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Continuos Glucose Monitors (part 2)

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About a year ago, I wrote this post about continuous glucose monitors, that’s sorta ‘part 1’ of these two parts.

Since then, and parallel to this most recent time with the sensor, I’ve encountered improvements to the ecosystem. The sensor technology is way better, as is the app/rendering of the data.

The long story and comparison between the new system and the old #

the technology has gotten way better and now costs $50/sensor instead of the $100/sensor it was as recently as a year ago, and I’ve updated my mental models in this space. It was time for an update on that post. Here it is.

My disappointment with the original implementation of the CGM device was that it was difficult to obtain and expensive, at $100 per two-week-long sensor, the sensor stored only a few hours of data on itself and needed frequent syncing, and the syncing was delicate. The phones NFC reader had to be almost exactly on the sensor itself. The apps for viewing the data were clunky and slow as well. There were two of them.

That’s all gone now! The default Amazon device is finally good enough! Lingo Continuous Glucose Monitor.

I also don’t have diabetes, and don’t have any warnings signs of pre diabetes or ‘metabolic syndrome’. I’m simply an intensely curious person.

The last time I checked the ecosystem for continuous glucose monitors, the sensors were still costing $100 per sensor, which lasted for two weeks. Wildly expensive, for something that doesn’t have too much going on inside of it. The actual cost to manufacture the sensor must be low numbers of dollars, to perhaps maybe even less than a dollar per sensor, at a certain scale of production.

Anyway, in the greater united states the price is now down to $53 per two week sensor, and is finally available via Amazon, instead of jumping through insurance-related hoops.

improvements in the sensor/app #

The sensor collects the data, the app displays it. The old sensor had a crappy app, and allowed for a brittle and slow third-party integration so the data could get off the ‘walled garden’ of the company that produced the sensor, and into a usable app. The integration was so slow I’d mostly use the default app, even though it was pretty bad.

Now the default app has a better UI than the third party app I used before, and the data syncs immediately. The device uses bluetooth to talk to the phone. The old CGM used near-field communication (the same technology for a cell phone’s ‘tap to pay’ feature. I had to tap my phone against the CGM to read it)

Now, because the device uses bluetooth, I no longer have to tap my phone to my upper arm to read the data. I open the app, and it pulls the data in in just a few seconds.

The app supports meal logging and exercise logging. (when one is exercising, often enough blood glucose goes up. Muscles are requesting energy, the liver responds by dumping a little bit of the 150 grams of glycogen it stores into the blood stream as glucose.)

The app is opinionated, and is designed f with diabetes, and labels all spikes in glucose as potentially troubling - if you log exercise it won’t count the rise as a negative thing. If it’s food-related, it counts the rise as a bad thing.

When I eat low-carb, no-sugar meals (which is my default meal) it’s sorta uncanny to see my blood sugar change not at all compared to the giant rise and eventual fall in my blood sugar after eating something carb-y and/or sugary.

How much glucose is in a human body anyway? #

At one point I was trying to figure out how much glucose was in my body anyway. Here’s my math, I was surprised at how small the actual figure was.

Supposedly, people who weigh what I do have about 4.5 liters of blood in their body. Imagine four 1 liter bottles side by side.

normal blood glucose readings are above 70mg/dL and below 140 mg/dL

if we were to convert those readings to grams per liter, what would it be?

How much sugar would i add to each liter of water, before it has the same sweetness level is normal in blood?

Does 7 gram per liter sound right? It sounded plausible to me - 7 grams of sugar mixed into a liter of water would make it perceivably sweet. it couldn’t be 70 grams of glucose per liter of blood.

What about .7 grams of glucose per liter of blood?

TURNS OUT THAT IS THE CONVERSION!

so my entire circulating supply of blood, when the reading is on the lower side, contains 3.15 grams of glucose. And at the higher side, contains 6.3 grams of glucose. That’s wild to me. That figure is so much less than I expected.

I use a food scale for brewing coffee and baking, so I know how small 5 grams of something is. That’s how much baking soda I’ll put in a single loaf of banana bread. I might put 70 grams of brown sugar into that loaf.

so, when my blood glucose is on the lower side of things, at .7 gram of glucose per liter of blood, with 4.5 liters of blood, I’d have 3.15 grams of glucose, in my entire blood stream.

A high level of glucose is 140mg/dL, or 1.4 grams of glucose per liter of blood.

My whole blood stream would be containing about 6.3 grams of glucose, max. I notice that this is less than I expected, and I’m sorta impressed with how quickly perhaps my body can use what’s in the blood stream, and can get more glucose into it.

Now I’m more impressed with my body’s ability to metabolize carbs and sugar than I was before. I was sorta off by a factor of 5 or 10, in my mental model for how this worked in my body. Whoops. I’m also impressed at my body’s ability to manage digestion in such a way, that even when I eat tons of sweet and carby things, the blood sugar doesn’t go through the roof.

Giant qualifications about health and eating #

Supremacy and purity culture/abstinence goes together. I talk a lot about food, but I don’t abstain from anything (including sex! but also food!) sorta ever. I’d rather feel extremely nourished, and when it comes to food, I do. When I talk about fasting or fasting essentialism stuff, it’s from a place of satiation and curiosity, sorta a sense of wow, I’m shocked to not yet feel hunger, how convenient all the other things I can do with my time/life/energy… sorta way. Not suffering. This concept is why I hate the concept of ‘counting calories’, either in or out. More on that another time.

