AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

I understand. My wife also doesn’t do well with fasting for the same reason, so I get it’s not for everyone.

I don’t know if I got lucky genetically, or if my body just adapted, but I’ve actually had slightly elevated (while still within healthy tolerances) fasting blood sugar levels the last 2 times I’ve had doctor ordered blood work done for my yearly physical. My body is so used to me eating only dinner that it floods me with sugar right around the time I wake up… it knows it won’t get anything to eat, so it’s like: “release the internal reserves, we gotta get to work! This asshole is gonna make us exercise later too!”

I used to only eat one meal a day, for going on ten years. Breakfast and lunch were inconvenient due to circumstances, so I didn’t bother. I never thought of that as fasting.

I agree that’s what you should be doing, at least initially. If the fat part is coming from your body though, you’re already doing something approaching a protein sparing modified fast. You’ll need to increase your fat intake sometime fairly soon, just to get the fat borne nutrients. Traditionally the keto macros are around 70-75% fat, 20% protein, 5-10% carbs.

The point of keto is to burn fat and have it convert into ketones in the body rather than eating carbs and having them convert to glucose in the body.

I wouldn’t worry too much about gluconeogenesis from excess protein. Yes potentially it could kick you out of ketosis but it’s an on demand mechanism and creating glucose from amino acids is energy intensive for the body. So it’s not going to spike your blood sugar, sit around in your system and then get converted to fat. Fat can also fuel gluconeogenesis but protein is the one you will hear bandied around in the keto space as a bad thing.

You’ve got some ketone tests, right? How are they looking?

If you are doing OMAD (one meal a day), you are already intermittent fasting (assuming there are no snacks).

Yeah, interesting that isn’t it. I get that too. Have you tried a continuous glucose monitor. It’s quite boring for me on carnivore, pretty flat apart from the morning bump, including post prandially.

I have not.

I bought test strips and a monitor, but
A) I hate needles
B) the lancet I have doesn’t reliably make me bleed even at the highest setting, so I have to keep poking myself (see A above)

The continuous glucose monitors have a big needle but you only put it in once and it’ll last 2-4 weeks (brand dependent). Being keto, you’ll probably find that it would be a boring experiment (or you’ll find there’s a certain thing you eat that isn’t quite what you think it is).

Have you tried other locations? The normal place it the pad of the finger but to the side works well and there are lots of other places.

I asked about them in another thread, but I haven’t had any problem keeping carbs under control. I was expecting that to be more difficult. So I didn’t buy a meter since I shouldn’t be anywhere near leaving ketosis.

As of last year when I checked, those were still prescription-only, viciously expensive, and insurance companies wouldn’t authorize them unless the patient was severely diabetic.

As I understand it, Britain’s National Health system was behind the first mass use of the continuous systems, which provided better tracking of glucose levels, dealt with the “don’t want to stick my finger” patients, and got off the continuous test-strip refill treadmill. The sensors can be a problem for some patients and they have to be replaced periodically, but they were an overall cost savings for the NHS. In the US, the phama companies making test strips lobbied hard against the idea. There are a *lot* of diabetics in America, and test strips are a steady profit stream.

After doing strict keto for a while, I acknowledge that carnivore is a hell of a lot simpler. And (locally) there’s no real cost difference unless you’ve been eating at the beans-and-rice level before. But I wouldn’t have believed that giving up carbs would have been so painless, particularly after living primarily on carbs for decades.

My fingertips are slightly callused; the sides are not, but it does hurt a bit more. Not like when I ran a quarter-inch drill bit through my hand, though.

This site is a bit fluffy, but shows some other points that are supposed to be equivalent to a fingertip:
https://www.dia betesincontrol. … as-finger-tips/

…or you might not react as the charts suggest. A friend of mine found that anything containing rice caused his glucose level to spike and stay there for hours. Everything else was within shouting distance of the tables, but rice was his Kryptonite.

