AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

I can endorse this advice.

The reason most people overeat, especially in the west, is because a vast majority of our food is devoid of all nutrients.

This is the reason you can eat a large bag of Doritos and still be hungry, while a small volume of steak and eggs will have you stuffed. Focusing on nutrient-dense food (meat, saturated fats, fruits) while avoiding food that for most of human history we would not register as edible (PUFAS, refined foods, etc) will get you where you need to be, almost effortlessly.

Natural sunlight and food is the best way to get your nutrients, if you are lacking in any area than supplementation is fine.

Well, most of them are chock-full of carbohydrates, which are technically nutrients, I think. But you’re correct; you can eat a ton of carbs and still be hungry.

I think elitestreet is referring to essential nutrients in food, things like potassium, salt, magnesium etc. There are no essential carbohydrates but carbs (esp in their more natural forms) can contain essential nutrients (often in a not very bioavailable form).

Things like doritos are nutrient free but flavored to fool our bodies into believing they contain nutrients. There’s a good book on this called “Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us” by Michael Moss. And another book by Nina Teicholz called “The Big Fat Surprise” which goes into fat in detail.

All the bad foods will have macronutrients, can’t get away from them, but no, or very little, micronutrients

Sometimes governments require the addition of nutrients. Wheat for example has next to none by default. So often you’ll find they add iron filings for iron content etc. The trouble is that iron filings aren’t particularly digestible. Whereas the haem-iron from meat works really well.

Here’s some research on that. Unfortunately it’s not the best quality but it covers some of the bases and comes to a reasonable conclusion.

Association between Haem and Non-Haem Iron Intake and Serum Ferritin in Healthy Young Women

As a side note, some people on carnivore diets give blood simply to reduce their iron levels. Whether that’s necessary or not is another question but as with all nutrients there’s a window of reasonable intake and some things can’t be flushed easily by the body.

For the last week I’ve had some unknown caller hammering my cellphone, mostly in the mornings. It seems to go in cycles. A while ago they hit it again. Since I was sitting at my desk I looked up the number… which turned out to be my endocrinologist’s office. I’d been meaning to call them about setting up my six-month follow-up appointment anyway, so I called them back. They were upset that I’d missed my appointment at 0930 this morning. I noted this was the first I’d ever heard of it. They scheduled another for next month.

The land line’s readout shows a number of calls from a number identified as a local hospital. My wife normally takes care of the land line, and she’s been juggling appointments of her own anyway, so I was letting her answer. She had been apparently just letting them ring out without answering. I don’t know what’s going on with that. I scrolled through, and yes, same number as the endo. Apparently their CNID is now set to their affiliated hospital’s name, because when they called in November, it showed up with the clinic name.

I’m more concerned about how they got my cellular number. A client’s support contact has it, and my wife, and a few friends; I *never* give it out to anyone else. So it probably came from Verizon selling my data, which got bought by one of the patient data brokers.

Thursday:
didn’t feel very well

Friday:
*definitely* didn’t feel well. Spent most of the day in bed. About 2330 I had the explosive shits. After getting back to my desk and sitting down, I felt what I first thought was another ureter kidney stone. That’s when the stone is stuck in the little tube between the kidney and the bladder; they’re extremely painful. As in, oxycodone just knocks the edge off a bit. But after a while it was working its way across to the other kidney. That’s not normal. The vertigo hit a bit later; to where I thought I might fall out of my chair.

During a lull I went on to bed with the fan on because I had the sweats, getting up to hit the bathroom every hour or so. During the night my back and knees had started to hurt; pretty much like what I used to take anti-inflammatory meds for. And the kidney pain kept ratcheting slowly up.

Saturday:
I don’t remember much about Saturday. I spent most of it alternating between sweating in front of a fan, rolled up an an electric blanket with cold shakes so bad I probably looked like I was having seizures, and trying not to throw up in bed. Shoulders and hips signed up for being painful. Kept hydrated at the standard 60oz/day. (3x bottled waters) Due to the generalized pain I couldn’t tell when I actually needed to go to the bathroom, so I shuffled in there every couple of hours for the next few days.

Sunday:
My scheduled TRT day. I managed to sit at the desk for a couple of hours, but I didn’t want to pass out in the middle of shooting up, so I postponed it. I did my weekly glucose test: 145. (!!!!) It had been 48 hours since I’d last eaten anything; I was expecting low 80s. Glycogenesis? I need to look up when that can occur. Blood pressure was 78/42, but an hour later it was 135/76. Hm. Went back to bed.

Monday:
Felt a bit better, was able to sit up a few more hours. Kidney pain pretty much gone away, but the spine and joints were a sumbitch.
Still have the vertigo. I *hate* vertigo.