I also try pretty hard to avoid anything that feels too eating-disorder adjacent. For fun, I read a memoir from someone with an eating disorder, to see if my relationship with food seemed sufficiently different than the one modeled in the book. Indeed, my suspicion/hope is satisfied, it doesn’t seem like an eating disorder.

It’s simply an idiosyncratic, adaptable/flexible/consistent form of feeding myself, alternating between periods of not eating, interspersed mostly with eating really nice, healthy meals.

I mix in a bit of ‘working out’. Same as how I sorta hate american hunting culture, I sorta hate gym culture.

anyway… I’ve been freaking loving these “isometric bar holds” I’ve been doing. That’s part 1, and I have a part 2 soon to land. It’s been huge, for me, and a bunch of friends have tried these lifts with me, and they give pretty good reviews.

mixing it all together - slightly timing meals, and eating plant fat + mushrooms + cruciferous stuff #

The original thesis was mostly that intermittent fasting is cool (like skipping breakfast) and otherwise model sugar as to be avoided and bread-type-things as overall delicious but best avoided. Fat, especially olive oil, I treat as a health food. The more the better.

I hope we all add at least 10-15 g of olive oil to every meal for the rest of our lives.

if there’s enough fat, and/or glucose isn’t extremely plentiful/overly-saturating, eventually the body burns through some glucose stores (seemingly mostly in the liver, a few hundred grams of it) and then turns on this whole cool-as-heck freaking ‘energy generation via ketone bodies’ thing.

the tl;dr is the body CAN make glucose out of fat, and can metabolize fat directly for energy.

The liver can make molecules out of fat (it can also make glucose out of fat), and some of these molecules are called ‘ketones’.

and then mitochondria, which usually use glucose to generate energy can also generate energy via these ketone bodies.

There’s urine tests one can use to measure ketones, or breath ketone detectors, or blood ketone detectors. All look at different molecules, but in all cases nearly levels of any of the looked-for molecules count as ‘being in ketosis’

Mid levels of ketone readings, in the blood, is like .4 grams per liter, once that system is in operation. Close in amount to the amount of glucose that is in the blood.

And it’s not ‘glucose OR ketones’, it’s always ‘glucose AND ketones’. There simply will not be any ketones made by the liver until the glucose levels stay low for a long enough time. Then the liver begins to make ketone bodies, along with glucose.

A reluctant book recommendation: Brain Energy #

I encountered a few more books. Turns out the brain functions pretty differently in a high/medium sugar environment vs. low-sugar and ketones environment.

Brain Energy by Christopher Palmer was… adequate. I sorta hate books written by western doctors, usually. They seem patronizing and self-aggrandizing, but maybe that’s me projecting my own least favorite parts of myself onto the author. lol.

The book Grain Brain was interesting enough to justify renting it from the library and listening to the audiobook. I dislike something that seems to be common among books written by medical professionals. It seems nakedly condescending, and paternalistic, at times. alas, still worth sifting through. The focus on the brain was distinctive. After reading it, I began to appreciate that my brain is like three pounds of pure fat, and my spinal cord and the main parts of the 11 or 22 cranial nerves is probably most of another pound of fat.

Another splash of olive oil. Some coconut oil, too. Those are the two plant fats I eat lots of.

Crucial point of distinction: it can be done without meat #

Nearly every book I’ll link to, in this piece, and in most books one encounters about a low-carb high-fat consumption pattern, seems to take as a given that meat can or should be consumed, daily, or in every single meal, and the authors (maybe they’re too propagandized by the american agricultural industry) cannot bring themselves to even mention the possibility of this thing being done with zero or very low amounts of meat. Some of the books seriously advocate for the ‘carnivore diet’, which is mostly eating pure meat.

sidebar: after originally writing these words I sorted out what ‘glutamate’ was, and how interesting it is now when I notice that some cancer cells are known to be able to ferment glutamate IF glucose isn’t available.

I almost don’t eat any meat. I do sometimes eat some fish. (salmon or sardines, very occasionally. Certainly at least once a month, never close to daily)

Mushrooms are a complete protein - every essential amino acid is available via mushrooms.

The paper Edible mushrooms: A potential source of essential amino acids, glucans and minerals. Int. J. Food Sci. Technol. could be an interesting read. It was for me.

So, a few years ago, I started ensuring mushrooms are present in my diet regularly, as consistently as some people might eat meat, and I think with a similar sense of savory nourishment. I literally tripped over the agaricus bisporus mushrooms at a local park, and have since then been picking all my mushrooms from there and I eat them regularly. I’ve foraged dozens of pounds of mushrooms from the park, now.

But before foraging them from the park, I’d always have mushrooms on hand from a local grocery store, and would add them to my meal, described below.

Autophagy #

The body is always taking old cells apart for parts, and rebuilding structures as needed. Some cell types (epethelial cells) regenerate/renew relatively quickly, lasting for just a few days or weeks, and others turn over slowly, lasting for months.

‘Autophagy’ is the sciency term for this. The process is determined by mitochondria. The cell doesn’t decide it’s time for itself to die, mitochondria decide it’s time for the cell to die, and basically induce a suicide for the cell. (the book, power, sex, and suicide is all about mitochondria and their rather interesting relationship to the cells they operate within and around)

healthy mitochondria are hella smart, and it’s very very nice for the body to do some autophogy. Fasting and fasting-mimicking nutrition patterns encourage autophagy. The cool thing is, it seems mitochondria are smart enough to consume to unhealthiest parts of the body. So, one can sorta replace the oldest/most-worn-out parts of oneself, if one is having lots of autophagy going on.

