It has been three weeks since I started pigging out in my attempt to gain weight and two weeks since I started to work on my sleep. How’s all this working? Well, my weight was steadily climbing and I thought for sure I would be at 160 around now but instead I’ve dropped back a bit once again. Today I weighed in at 157 and seem to be stuck around 156-157. This is better than being stuck at 151 and at least my BMI is now 20.5 which is in the range where I can live with it. The weight training is working, in the few weeks since I got serious I’ve increased 3 lbs. and have found my quads and biceps both grow by 0.5″ already. I’m trying to get in weight workouts at least 3 days a week and have really noticed an increase in strength. I could initially only leg press 180 and just barely and now I can do a set of 200, I think I can actually get to 210 or 220 next time. Quad and hamstrings were at 80, now I can do 100 with them. It is kind of amazing how fast the strength comes back when you get serious about it and my workouts only last about 15-20 minutes since I’m just pushing the hardest weight I can get off the stack until my muscles just fail.
Category Archives: Health
Sleep restriction one week in
I’ve been on my sleep restriction plan for a little over a week now. The first few nights I slept pretty well then I cratered but since then have worked my way back up to where last night I slept my whole allowed 6.5 hours. I’m hoping that this trend of high sleep efficiency continues and I can start adding in some extra sleep time at the end of next week. I was pretty drug out the first 4 days of this but now am used to sleeping less and actually feel pretty good most of the day but do get really tired around 7 p.m. Staying up after Catherine goes to bed is the tough part, I just want to go to bed then too but usually have another 90-120 minutes to stay up.
Weight Update
It has been two weeks since I got serious about trying to get my weight back up with Operation Bradley Cooper and a little over a month since I cratered out at 151. What has happened in the this last month? I’ve managed to gain 5.8 lbs is what happened! I’m now at 156.8, the most I’ve weighed since February when my weight started declining again. It really seems that something in my system shifted in the last few weeks since I’m finally able to gain weight and keep a steady gain. Granted, I’m eating a lot more calories than I’m burning so maybe still not absorbing perfectly but at least I know that if I eat enough food that I can indeed keep the weight trending in the right direction.
The sleep plan – phase 1
As I mentioned in my last post, I have been dealing with some middle of the night (or sometimes early in the night) insomnia for the last month and decided to go to a sleep clinic to see what I could do. I had the appointment on Wednesday and, of course, on Monday and Tuesday nights slept like a baby for over 9 hours each night, I think I had hit the point of total exhaustion.
Sleep issues, if it isn’t one thing it’s another
For the last two weeks my sleep has been really rough while my SIBO has been minimal and my weight has been on an increase finally. I never sleep great but usually I can eek out 7.5-8 hours per night with a few wake ups in there but since coming back from Iowa early in the month I have been progressively sleeping less and less with many more interruptions in my sleep. For the last week, at least, my pattern is to fall asleep no problem, wake up 2 hours later and then fall back asleep after maybe a bit of reading. I then wake up again 1.5-2 hours after that feeling pretty wide awake, my body thinks it is 4:30 in the morning and it is 1:00. I then never really sleep great after that, I’ll doze off and wake up again every few minutes. Some mornings I crash again around 4:30 and finally crawl out of bed between 5:30-6:30.
Operation Bradley Cooper
Even though I feel about 99% better and much healthier than a year ago I’m still struggling with my weight. I was up to 159 in December and thought that I was on my way to 160 and done with all this weight loss that I’d been struggling with after dropping from 183 to 146 earlier in the year. Then early in the year I dropped down into the 156-157 range and stayed there for several months. In March I dropped down into the 153-154 range and ended up stuck there for months. Most of the early summer I fluctuated in this range and started trying to eat more to see if I could bump it up. Then in late July Catherine said I was looking gaunt again so I weighed myself and was at 151 which was the lowest I’d been in a year. Since then I have been struggling to stay above 150, mostly stuck right around 152 even eating around 3000 calories per day.
3 months of no treatment
I stopped taking antimicrobials at the beginning of May to get ready for my last SIBO test on May 15th when I was down in Portland. That test was still positive but very low and when I met with Dr. Keller on the 18th we decided to just quit chasing after those last few points for a while. Instead I decided to work on motility, trying to heal my gut lining, trying to get my good bacteria repopulated in my colon plus give my liver some time to recover from the assault it was under with that last 6 weeks of treatment.
