive, unneeded, but the rest of it, possible, not recently, but it's been done and I've still wanted more. The main reason for it was variety, I generally bought the least amount possible of each thing, where it made economic sens to do so (e.g. I think a 300g quiche cost 30p more than a 140g one, for some reason, so I bought the 300g one, 600g of trifle is actually cheaper than 500g etc.).

I just wanted several different things, and 'small' amounts of each added up to quite a bit of food, far more than I can apparently eat before it goes off, let alone I'd only allocated 2 days to polish off what i was going to eat before going back to low carb.

That should have been possible, but I'm fairly sure it's illegal to force feed the local wildlife rock cake and 'sausage' rolls lol.

An impulsive mistake - I wouldn't mind but the keto chilli is actually much nicer, than even the bacon and black pudding sarnie.

In one way this is a good thing, the totally unexpected and slightly disturbing thing is that I didn't, and don't, want any of it. But if that makes it easier to get back into ketosis, and stay there for a while, that's got to be a good thing. Possibly.

I couldn't even get a lot of the things I wanted, neither limeade, or apple tango, amongst many other things, seem to exist any more, at least as far as sainsbury's are concerned. Stuff I used to buy regularly, from that store, a year or 2 ago, just doesn't exist - but they still persist in selling things like brains faggots even though no one has bought them for 45 years - go figure.

ETA - Maybe it's the gelatinous yellow maca root I'm taking, the function of which is to magically rebalance all hormone levels to 'optimal' levels - if that includes hormone levels relating to appetite and hunger then maybe my body has rediscovered the ability to determine how much useful nutrition is contained in stuff, and respond accordingly.

Or maybe butter coffee is just really, really, really filling lol
 
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Wonko said:
they still persist in selling things like brains faggots even though no one has bought them for 45 years
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I haven't had those since I was a child. I think I remember liking them - they were basically just meatballs, as far as I remember. Personally I prefer beef olives (which I think of as being similar to faggots, but probably aren't) although I never see them available in England. They were a staple lunch offering in the school I went to in Scotland - except the filling was oatmeal and onions instead of sausage meat, probably to save money.
 
Limeade was my favourite. We used to have two bottles of pop delivered every week when I was a kid. I think it was called Corona. Some weird flavours.

Err I have to confess I like haggis, black pudding and stuff like that and I have actually bought brains faggots this decade.
 
That was interesting, not helpful, but interesting.

I finished the last of the junk/snack food yesterday morning, all that was left was one scone.

Yesterday afternoon I was more efficient/active, possibly not feeling so rough helped, I moved a storage heater 4 foot to the left, to allow my TV unit to sit against the wall.

I more or less got it right, the hole boring and positioning went perfectly.

However, the cable still needs shortening and mounting in a protective track, which will involve emptying the TV unit and dragging it out to allow working space, finding the tracking and cutting it in the loft, then more hole boring to secure it to the wall.

Whilst trying to tidy up the cabling last night I discovered that the storage heaters thermostat was just hanging loose down the back, so in order to fix that I need to dismantle and empty the storage heater so I can detach it from the wall and see if I can determine where the thermostat is supposed to live, before fixing it and reassembling the storage heater.

So, even with a pretty productive day yesterday, I am actually further back than I was yesterday morning. It'll all work as is, and I have the positioning right, it all looks good, apart from the cable being about 2 foot too long and not protected as the regulations suggest it should be.

I just need to pull it all apart again to sort out it's thermostat :banghead::banghead::banghead::banghead:

Apart from that, after a fairly short time without excessive carbs, the puffiness and constantly feeling uncomfortable is dropped down to more sensible levels. It would appear that much more than 150g a day of carbs (1 scone) makes me feel quite rough right now.

I more or less restarted my 'protocol', only 1 whey/powdered supplement drink, no salad or miso soup, but everything else was there. Will try and get more of it in today - and see if there are enough ingredients to make a miso soup. Apart from some tomatoes I doubt that there is any salvageable salad.

I actually had muscle tone last night, not so much this morning, but after a few days of being jelly dragged around by internal sticks I'll take what I can get.