Augophagy is low when glucose levels are high. Atophagy is high when glucose levels are low and ketone bodies are high.

Meat is wildly over-consumed #

Something that annoys me a little in the ketosis-discussing books is how the authors (or posters online) seem to all hold oddly strong beliefs about the “obvious” need for nearly daily consumption of meat!

I find this super disappointing. It seems possible that meat is not bad for you. Yet the consumption of factory-raised-and-slaughtered animal products, the scale at which it’s happening, and the legit concerns about the actual product, even if one had no ethical qualms about the animal slaughter itself… i remember when I was eating meat regularly and couldn’t imagine stopping eating it. Bacon was in my daily omelette, I didn’t think I could give it up. Then I read eating animals and that’s basically the last time I ate meat. I have had a few bites of meat here and there in the decade that’s elapsed since I read the book.

I’m certainly not a vegan.

I eat eggs, so many eggs, almost never less than three per day, and I put heavy cream in my coffee, usually, and sometimes eat cheese, and I bake with butter. It’s been almost ten years since I’ve bought meat in a grocery store and taken it home to cook, but it’s been twenty years since I’ve not eaten at least three eggs every single day, except for rare days when I’m fasting. I keep dancing around the idea of eliminating eggs from my consumption, but have not found a way yet.

I now think it probable that eating a lot of meat is unhealthy. Drinking milk seems obviously problematic, for the same reasons as meat, and maybe some extra ones as well. (animals when drinking milk in normal states are in a period of growth, so the rich hormone profile of animal milk, reasonable for babies, makes less sense for adults. Milk to me is sorta carby, too. Anything that ends in -ose is a sugar. Glucose, fructose, lactose)

So, if one takes meat and most dairy away, and if one treats grains like bread and rice as unhealthy and best avoided - is there even anything left to eat?

yes. endless varieties of vegetables, mushrooms, eggs, and an abundance of olive oil.

So, that’s what I eat, nearly exclusively. For things to taste ‘good’ vs. bland (I grew up in a white peoples cooking culture - bland and unseasoned) I use lots of spices. I keep a big bag of ginger and garlic nearby - every meal gets a little of that, diced. Spicy peppers. Salt & pepper, of course, and I’ve lately been spicing the meal with garam masala, curry, tumeric, cumin, and more. I’ll splash some lemon juice and scallions over the whole thing when plating it, and the food is so good that even now, after making variations of this meal hundreds of times, it is still remarkable to me how good it tastes.

On meat & protein & ‘gaining muscle’ #

sometimes I’m a bit angry when I’m penning some words, if it’s not obvious.

there is something in gym culture that is distasteful to me. Seems like ‘getting big muscles’ is the presumed good and ideal outcome of nearly all exercise? At least from one POV. There’s people who add tons of protein powder to every meal. There’s things floating around that says someone “should” eat 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body mass, or per kg of lean body mass. I’ve never counted calories and never counted grams of protein. When I do count up my regular protein consumption, it works out to way less than half the ‘recommended’ amount of protein. I rock climb, and would gladly accept a lower weight, if it didn’t come with any strength penalty, or hunger. No meat, no protein powder, and I’m doing just fine, though I must mention I don’t consider myself to be particularly good at rock climbing.

even a gram of protein per KG of lean body mass is wild, to me. No one’s body is simply adding muscle to the frame because there’s extra protein in the system.

I simply wanna name that, because I’ve been seeing a comical amount of new muscle lately with these isometric bar holds, for the first time in my life. Small amounts of muscle, small amounts of protein, small amounts of high-quality exercise-adjacent stimulus.

Calories in/Calories out #

I hold the Calories In/Calories Out model, for what is implied on both the inputs side, and energy expenditure side. Literally never in my life have I looked at the calory count on a food package. literally all I look at is the quantity of carbs.

But it’s physics …

say the CI/CO people.

I also don’t know what it means to ‘burn a calorie’. Like, whatever is meant when someone says “walking burns so and so calories.” or “i ate a , so now I have to <'exercise' a certain amount>."

I think that mental model is unhelpful at best.

  1. The body manages itself pretty well. weight gain is driven by insulin levels. If insulin is stuck in the system, cells that can store fat, will store fat. If insulin is low, the body can access energy in normal ways, including metabolizing fat that already exists in the system. If insulin is kept high, eventually ‘insulin resistance’ happens, all sorts of other troublesome effects happen.

‘Weight gain’ is extremely NOT related to ‘eating more calories than one expends’. The Case Against Sugar goes through the stories of so many different people groups who encountered industrialized food systems, even into the 1950s. Sugar/carbs causes the blood glucose levels to rise, and eventually insulin gets secreted to bring the glucose back down, but if more and more stuff is in the system resulting in insulin needing to stay up, bad things happen.

Sustained, ‘chronic’ reliance upon insulin leads straight to metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is the same as insulin resistance, is the same as pre-diabetes.

Fasting will very, very quickly bring back insulin sensitivity, if it’s been absent. “exercise” cannot address the issues of elevated levels of insulin, except for a bit of movement after eating, maybe?

I use my glucose sensor, a low carb meal + a five minutes of walking sometims around seems to let the blood sugar levels stay completely flat. Even if I don’t walk around at all, after this ‘sorta weird’ meal I usually eat, there’s zero bump to blood sugar, in a way that I maybe seems surprising. It was to me, at least.

This whole thing is talking about food, and digestion. The gut is pretty cool. (I really liked Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ).

Part of oral health is keeping the mouth clean and inhospitable to bacteria while letting the mouth do its own thing.