Today:
Definitely getting over it. Got in to see the doctor, gave him the symptoms, and asked him if he wanted me to stop there or if he wanted my amateur diagnosis. He wanted to know what I came up with.

My diagnosis:
Not a UTI; no burning when urinating. Not stones: the feeling wasn’t the same, and stone pain doesn’t from one side to the other. Plus it was mostly gone by Monday. I’d gone off the nootropics the previous week and was going to wait until this week before trying the next ones so I’d be clean when starting the new tests, no nothing there. I’d starting taking a calcium supplement as he’d recommended at our last visit, so it was something new, but it was just a plain over-the-counter dietary supplement, and I really don’t think that was a factor.

The joint pain was very familiar, particularly the spine and knees. With the other joints joining in, that’s a full-on inflammation attack. And I haven’t had anything like that since I went on keto back in November.

So: kidney infection, which somehow set off the Immune System Disorder. The doc thought about it a bit and agreed. He took blood and urine samples, but said the way things are working now, he might not get the results back until next Monday, so he picked an antibiotic to start taking today. He might have me swap to a different one depending on the lab results. I asked if he could give me something for the vertigo; he said sure; I suggested he save everyone some trouble and just prescribe the handy 5-gallon size. Unfortunately he thought I was joking.

The blood samples were because he’d been discussing me with another doctor, about my autoimmune disorder. The other doc had some suggestions of different things to look for, so he was going to have me come in for a blood draw sometime this week anyway.

Oh, and at the weigh-in, I scored 296! Though that’s probably a false alarm; three and a half days of shitting and sweating and not eating much lost more weight - probably just water, despite all the drinking - then I was expecting. At the rate I’ve been losing weight, I was expecting to drop below 300 sometime next week. The doc counted back previous visits in his chart - 325, 359, 343, 379, 349… I think he was happier than I was.

Check out Jim Humble MMS or CDL, I did it, and it helped me! Still taking it, daily.

Hopefully the antibiotics start working and you start feeling a bit better today

I started feeling better within a few hows. It may take a while for the inflammation problem to settle back down. The anti-vertigo med is Meclizine, btw. Seems to work like a champ.

So, this morning I came in, fired up the VM with Thunder’s and Firefox updated, and… those goat-felching strap-skanks decided to fuck with the scrollbar *again*. They keep wanting to narrow it to some four-pixel-wide stripe, or have it swell up when the cursor approaches. Previous fixes have involved weird GTK tweaks or poking at undocumented binary fields in about:config, because some shitweasel at Mozilla, probably stuck with a 1024x768 workstation, really REALLY wants that goddamned scrollbar to be as narrow as possible, even though it’s unuseable for anyone with a high-resolution monitor.

Now, the shitweasel decided that when you mouse where the scrollbar should be, there’s NOTHING THERE. After you WAIT, a scrollbar pops up. Move the cursor away, and the scrollbar shrinks to half-width. A couple of seconds later, it vanishes. So, off to the web to find out how to stamp out this latest abomination.

Apparently, this is the default behavior of something called “Windows 11”. If Windows 11 wants its scrollbars to work that way, then obviously Firefox should cooperate. But I’m running KDE, and I don’t give a bloody damn about what bullshit some tampon-chewing retards in Redmond are torturing their victims/customers with this year.

YOUR PROGRAM SHOULD COMPLY TO THE DESKTOP IT IS RUNNING ON.

Mozilla has made a long string of bad business and programming decisions, and nowadays is utterly dependent on handouts from Google. I keep wondering if the continuing face-plant grade stupid decisions Mozilla keeps making are actually decided by Google, to help drive the bitter clingers over to Chrome, which is even worse.

Yeah hate that windows scroll bar hover shit. It’s takes far too long for the bar to appear.

The whole world doesn’t live on skinny phone screens. And no matter how Microsoft doubles down on phone-izing every aspect of Windows, only a tiny number of phones run Windows, and I doubt the percentage is going to get larger. But even if all of them ran it, it’s no excuse for treating a desktop like a phone. The current Windows UI looks like shit to start with, but it’s absolutely recockulous on a triple-monitor desktop that’s over six feet wide.

Tell us how you really feel, Andy!

I’d be banned from Thunder’s if I did that…

Meanwhile, yesterday I did some light pumping and a full set this morning. No problem. As far as I can tell the scars - which are still getting smaller and softer - hadn’t shrunk or stiffened at all, even after a week. They were just ever so slightly tender for a while after yesterday’s pump. I didn’t notice anything today. Maybe some time I’ll take an extended decon and see how they do.

EQ was zero when I was very ill, and improved as I got better. I’ve been tracking PE and general health separately, but I’m pretty sure there’s a strong connection between the two. Generally, EQ seems to fade a day or two before some symptom shows up. I’ve been pretty healthy for the last half-year, so it will take a while to accumulate meaningful data.