AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

The lab results on the kidney infection finally came back. The doc called at 0730. The antibiotic he chose was correct for the particular infection; he’s writing a prescription for another week.

Unfortunately, he said a bunch of the blood work numbers were way out of norm, and indicated “stage 3 kidney disease. He’s going over the older labs and will call me back later today or tomorrow.

Well, sheeit.

It turns out “stage 3” mostly means “your kidneys are getting weak, you should probably watch your diet and meds more closely.”

Flip side: I was four days into a vicious kidney infection, had eaten almost nothing during that time, and I’ve been strict keto for six months, so I’m not sure the labs are going to look normal in the first place. I’ll bring that up in our next conversation.

Some preliminary web searching says Lisinopril, the blood pressure med I’m on, is commonly prescribed for various kidney diseases as well, and generally considered a net benefit to kidney health. Keto doesn’t seem to be linked to kidney problems either, though the haters blame it on everything from bad breath to leprosy.

I’m a few days from being on keto for a full six months. If the doc thinks it’s worthwhile, I’ll move back to carb burning for a few weeks to ‘normalize’ things for another lab.

PE day 664
keto day 169
weight 293 (-54#)

next weight goal 275#

excellent to outstanding EQ for the last few days

still procrastinating on the exercise thing

You need a doctor who understands keto to look at your labs. With tele-medicine that’s a lot easier these days.

Hopefully he comes back with some better news when he has a better grasp of the figures.

Good work on the continued weight loss!

Dude that is crazy Andy. Best of luck.

[Memento video]

I’d already found both the lists he referenced. Unfortunately the only two listings in my state are apparently gone or no longer doing business under the listed name, and dealing with an out-of-state provider is extremely complicated due to the “Affordable Care Act.”

If you have the budget to pay, the telemedicine options are often fairly cheap for something like an opinion on labs within a ketogenic framework.

If you want to do the work yourself there are a bunch of people discussing their labs. For instance Paul Saladino has a couple of Fundamental Health podcast episodes describing his labs where he goes over what kind of differences you’d expect (Podcast | Carnivore MD). Then there’s Chris Masterjohn (|) who has multiple blog posts discussing labs. Then there’s Dave Feldman’s stuff on cholesterol and related issues (Cholesterol Code – Reverse Engineering the Mystery). Then if you want to understand mechanisms there’s the Petro Dobromylskyj’s hyperlipid blog (Hyperlipid).

When I get labs, I know what to ignore and what to pay attention to but my situation is markedly different from yours.

I’ve seen labs that show keto destroying free testosterone levels. When I was on the keto diet I felt high all the time (in a good way). Since switching back to being moderately low carb and just counting calories I function much better. I also hit some terrible plateaus while doing my year long keto experiment.

Also I don’t want to live without rice and potatoes.

Yeah, long term keto seems to have that effect. Cycling can counteract it. Rice is good stuff as a form of carbs that has next to no nasty stuff but potatoes are from the nightshade family.

What does being a nightshade have to do with being high in carbohydrates? I’m kinda confused

Nothing. It’s just that white rice is a cleaner carb to eat, less likely to have negative interactions with your body. Put another way, there’s less poisoning effect with rice than potatoes

That’s interesting, I never thought potatoes had negatives unless fried.

I can come up with the money, but trying to determine if a doc knows his ass from a hole in the ground just from a web site is beyond my skills. Even if the guy is good, how would I know?

I’ll follow up on that.

I’m not convinced there’s a problem yet. My previous labs all looked fine, and this one is after four days of a nasty kidney infection, before starting a course of antibiotics. I wouldn’t expect them to look normal.

I see the endocrinologist for TRT follow-up in two weeks; she did an extremely detailed set of labs back in November, which had nothing that attracted her attention, or from my regular doc - I got copies, and gave him one for my records. That’ll be a different set of labs a few weeeks past the infection, for another data point.

[daydreams of the local Mexican place that does a mean chicken biryani if you can put up with the gangnam music on the PA system.]

Mexican-Pakistani fusion cuisine sounds unlikely, but there you are…