Fasting and/or no-sugar eating seems obviously gentle on the teeth, compared to using the mouth constantly.

I stumbled across a thing called oil pulling once. I saw that coconut oil was one of the suggested oils.

I already think of coconut oil as nearly pure ketones. The story goes:

MCT (medium chain triglycerides) Oil is really expensive and fancy ‘pure liquid ketones’, supposedly.

Coconut oil has a lot of the biological precursors of those ketone-specific form of MCTs, and is antibacterial, and great for the skin, lips, body anyway.

It seems that most people who subscribe to oil pulling spit out the oil, but it cannot go into a sink because it contributes to clogged pipes.

The solution that seemed easiest to me is to pick an oil I already consume and think highly of, and simply swish it around for a bit before eating it, so that’s now what I do with coconut oil, in a way that relates to oral health.

I also found some gum with nano-hydroxyapatite, seems to help resurface the teeth, and floss, and have a home de-scaler so I can make sure plaque doesn’t build up around my permanent retainer.

So far, my oral health has been nice in a way it’s historically not been, but the biggest intervention I made was fixing my tongue tie and my mouth no longer is open when I sleep or when I’m awake, so that alone could have more of an improving effect on my oral health than all over interventions combined.

Mitochondria are cool as heck #

I was one of the folks with a certain mental model of mitochondria as sorta passive ‘energy making things’, left over from some high school biology textbook.

I quite liked this book about cellular biology: Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. Mitochondria as energy generation (including the aerobic oxygen+glucose pathway, the anerobic glucose fermentation pathway, and the pathway that uses ketones to generate energy, when there’s not glucose in the environment).

The ‘suicide’ part of the title of that book refers to how mitochondria decide “for the cell” when the cell is to be deconstructed for parts. From the cell’s POV, it’s an induced suicide, from the mitochondria’s POV, it’s taking apart a structure for the bare materials and re-assembling a fresh or related or different structure. In american scientific english, that is called ‘autophagy’, and healthy/happy mitochondria do a lot of selective, necessary cell removal.

Related, Change Your Diet, Change Your Mind: A Powerful Plan to Improve Mood, Overcome Anxiety, and Protect Memory for a Lifetime of Optimal Mental Health

I hate the title. Again, american medical establishment paternalistic talk. And yet, worth sifting through. Talks about low-sugar brain function vs. high-sugar brain function. The former is quite a bit different and improved from the latter.

I’d never conceived of a high-fat low-carb feeding pattern as a tool for ‘managing moods’ until pretty recently, but I encountered it on reddit (example search), eventually found the above book, and was glad I did.

Other Reading #

  • Just a few months ago, I found Ravenous: Otto Warburg, the Nazis, and the Search for the Cancer-Diet Connection. I’d long heard of Otto Warburg, in the history of cancer research for his encounter of that interesting feature of call cancer cells - that their normal cellular metabolic functioning is broken and they laboriously ferment blood sugar. The book is fascinating, Otto Warburg was a bit of an ass, and the vignettes about Hitler and other Nazis were top notch. (Lots of american purity culture is in common with some nazi norms around purity culture).
  • Tripping over the Truth this book is nearly the origin story, I first read it many years ago now, and still think of it regularly. Seems reasonable now to say “cancer is a reasonable result of ‘everything is too sugary too much of the time’.”

that means resolving THAT issue, and keeping things low-sugar for a while and seeing what happens, works so well.

note on fast-adjacent things #

I keep noticing a pattern when medical people talk about this low-glucose state, and I think they’re overstating aspects of it. But maybe the technology wasn’t available when they wrote these books - a good continuous glucose monitor + app integration became widely available only in 2024 or however long Lingo figured out how to get $50 two-week CGM sensors on Amazon available to anyone with a credit card.

as I’ve read some of the books like finally finding an e-book copy of [Thomas Seyfried’s book]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13719723-cancer-as-a-metabolic-disease?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=B9UvTfpzvN&rank=1() that kept getting mentioned in other texts.

Cancer as a metabolic disease, libraries and had no luck getting a physical copy….

I found the PDF on thepiratebay, and started skimming around the document. I notice that I sorta find myself eating in a way that could be called ‘keto-ish’ sometimes, was curious to see what they said about it all.

For instance, they talk about caloric restriction a lot, but I don’t think that’s part of the solution at all. Turns out cancer can also or maybe ferment something besides exclusively glucose - sometimes maybe it can do glutamate too? (if your next question is the same as mine, ‘what he hell is glutamate?’ and you google ‘sources of glutamate’, you’ll say “oh that makes sense”)

If someone drops meat out of their diet, and backfills it with cruciferous vegetables, mushrooms, eggs, and olive oil & coconut oil, and occasional salmon & sardines (those fish in particular!), that person probably wouldn’t consider themselelves to be starving, but while keeping that pattern, their blood sugar will go to levels that some medical people think is ‘dangerously low’ (it’s not) and their body will go into pretty hefty ketosis.

I think then there’s no sugar in the system for fermentating energy systems to ferment. Supposedly cancer cells can also ferment glutamine. I didn’t know what glutamine was and how it was different than glutamate, or what their relationships to anything else was. a med student on r/medicalschoolanki had a beautiful answer.

anyway, knowing now what glutamate is, could you imagine a way to have less of it floating around, because just like glucose the body can apparently fabricate it itself? One would simply stop eating meat, if one was eating meat. Knowing that perhaps cells can ferment glutamine same as glucose, or that they can in at least some situations, was an interesting connection for me to make. I think there’s plenty of other good reasons to gnerally not eat meat, though. (except for, again, occasionally, sardines and salmon, or maybe fish overall but not very much. Certainly never pigs, dinosaur birds (chickens) or cows).