It has now been three months, the longest I’ve gone without actively treating SIBO in the last two years and I feel really good. Overall I have no symptoms at all most days and even on the days I have some symptoms they are very mild and late in the day. My poops are back to normal and constipation is not an issue at all these days, I go very regularly several times a day. I’m eating a pretty full AIP diet these days with some eggs thrown in there too and a few seeds and selective nuts occasionally. I can now handle lots of sweet potatoes and plantains, things that would have killed me a year ago. Better yet, I can eat chocolate and homemade Paleo ice cream!
Dongshan’s Illness, Tim’s Illness
Catherine listens to a lot of podcasts and often recommends some to me. A few days ago she recommended one on How Illness Deepens Us by Michael Stone. I got through all the fluff yesterday and finally got to the meat of the talk today and could very much relate to one of the main koans used in the talk – Dongshan’s Illness. This is Case #98 in Dogen Zenji’s collection of 300 koans – The True Dharma Eye or Shobogenzo (not to be confused with The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye also called The Shobo Genzo. It is also found in several other koan collections and is Case #94 in The Book of Serenity.
Cholesterol Clarity and my numbers
After listening to a podcast with Jimmy Moore I decided to read through his book Cholesterol Clarity: What the HDL is Wrong with My Numbers? I did a skim read of the book but the real meat is the very end which gives you the testing guide and optimal ranges. How did I stack up on my last test?
Standard Lipid Profile
The Total number and LDL-C numbers are really kind of irrelevant according to Jimmy, it is the Triglycerides, HDL-C and the ratio of the two that matter the most. There I’m in good shape even though my total numbers look high.
Total Cholesterol Mostly irrelevant but should be 254 a bit high
250 or below for women and 220
or below for men
LDL-C 130 or below but higher levels 155 a bit high
are not necessarily relevant to
your heart health
HDL-C Above 50 is good but 70 or higher 91 great!
is best
Triglycerides 100 or below, under 70 is best 41 great!
Advanced Lipid Profile
This looks at the sizes of the particles
LDL-P Below 1000 nmol/L 1481 high
Small LDL-P less than 200 nmol/L, and 148 good!
20% or less of total LDL-P 10% good!
In general the markers that matter I’m good on, the ones that doctors look at but don’t seem to matter I’m showing high on. It it crazy that doctors are still looking at bad information and prescribing statin drugs based on these numbers.
It looks like my high numbers could be high for a couple of reasons that relate to my health in general and not my Paleo diet. In the Nine Reasons Why Cholesterol Levels Can Go Up chapter I have a few of them. These include:
- Consuming a low-carb, high-fat diet. This is my diet these days thanks to SIBO. Evidently there is a segment of the population whose LDL-P, LDL-C and Total Cholesterol numbers will spike on this diet and they don’t know why it happens. Still, it appears the Triglyceride and HDL-C numbers and particle size are the important numbers.
- Chronic Bacterial Infections. Well, yes, I have one and they have been shown to raise these numbers too.
- Weight Loss. Thanks to SIBO I’m still down 10-15 lbs from my optimal in great shape weight. My cholesterol numbers may just adjust themselves once my body fully adapts to the new set point.
One other thing I learned from the book which I found interesting is that Dr. Ornish’s famous study that recommended a Low-Fat Vegetarian Diet to reduce heart disease was very flawed. It was a 5-year study that never isolated diet since it also required lifestyle changes related to smoking and exercise that would have a huge impact. Not only that but 28 out of the 30 participants ended up having heart attacks or requiring heart surgery within the time of the study. That does not sound like a plan that took care of heart disease. I had just listened to Dr. Ornish promoting this study as part of the class I’m taking a few weeks ago.
A podcast for everyone with SIBO
A few days ago I listened to Dr. Ruscio’s summary of the SIBO Symposium podcast and in it he mentioned a previous podcast with Chris Kresser about how Chris turned his illness around by simply choosing to live again instead of being so focused on his health and illness. I pulled that podcast down and listened to it yesterday, you can find the transcript here and the podcast in iTunes here. In this podcast several examples are given of people who got better when they finally stopped obsessing about their health and just went out and lived. One guy even got better on a beer & pizza diet, primarily because he was out living life and being social again.