I got some blood tests taken again to see if I had managed to improve my fasting glucose and HbA1c since my last test. Despite not having eaten a single grain of wheat, rice, oats, rye, amaranth, etc. for about nine months, neither metric had improved. I was still at the top end of a healthy range and was advised by the (private) doctor interpreting the results that I might be on my way to developing diabetes. The GP at my surgery just told me that I should lose weight and exercise more, which shows you how useless the NHS is, since I work out 4 times a week and am 171cm tall and weigh 54kg FFS. Anyway, this made me decide to follow a ketogenic diet: high fat, low carb, moderate protein. I am back on cronometer weighing my every ingredient which is annoying as hell, but is helping as I
I really cannot express the depths of my love of pig fat. I eat enormous quantities of crackling and would eat more if only I could get more of it. If you can sell me some pasture raised pig skin, please do get in touch. Weirdly, I do not like to eat pork itself, aside from some bacon with my liver and caramelised onions. Anyway, lard. Yum. Delicious and (if you buy pasture raised pig fat which I do) nutritious, as it’s also chock full of vitamins D, E, and A, and omega 3 fatty acids. Despite loving crackling (aka pork rinds) more than even lamb fat (*gasp*), it never occurred to me to do anything with it other than eat it. I use the rendered lard from my crackling to fry just about everything bar beef and venison steaks, as I think they taste better with butter. However, this left
I don’t normally have specific exercise goals. I just have a commitment to exercise 3 to 4 times per week, to get stronger, and to generally support healthy aging. Actually, I suppose they are exercise goals! What I mean is, I don’t normally have a defined thing that I want to achieve like wanting to run x distance in under x minutes, or wanting to do x lift at x weight. I just kind of keep at whatever type of exercise I’m doing at the moment, and then switch up when I get bored. This year was different. This year I wanted to get one pull-up. I have not been able to do pull-ups since I dislocated my shoulder in my mid-twenties. I have sporadically tried to get a pull-up for the last decade, but I never seemed to get close to achieving it. So I would give up after a while
Earlier this year, I wrote about my achilles tendinopathy which was caused by wearing Vivobarefoot shoes. I still have the tendinopathy and am now on the waiting list for shockwave therapy. Please don’t wear barefoot shoes. Learn from my mistake and don’t wear barefoot shoes. I actually had this conversation with a newbie convert recently. He was devoutly proselytising that our feet are evolutionarily ‘designed’ to be barefoot, so wearing shoes which mimic this state can’t be bad for us. Yes, young padawan, but whilst our feet are designed to be barefoot, they’re not designed to be barefoot on tarmac or concrete, which is what most of us spend our outdoor time walking on. They’re designed to be barefoot on grass, sand, soil, and and other natural materials: materials which all have some ‘give’ in them. In my experience, those of us who live in urban environments need more cushioning in
I loved Sinéad O’Connor. Somehow, despite multiple moves, I still have her first album, The Lion and the Cobra, on vinyl. It was one of the first albums I bought when my taste matured beyond asinine pop music, and it remains one of my desert island discs. I won’t pretend that I followed her throughout her career, because I didn’t. But that first album of hers still has my heart. There was something about her, and that cover, which genuinely awed me when I was young. The juxtaposition between the fierceness she embodied, how delicate her voice was, the range she was able to cover, and the stories she told with her lyrics. I know every word and melody of every song on that album, and listening can easily transport me back to a self I’d rather not remember being. I did not like being a teenager at all, but that makes