So I think a crucial mistake ppl might make when thinking they’re avoiding sugar is not avoiding the glutamate. Model an ideal nutrition source as ‘not glucose’ and ‘not glutamate’, and drop meat out of one’s diet completely, and good things might happen. all the meat-based amino acids float around the blood stream perhaps, same as sugar?

anyway…. I want to introduce ‘the meal’ and eating it once or twice-ish a day. And always eating once or twice-ish a day. If this meal is one of those regular meals, it might count as…. I donno. solves a lot of problems, in a pretty humble package, kinda. But still enough pretentiousness that it can be appreciated, and it’s delicious enough and can be done in just a few steps. A preference for spending most of the time not eating also gets fun. perhaps.

Visualizing Mitochondria #

I had always thought of mitochondria as sorta passive blobs that did biochemistry to generate ATP, which was used by the body to ‘do shit’.

Turns out they are busy as hell.

A book titled Power, Sex, and Suicide really did it all for my brain when it comes to mitochondria. (The book is about mitochondria)

For instance, cells do not want to ‘die’ and strenuously resist apoptosis until the very end. It’s mitochondria that get in there, and in a rather surgical and ruthless way, sorta eviscerate the cell from the inside out, and then they leave the cell and carry on in other places

I thought mitochondria were stuck inside of cells, floating, sorta like plastic balls floating on the surface of a pool.

Turns out that isn’t the case at all.

The first 3 of these videos were the first ones I saw and really surprised me. As I’ve since tried to re-find those videos from years ago, I’ve linked a few other short timelapse videos of mitochondrial movement/dynamics

5 hr timelapse mitochondria, in like 6 seconds

30 minutes of Mitochondrial transport along microtubules, 10 second timelapse

11 second video, mitochondria moving in a cell

Mitochondrial transfer between pre-adipocytes?

mito movement (12 seconds)

Golgi and Mitochondria Dynamics in Fibroblast Cells Under a Fluorescence Microscope

Visualizing mitochondrial trafficking in neurons

Mitochondrial dynamics through cell division

A note on calories in/calories out #

this model, ‘calories in calories out’, is total bullshit. so many issus with the input side of calories, and in the ‘output’ side of calories.

I AM SO SORRY I CANNOT HELP BUT LEAD WITH HOW I FEEL ABOUT IT! I’ll explain.

Unfortunately, though, I never really ever thought CICO was true, it felt intuitively wrong to me my whole life.

Even the last youtube video above, right after the timestamp it opens to, the creator says “too much nutrition”.

It’s not that! It’s not too much energy or nutrition or over-feeding, it’s too much glucose and ‘too much’ and ‘too long’.

Body composition things is OBVIOUSLY a hormone issue! It’s so screamingly obvious and assumed as true by every other related domain that it’s wild that anyone still says CICO! If that were the case, hormone therapies of all kinds would not be an option! Weight gain and loss and muscle recomposition is such a known part of horomone therapies. They’re either the entire point, or they’re the entire obvious downside.

if the body is soaked in sugar for too much of the time, insulin gets created and sent into the system in excessive quantities. Insulin has an effect on hormones of all sorts. Insulin resistance is synonymous with miss-calibrated everything else.

“working hard” is a waste compared to “moving enough that the muscles are involved in drawing glucose out of the blood, if there is 1) too much sugar in the blood, or 2) there is sugar in the digestive tract that needs to be metabolized and released into the bloodstream, _because there’s no where else for it to go.

Is it possible for the intestines to preferentially avoid digesting sugar and/or carbs? Can it be ‘spent’ in the gut biome, instead of going into the blood stream? If a dog were to eat shit post-sugary meal, would it taste sweeter than a regular shit?

the body absolutely does not need any sort of steady input of nutrition, to maintain itself in a perfectly suitable fashion.

‘calorie restricted’, ‘calorie deficit’ is the same attitude

calorie deficit is propaganda, counterproductive #

to think in the concept of calorie deficit, or to try to retain it like an emotional pool noodle is harmful.

source is everything. Fat is far better as fuel than sugar, which is obvious when you see both burn in a fire. fat will puddle, bubble, it obviously has a higher heat retention capacity, catagorically different than cellulose (woody stuff, bready stuff, wet sugar).

That said, here’s some interesting videos I recently watched on mitocohndria.

(I was looking for some videos I’d seen where mitochondria were ‘tagged’ with some thing and able to be seen moving around)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQBmtzT4VTU

Mitochondria generate energy inside of neurons & mitochondria prefer to consume ‘ketone bodies’ #

ketone bodies are made by the liver, same sorta process as the liver makes glucose. (the liver makes glucose, it stores it, and releases into the blood stream if the muscles or whatever asks for it)

ketone bodies theoretically generate like 10x molecules of ATP per input molecule than glucose molecule. (8 in, 30 out?) I don’t exactly remember. It’s the ‘krebs cycle’ or ‘cytric acid cycle’.