There’s also (at least in the USA) the problem of artificial sweeteners, which are everywhere. Some of them have a glycemic index higher than table sugar, and thanks to a ruling by the Food & Drug Administration, they don’t necessarily have to note their use on the nice little “nutrition” label required by law on retail-packaged food.

In the mid-1990s, my bone-pressed shaft length was 5-3/4” after some months of pumping. I’d started at 5-1/2”.

In June (2021) I measured a non-bone-pressed 5-7/8”.

Yesterday (12/11/21) I measured 6-1/2” with about a 75% erection, still non-bone-pressed.

This morning (01/08/22) I measured 6-5/8” with about a 75% erection, non-bone-pressed.

I don’t know if it’s due to TRT or keto, which I began at about the same time, but while I’ve not lost much poundage, my *shape* has changed. Among other things, my fat pad is noticeably thinner. Still not thin enough to let the ruler bottom out on my pelvic bone, though. And it’s likely that new 1/8” is simply less fat pad.

Even so, the new number makes me happy.

The easy solution is to cook everything from fresh ingredients and avoid any processed food. There’s such variability within processing (cheese is a great example).

Body composition changes are a good sign. With enough protein in your diet and adequate test you might find you are putting on muscle and muscle weighs more than fat (hence waist measurement as a better metric).

Waist: down from 60” to 58”. Every little bit helps.

Dec 2021:
shaft pumping: 75h 05m
ball pumping: 42h 40m
edging: 5h 50m
Kegels: 2100x
extender: 97h 00m
with other PE-related activities, 239h 00m

cumulative: 2,498h 05m since 07/2020

Interestingly, after hours extending exceeded hours pumping, I’ve lost some girth. Where the 2-1/8” tube used to be a tight fit at the base (“traffic cone” taper) it’s now a bit loose, and I don’t pack the tube like I used to. On the flip side, I’m happy with the length increase and improved flaccid, so it’s a fair trade-off. My length is a bit more than my circumference now, so I don’t have as much of the exaggerated beer-can shape as I did before.

An paper on how cooking reduces the oxalates in some vegetables:

Effect of different cooking methods on vegetable oxalate content - PubMed markedly reduced soluble oxalate,100%25 recovery of oxalate losses.

I found an exercise that doesn’t hurt my abdomen at all - dumbbell rows. Bend over with one hand on the bench, the other holding the dumbbell, and do a circular rowing motion, with the upper arm coming parallel to the spine on the top of the stroke.

I did the commonly-recommended 3 sets of 10. I made a lucky guess on the weights; I might have made it another few reps before completely crapping out. My back muscles were twitchy the rest of the evening, but everything seems fine this morning.

Got more time in with the ADS, still ramping up slowly. I still don’t see why my dick thinks there’s a difference between the ADS and the Size Doctor. If anything, I’d expect the smaller bell on the ADS would make it less likely to get sore.
But it doesn’t seem to work that way.

I’d love to see more than the abstract. Looks like it’s a dilution effect. There are lots of cooking methods that reduce the poisons in vegetables, the obvious example is kidney beans: a couple of them will kill you if they aren’t cooked properly. There are various techniques that have been used to detoxify in the past but aren’t used these days, it’s worth looking at Bill Schindler’s work on this.

Hm. I’d never thought about it, but now I’m wondering how those oxalate numbers are generated.

That there are papers about how boiling reduces oxalates in some vegetables implies the default is “raw.” I agree that dilution through boiling would be the most likely mechanism, but I wonder if temperature has an effect? Baking runs much hotter than boiling, and for longer times; if oxalates are prone to thermal breakdown, “high oxalate” foodstuffs like almond flour might not be as bad as the usual numbers indicate.

I just spent a few minutes looking up how foods are tested, and it looks like common calorie/carb/protein/fat testing runs about a thousand dollars per sample, and the half-dozen lab sites I checked don’t list “oxalates” as part of their testing. That oxalate information has to come from *somewhere*; I’ll poke some more when I can think of new strings to feed the search engines.