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That's Dr Tank Green to you, Marjorie.

On low carb diets

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Graph of my rapid weight lossI have written previously about my dietary changes in response to a borderline insulin resistance test result, so I thought I would post an update on where I am on this journey.

As you can see from that graph, my weight kept dropping until I hit 52.5kg, at which point I got scared. That put me in the underweight category in terms of my BMI; more importantly, my sleep became affected and I was definitely losing muscle mass in my quads.

The theory of low carb diets (by which I mean eradicating cereals, grains, sugars, and starches from your diet), is that by replacing them with nutritionally dense foods we will eat less. The reason being that we get more bang for our buck with every egg, steak, and chicken drumstick we eat. Our bodies need less food because everything we put in it has a lot of what it needs, nutritionally speaking. So we don’t get hungry as often as we’ve eaten nutrient dense foods.

This is all true in my experience. However, what did not seem to happen for me was an adequate hunger mechanism. By which I mean, my body seemed to be so satiated in terms of nutrient intake that it was not registering a calorie deficit.

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On diet

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Two things happened today. Firstly I saw a picture of the once supremely handsome (now vegan) Robert Downey Jr looking old, grey, and dusty as fuck; secondly, I realised that I can hang off callisthenic bars using one arm, including my bad arm/shoulder. This was previously completely impossible due to my shoulder injury. Both of these observations are related to diet.

I turned vegetarian at the age of 13 or so for ethical reasons. I made the connection between the (delicious) lamb chops on my dinner plate, and the cute, fluffy lambs I would bottle feed in the spring time at my dad’s mate’s farm. I just couldn’t eat them anymore. I stayed vegetarian until I was in my mid-30s, after which I started eating some fish and meat as my health was clearly suffering as a result of spiralling food  intolerances and allergies and the beginnings of IBS. (Side note, in my early 40s, my IBS was so bad that my GP feared I had a gynaecological cancer. Thankfully scans showed nothing odious there, so she realised it must be IBS.)

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On insulin resistance

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As a recent post indicated, I have been doing a lot of reading around health these last few years. I have primarily concentrated on literature pertaining to metabolic health and literature pertaining to the microbiome. This is all in addition to practising a healthy diet and lifestyle.

The more I read, the more I became interested in learning about my own health markers beneath the visible or easily discoverable. This is mainly due to knowing I have a sweet tooth, knowing that when I do gain weight it is largely around my abdomen, and learning about the phenomenon of TOFI: thin on the outside, fat on the inside.

As the health tests you can get on the NHS are sorely limited, I recently went private to get some more thorough tests through Medichecks. In particular, I was very interested in learning about my HDL:Triglycerides ratio as a more meaningful cholesterol test, and, of course, the biggie for me was insulin resistance. The latter is because I have learnt that many people are insulin resistant and therefore on their way to diabetes, even though their fasting blood glucose levels look fine.

The results surprised me a little and so I thought I would share them to show why it is so important to pay attention to your diet and get more thorough blood tests done than the NHS offers. But first, some basic stats:
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On metabolic health

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Many things in life baffle me. Things like: why do people participate in a global capitalist system doing shit jobs they hate for a system which does not benefit them? Why do so many people wear such ugly shoes? Why are there no truly revolutionary people living in the UK? Why do so many women look like drag queens nowadays? Why does no-one care about (data) privacy? All baffling stuff.

However, the Truly Baffling Thing which has occupied my thoughts most frequently over the last two years is:  why, in the midst of a global pandemic which is disproportionately affecting the metabolically unhealthy, are people not making an effort to get healthy? Genuinely and truly baffling. It’s almost like people want to be ill and/or at risk.

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On Vitamin D

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I recently watched this fascinating lecture on the relationship between Vitamin D deficiency and severe Covid-19 and thought it well worth sharing.

I am a very strong proponent for supplementing your diet with Vitamin D and have been doing so since 2010. In the UK, the guidance is that you should do so between late autumn to early spring if you are white, and all year round if you are black or Asian (i.e. have melanated skin). I currently supplement during the winter with 3 x 1000iu D3 tablets a day, spread over three meals, although when I lived in Scotland, I actually took 6 x 1000iu tablets a day. I have tried various different brands and definitely notice a difference between the cheapo brands and the better ones, and now use Solgar.

I say notice a difference because the reason I started taking Vitamin D was to help with my asthma. I had mainly grown out of my asthma (unless I was sick) but in 2009, I developed what I call “winter asthma”. It actually corresponded with a move to Scotland and I didn’t realise it was that until the following year, as I spent that first Scottish winter thinking I had one really long illness. It wasn’t until my asthma suddenly started getting worse again in September 2010 that I started to suspect it was some kind of weird allergic-type response to the winter.

Since then, I have experimented with supplementing my diet with differing amounts and types of Vitamin D and now control the winter asthma very well through a combination of Vitamin D, and turmeric and black pepper. Although, in respect of the latter, it would be considerably cheaper if I just drunk some golden milk every day, but the only (goat’s) milk I imbibe is in the form of homemade ice-cream. 😎 I take the supplements from mid-September until mid-March and they almost completely alleviate my symptoms. I want to stress how severe the winter asthma is if I do not do this: I need to take my Ventolin around 20-30 times a day. (I refuse to take the steroidal inhalers, much to several medics annoyance.) So it is no small thing (to me at least) that I am able to achieve such good results through supplementation with natural products.

What I found really interesting about that video above, is how the elderly are unable to synthesise Vitamin D adequately, even during the summer months. This was news to me, but shows how vital it is for those of us in the northern hemisphere to supplement our diets with this vitamin for its proven anti-inflammatory, immune boosting, and blood-glucose regulating functions, to name a few, especially as we get older and are also at risk of bone and muscle loss and attendant falls and fractures (link to PDF) as a result of Vitamin D deficiency. This is even more important for black and Asian people. Frankly, this is precisely the kind of preventative health product that should be free on the NHS.