The krebs cycle happens inside of the physical structure of a mitochondria. That sorta grooved membrain thing. It’s a shape that maximizes internal surface area, same as the folding grooves of the brain.

mitochondrial health and ‘brain/neuron health’ are 1:1. I did not know until like a year ago that there was any correlation between ketone bodies and mental/emotional stuff. read that again

the book power sex and suicide posits that mitichondria are their own type of organizem and sorta colonized/invaded/helped regular cells, sorta an inside out version of the harmonious relationship between bacteria and plants in the “rhiozome”. (in the top layer of soil, plants deposit sun/water combined energy, it’s eaten by bacteria, bacteria create as a result certain metabolic products that is then taken up and used by the plant.)

These systems could be considered to have their own independent existences, but happily exist with each other, wherever there’s metabolizing to be done.

brain energy was an adequate read.

a huge tldr of all this is to just get a continuous blood glucose monitor, eat a high fat, low-carb, low protein meal next, and then begin successive 18 hour fasts. perhaps within one day (for me) but maybe more one will see one’s glucose levels stay pretty low, except during exercise or activity. climbing, walking, running, throwing a frisbee, walking stairs, etc.

Though if I did those things after eating a big meal, and seeing my blood sugar go up, with a little activity, it would sorta dive right back to normal. At least until a little more of the meal was digested, then it might go up again.

big part of the demand side for getting blood sugar down is ‘any process in the body requesting energy’ so if one walks long/fast enough (or, my favorite stim, walking up and down a few flights of stairs) for the body to request energy, one can see one’s blood sugar plummet, in the space of a few minutes.

It’s like wringing out a sponge, how quickly the few nalgine bottles worth of blood in our body to pick up 4 grams of glucose, it gets pulled out of the blood and the digestive tract can dump another few grams of glucose, which it’ll do smartly and with reasonable timing, if you set it up well enough for success.

more on that later

(I can be fasted for one, two, three days, and my glucose levels stay pretty similar during the day to when I’m eating normal low-carb type shit. )

in the space of a few minutes, if I do intense exercise, like hill sprints or climbing or lifting, or walking around for five minutes, or walking up and down the stairs in the six-floor building in which i live….

while wearing a cgm, i can see blood sugar go up, then down, then up, then down, quickly, right after having a big meal of bread, or doughnuts, or pizza, or indian food buffet with naan, or this, or that, or whatever…

so, it’s not ‘too much calories’. blood sugar does not budge at all when I eat this meal.

TODO: insert a few screenshots of Libre CGM data? this needs to be it’s own blog post.

anyway, this meal is good, everyone loves it.

✨ The Meal ✨ #

todo: make this its own page

I have a meal that I eat basically every day. If I eat a meal that isn’t this meal, my other meal for the day will be this meal. I eat almost exclusively twice-ish a day. Sometimes less, sometimes more, never breakfast.

TODO: Add a photo of the finished result?

Google doc of printable instructions

I like it because while I can cook it easily, I always make it in bulk and get a few meals out of a single session with the cutting board/cast iron skillet meal vibe.

I note that it is something that in some communities is a big deal, or even an impossibility.

It’s a ‘keto-friendly’ meal, functionally zero carbs or zero net carbs. This meal as eaten is both deeply satiating and will cause not a single point increase in your blood sugar. It HATE counting calories and never have and never will, and i dislike the concept of ‘macros’, but this meal is zero carb, high fat, medium protein, zero meat, some eggs.

i don’t eat meat which matters to me when I talk about keto things, because some keto communities eat wild, horrifying amounts of meat. Cows, pigs, chickens. I don’t eat those anymore. I do sometimes eat fish.

But I can easily go weeks without eating any sort of meat, not even fish, and not miss it or think about it or feel that I am in any way nutrient deficient.

I’ve cooked this meal or a version of this meal every day for at least 12 years. I’ve cooked this meal in like 18 countries, many dozens of kitchens. It’s easy to grocery shop for, flexible based on if any produce is in the refrigerator and going bad, but can also be made out of vegetables that only slowly go bad.

onions and carrots, for instance, will keep for a long time (weeks), and can be a perfect base of the meal. But it can also take spinach or any other ‘delicate’ vegetable.

I cook it because I am dumb and lazy and am sometimes using unfamiliar kitchens. I am not dumb, but some people have literally made fun of me for learning some of the things I’ve learned related to the kitchen, making fun of me for not having already known something. what the fuck.

for instance, mushrooms can be/want to be cooked ‘dry’ on a pan. No oil needed. Lots of veggies can accommodate this method.

Also, if the pan is getting hot or you want to steam the contents a bit you can add water to a hot pan while the food is cooking, and the temperature of the pan goes down, food sticks a bit less, and sometimes steam is created. I was 36, burning food to the bottom of a stainless steel pan in an unfamiliar kitchen, trying unsuccessfully to scrape burnt food off the bottom of that pan, when I learned this, and immediately found the obviousness of ‘add water to a pan’ breathtaking. I use it often when cooking, now, even in my cast iron, and love it for me.

today’s 10,000, explanation

it’s good as hell. I’ve gotten particularly good with it in the last year or so, but even the ‘basic’ version of this meal is delicious, and many others have reported as such to me.

When I do my standard, current, at-home meal, it’s mouth wateringly good. And still, I cook it because it’s the fastest way of putting heat and food together and then shoveling the results into my mouth.

People who know what they’re talking about have remarked on the speed and voracity with which I sometimes consume my food. The first time this was pointed out to me, in such a gentle and interesting way, I was instantly shocked that I’d never noticed it before. I’ve since gained lots of ‘mindfullness’ around food, or at least I can observe myself and have awareness when I’m deep into what seems to be pouring food into my body (and sometimes water) in a way that gives ‘camel’.

todo: insert photo of the pan sitting one step away from where I type these words…

I have a printable version of this ‘recipe’/instruction combination.