Of course a lot of the food I was supposed to eat over the last few days before the insanity hit, has gone off, so until I can get some shopping, Friday probably, my options are a little limited - Not gonna starve, but may get bored.

ETA - My blood glucose level was 8.4mmol this morning, a rise of over 3mmol in a few days. Oddly it barely rose at all the first couple of days, I assume that the excess was being stored and soaked up that way, now the 'reservoirs' are full any excess stays in the blood. Easy to fix but it'll probably take a few days to strip out a significant amount of the stores and bring things back under control.
 
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Looks like these test strips are broken.

After only 3 days on a restricted carb diet - okay, really quite restricted, probably not more than 15g a day, although I'm not being religious about it I have managed to make most of a 'standard' days meals pretty close to 1-2g of carbs. The exception being miso soup which is about 4g a bowlful (don't you just love accurate and replicable measuring systems that include (per bowl) when giving all other numbers to 3 decimal places?)...

...anyway;

They say my glucose level is 55 mmol/L (blood reading was 6.2 mmol this morning), and my ketone level is 8 mmol/L (no idea but target range is between 0.5 and 3.0, and I have been un-reliably informed by google that if it goes above 16 then I am likely to be dead soon, which is nice.)

This shouldn't be possible in only 3 days (although thinking about it, on the days when I wasn't eating a takeaway, my diet was fairly low carb for a few days prior), unless something else is going on, or, more likely, I have a bad batch of test strips.

Next week I'll see if I have lost any earth weight, and maybe list what supplements etc. I am taking, in one concise list rather than over several posts
 
This morning I took ketone, glucose and blood glucose readings within a few minutes of getting up.

Ketones - between 4 and 8 mmol/L
glucose (urine) - trace
blood glucose 5.0mmol/L

This is considerably different from what I am seeing later in the day re: glucose.

As I am not consuming any significant amount of carbohydrates I can only hypothesis that my body is converting something into them as the day goes on.

As it's apparently not likely that it can do this with fats, these get turned into something related to ketones, it seem more likely that the culprit is protein.

As well as dietary protein I am taking around 60g of whey isolate a day as a supplement.

I can't do it today, other things to do, but testing around the time I take a shake may be an appropriate way to determine if this is happening.

The whey is being taken partially to stop my body doing precisely this to my muscle tissue, to encourage protein sparing and prevent muscle loss, as I can't train to encourage my body not to burn muscle tissue. It's also being taken to provide a carrier, that doesn't taste too bad for a few other powdered supplements I am taking.

It may be necessary to rethink this, depending on what testing shows.

I'm not paying the exorbitant amount that this whey costs just for my body to turn it into sugar and immediately dump it.
 
I haven't read the whole thread @Wonko, but I definitely plan to.

I'm working the same angle, mostly with foods (high nitrate foods, antioxidants, vitamin E, omega3, electrolytes). I'm also testing red light therapy at the moment. I see you're testing out ketosis, I've never had any luck doing that (but I'm female, we may tolerate it less than males), looking forward to follow your experience (and catch up to what you've done so far!) :)
 
Midnattsol said:
I haven't read the whole thread @Wonko, but I definitely plan to.
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Unless you're bored I'm not sure how much use reading all of it would be to you. It's quite long, I've made quite a few missteps and mistakes, and it seems, drawn the wrong conclusions on several occasions.

It's also not been kept updated as it should have been because apart from total gaps various parts are on a couple of other threads, I have posted stuff in whichever of my threads seemed most appropriate to me at the time.

This was definitely not the best way to do it, although it seemed so at the time.

I am hoping, in the next 2-4 weeks, to post an update, a tenuous conclusion of my results so far, that will only apply to me i.e. they will almost definitely not be generalizable to others, as I am me, I am not others, and experimenting on others is ethically frowned upon, and practically difficult, given there is only me here.

I am likely to post an update on my current regime, the things I have stuck with, sooner.

As it's primarily for my own purposes it will probably be long and boring ;)

It should be noted that I am not, in any of this, attempting to 'cure' my ME.

Nothing I am doing is likely to have that effect, in fact a lot of it has been scientifically proven, in various studies as well as others personal experiences, not to do so.

I'm not trying to cure myself of ME, that was/is not the aim of this thread.
 
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