I could/should include perhaps a timelapse video that shows the prep. It’s relatively quick, and I consider myself skillful with a chef’s knife and enjoy the chopping of the veggies and the prep of the meal.

Because of a few decisions/tools/workflows, this meal is also for me easy to set up and easy to clean up. I can finish cooking with a cleaner workspace than what I start with, because most of the meal time is spent with the food sitting quietly & sauteeing, not needing active tending. It makes zero dirty pots and pans.

side note, the convection cook top unit I use makes it even easier to get this meal done quickly and effortlessly. It’ll maybe show up in the time lapse some day.

Google doc of printable instructions

interestingness is next to beauty, sorta. I think deliciousness is next to beauty, too, and this meal sometimes tastes delicious and interesting.

Basically, as many of the first line with one or two items from the second line for bulk:

mix as much of this as possible: garlic, ginger, tumeric, lemon juice. Salt, cumin. Mushrooms. Spiciest peppers possible, at least a little

Fill volume of cooking container with one: Broccoli, cabbage, carrots, onions,

Oil/fat: olive oil or coconut cream.

Acid: lemon.

Mix it all together, cook it up, add eggs, mix the eggs in somehow, cook it all through, serve it up. Top with green onions, squeeze a lemon slice over it if you can, and then pour a HEAVY drizzle of EVOO, maybe sriracha or something spicy. It’s a meal, satisfying as hell.

I can eat this meal once a day and hardly even detect hunger in my body between meals.

Cast Iron is crucial, and a ‘cookie turner’ spatula. This would mean there’s iron in a very healthy way.

The point isn’t iron, it’s ease and effortlessness. I can scrape my pan clean with a metal spatchula if I want, i never have to put water on it to clean.

It perhaps makes sense in the video timelapse… that I’ve not yet published. I’ve got some time lapses of chunks of this meal prep. Maybe I’ll just combine them all and link it here.

i recently started adding fresh squeezed lemon to all sorts of things. And energy generation in the body is named the citric acid cycle, so maybe the deliciousness relates to how useful it is to have in the body.

Similar as the ‘lemon in lots of things’, I started wearing socks inside of my climbing shoes, virtually 100% of the time, from the first time I tried it. I never want to stick my bare feet in a climbing shoe again and it’s unlikely I ever will. consider trying it with a sense of curiosity, if you can. I’m weird, but not for this. Thank you, person who introduced me to these things.

Garlic, as much as I can get in a meal and in my life. I found this delightful book in the library attached to the botanic gardens. I was already pro-garlic because of taste, and now I’m all the more pro-garlic.

Garlic is a ‘natural antibiotic’, but unlike most normal antibiotics, it works on both gram positive and gram negative bacteria cell wall types. penaccilin works on only one of those types of bacteria. something something all bacteria have cell walls that are either gram positive or gram negative, but it affects how they interact (or don’t interact) with traditional antibiotics.

Super cool. Again, this book that I stumbled across was great. Garlic has been used sorta by everyone, across time, to do useful things for all sorts of life-related domains. this 1996 book is a nice compendium of what is known in english about garlic, the chemical compounds within it, why they seem to do what they do

Pulse oximiter, blood oxygen level & breath holding #

this could be it’s own article.

There’s an interesting little device one can get off amazon, it’s quite cheap, a fingertip pulse measuring device, it also detects blood oxygen levels.

footnote? “technically something about oxygen carrying capacity of available total as detected in the capillary network of the fingertip”

I got it around the same time that I started using a ‘breathholding training’ app. I wanted to know what my pulse was, and this was a simple way to measure.

So, I can clip this to my finger, and immediately see my pulse printed out, and the blood oxygen level.

And, turns out that when doing breath holding training, the blood oxygen level sometimes does really interesting things, and I’ve not seen other people talk about this yet.

I can watch my blood oxygen level change (or not change) as I hold my breath. Sometimes I’d be at the end of my breath, it felt like my body was screaming for me to take another breath, and my blood oxygen level would be close to the max value, 99 or 100%.

I noticed this but it didn’t really mean anything of interest to me, for months.

I can do some breath holding training, and do a ‘one rep max’ breath hold test, and always was able to do above two minutes, maybe close to three. with a little practice, I found myself easily doing three-something minutes.

Sometimes during long breath holds, when my body was still, I’d see the blood oxygen level tick downward to the low 90s or 80s. Nothing too severe.

And then a tiny realization clicked, it was based off observations of how I sometimes observed my blood oxygen level going down, and then DOWN QUITE A LOT! and then popping right back up within seconds once I started breathing again. I gained an appreciation for how quickly blood that was allowed to pick up oxygen would reach the tips of my finger, to be read by the blood oxygen level sensor.

turns out the thing that makes you want to breath is buildup of CO2, not lowering blood oxygen levels. This was always something I knew academically, but I’d not had much experience with it.

So, a few weeks ago, a new mental model of my own respiration and metabolic processes clicked into place. I’ll do deep breathing for at least 30 seconds before starting a breath hold - in my mind, I’m running blood that has some amount of CO2 in it through my lungs, and i’m draining it of CO2 faster than my body is placing CO2 back in the blood cells.

I believe my body circulates my entire 4.5 liters of blood at least once a minute, so this deep breathing moves more CO2 out of my blood than normally would be displaced if I were not doing that deep breathing.

Then, when I take a deep breath and hold it, I have much more space in my blood supply to store CO2, which is being generated, slowly, throughout the breath hold.

This means I can hold my breath much longer before the same amount of ‘pressure to breath’ builds. And, consequentially, much more of the oxygen that is in my blood gets consumed, before I take another breath.

The same day I had this realization, I did far and away the longest breath hold that I’d ever done - over four minutes. I was shocked! It’s so interesting.

I also was able to see my blood oxygen level go far lower than I ever had before. At no point did I experience any sort of cognitive effect or any sort of loss of conciousness, but I was comforably holding my breath while watching the pulse oximiter show values in the 70s, and then even into the 60s.

It always dips a few more points after I start breathing, so the lowest values I’ve ever seen are always a few seconds after I begin breathing. This time I even saw it dip down to 51% for a brief moment, and then a few breaths later it was back to 100%.

It feels like a form of training, no different than sprint workouts or heavy isometrics or climbing - I am imagining that some aspect of my respiratory or circulatory system is getting ‘tuned up’ by this practice. I find it deeply regulating and peace-promoting.

I use the ‘STAmina Apnea Trainer app’ for android. it’s free. There seems to be an iphone version too.

here’s the app

I always do the breath holding while lying in my bed or hammock, by the way. Zero interest in water, never will have any.

I also sometimes am in deeper-than-usual ketosis, when doing the breath holding training, and that almost certainly extends how long I can hold my breath. I’ve not tested it very much, but maybe i’ll update this section with more on that sometime.

‘ketone bodies’ whatever the heck those are #

this is extra drafty, I’ve been curious about this all, and I’ve long ago occasionally used some ‘ketone urine test strips’ (like this on amazon, i don’t do affiliate anything fwiw)

and those are fine, whatever, but sorta hard to read, and usually I was sorta low, but way more often than I’d expected I was getting positive ketone measurements.

also, I didn’t/don’t have too much of a mental model of how much is what, what it means. blah blah blah.

Those are just a few dollars on Amazon, so just a few cents per test. But still not free.

More expensive per test, but something that was more interesting to me was a blood ketone testing kit. It’s basically a blood sugar testing kit (finger prick, then measure with a disposable stick) which I’ve used in the past, prior to my first test with the continuous blood glucose monitor. I’d never had them both at the same time. Anyway, the first batch of those tests, I remember being surprised at how often my body was in slight ketois. .2 mmol/liter or .3 or .4, and ‘nutritional ketosis’, whatever that is, is generally considered by american medical people to begin at .5 mmol/liter. I’d be at/above that value quite often, too, when doing my normal nutritional pattern around ‘the meal’, I describe elsewhere.

Anyway, that was a long time ago.

More recently though has been a breath ketone measuring device! this is what I got

It’s cost-per-use is free, and I’ve always noticed and/or wondered about value changes around exercise, fasting, pseudo-fasting, binging-on-pizza-and-ice-cream or having regular or occasional foods like that.

Sorta testing the Standard American Diet on myself sometimes, and also testing my normal/default eating pattern.

the breath meter is super easy, way easier than a BLOOD PRICK of course, generates zero waste, is just battery powered. Perfect.

But then I was like “what tf is this thing measuring”, and what is the possible relationship between the number this thing prints out, and metabolic processes inside my own body.

I’ve so far seen plenty of readings as low as 1 for myself, including times that I had thought I wouldn’t be in any form of ketosis, and values of 4-6 WAY more frequently than I would have thought.

It does read zero, as well, at reasonable times. I’ve also seen values as high as 46!!!

I’m pretty healthy, I like how I eat, and it turns out I’m in ketosis way more than I ever thought I would be, and I think it’s a big deal.

Basically, it’s easy, healthy, and I’m low-key advocating for more people to consider some of the same patterns. It’s a bit feral, unconventional, and even low-capitalism. My personal implementation of these norms are very interesting to me, and I’d have done more of this long ago if I knew some of what I know now.

breath acetone is what the breath thing measures - acetone is one of the three main ‘ketone bodies’ (whatever the heck those are) the other one is what is measured in the urine test strip, and the third is measured in the blood.

Turns out they all seem to sorta follow each other, but I don’t know how closely.

breath meter -> acetate (might be/probably ‘downstream’ of being burned for energy)

urine stick -> ACETOACETIC ACID (might be ‘upstream’ of being burned for energy)

blood stick ->

I sometimes have done all this experimentation while exercising, or various amounts of time since my last meal, or my last high-glucose meal. I now have an intuition for the answers to all these options.

I seem to usually have positive values on the breath ketone meter, even at times I thought I wouldn’t. Sometimes the values are quite high, _even when I am consuming my normal eating patterns, which doesn’t set out to accomplish any of this kind of thing.

More lists of books that have been quite interesting to me #

  • Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer I was able to find the PDF on the peer to peer file sharing prot=ocol
  • Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life best cell biology book I’ve read. Dense, I was able to get it via the library’s interlibrary loan system, was exceptional, mitochondria have a sorta…. adversarial relationship with the cell. Seems like mitochondria developed independent/before cells, very interesting relationship between volume of mitochondria, density of them within cells, some biological power laws that are the energy equivalent of the size/volume power laws. And the book has a great name! which serves as an outline of the concepts: the three big divisions of what mitochondria as active organelles do is: 1) generate power in impressive and diverse ways, 2) drive and control the different sorts of functions and roles the cells create, like sexual bimorphism, and 3) if mitochondria decide the cell needs to die, even if the cell does not quite want to die (it does not) the mitochondria induce the cell to kill itself. It’s no more difficult to read then the power broker/the story of robert moses

Footnotes #

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