AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

Way to go Andy! That is an impressive amount to lose. Congrats man!

I’m starting L-Carnitine today. Bro-science says it’s good for weight loss, cognitive enhancement, lowering blood pressure, prevention of fatigue, and Type 2 diabetes.

I’m tracking weight (going down), blood pressure (good with meds), blood glucose (perfect), and general tiredness/fatigue for more than a year. Basically, I wake up tired, and it goes downhill from there. It’s a problem that I’ve had for decades, and several doctor visits and extensive testing have failed to find anything wrong. Though nowadays they have a name for it, “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.” Which means “damned if we know what causes it.”

I still haven’t figured out a way to quantify cognition other than “feel sharper” or “dull today.”

Dosing seems to be between 1000 and 3000mg per day. I’m starting with 1000mg for a couple of weeks; then I’ll try 2000mg, etc. to give it a fair shot. Some drugs and supplements don’t do much until you hit some minimum level.

Huh. Just two days on L-carnitine and I seem a lot less tired/more energetic, both physically and mentally.

I’ve been keeping a “what I got done today” journal for years. In the last few it has mostly been “nothing”, so at least I have *some* basis for quantifying results.

I’m surprised you’re not getting enough from your diet. You’re still eating a lot of beef, right?

Keep us posted on this. It’s interesting.

Mostly pork and chicken at the moment. But as I said earlier, it’s a long-term problem.

I passed another minor milestone today.

I’m very much a grower, and while I don’t technically have erectile dysfunction any more, erections generally take some time and effort. Putting on the sleeve and bell for the vacuum extender, hanger, or ADS - they all use the same bell - required laying on my back, manipulating a 50 to 75% erection, and putting on the bell and sleeve before losing the erection. And due to my substantial equatorial girth, I was doing it all by feel.

Doing it standing up was a no-go; all the fat would sag when I stood up, and got in the way.

But that was 73 pounds and 11-1/2” of waist ago. I gave it another shot today and was able to get an erection and install the bell and sleeve with no problem at all.

I’ve been wearing the bell with the ADS rigging for months, including short trips away from home. The time limit was determined by when I had to pee; if I’d been outside mowing or cutting brush and likely smelling like a dead hippopotamus, laying down on the bed wasn’t a good idea. But now that I can reinstall it standing up, that’s no problem.

I’m mostly using a made-in-China generic bell; it came as part of an ADS kit. It uses a vinyl suction tube instead of a squeeze bulb or hand pump. The suction tube can coil neatly in a pocket, so I can remove and reinstall the bell anywhere I have a little privacy, not just at home. You can also use a suction tube with the Total Man bells, and probably some others.

I know it probably sounds trivial if not a bit pathetic to some of you, but I started from a long way down. Little by little, the improvement starts to become noticeable.

Way to go! Losing weight changes a lot of things.

The 2022 health stats spreadsheet, as it is now.

The “xxx” for TRT #33 is because my wife waited until the last moment to pick up my prescription, which wasn’t there because the endo doc had only written it for three months instead of the usual six. I called about a renewal, and the doc was on vacation.

Blood pressure and pulse are averaged from the detail sheets, same as SpO2 (blood oxygen level). The meter reports SpO2 in whole numbers, but since the range is generally 94 to 98, I’m logging the average to one decimal place. P-p is “pulse pressure”, the difference between systolic and diastolic blood pressure, an indicator of potential circulatory system problems. Mine is good. I blew off the lung volume tests in July for some reason. In August I started doing measurements weekly. The neck measurement is “the new BMI” in the medical industry. BMI is from the calculator at NIH gov.

And I just noticed I put the BMI for 07/15 on the wrong row… nothing like going public to reveal errors.

The end-of-month row does an average of various columns. I haven’t looked up how to suppress decimals to the right yet. And I still need to figure out how to do line charts in LibreOffice. That’s why I started the spreadsheets in the first place.

Detail log page, top half. It’s just a flat ASCII file in my ancient 80x25 MSDOS text editor running in an emulator. I’ve used the same editor since 1986; my nervous system is wired to it, essentially making it a direct brain-to-screen interface.

That’s the raw data for blood pressure and SpO2 readings; I figure the averages weekly while doing my TRT injection.

The doc asked me to start recording BP while standing a couple of months ago. I should probably do it at least once a day, but I get around to it a few times a week. Sometimes the difference is large, as shown here. Sometimes it’s only a few points over sitting.

“wrap” is because I have lymphedema in my left leg. Sometimes I leave the wrap off at night.

“motivation” is almost always low

“pain level” is generally low now. Before keto, it varied in direct relation to the pollen and mold count.

“bowels” is since “intestinal disturbance” is a listed side effect of my diet and most of my meds and supplements. I’m not having any problems, but if I get meds or supplements it will help spot which one(s) are the problem. ‘T3’ is according to the Bristol Stool Chart, which isn’t nearly as interesting or detailed as Pratchett’s “The World of Poo.”

“stones/sand” keep track of kidney stones. A non-issue since I went to keto.

“night pee” is mostly for when I’m using diuretics

The doc told me not to take the Norvasc since I was doing so well with Lisinopril. For blood pressure, it’s normally taken in one dose. When prescribed for kidney problems, it’s taken four times a day, as its effectiveness for that is about six hours. I decided to follow that plan. I log each dose. Sometimes I get distracted and forget.

Lasix and Bumex are diuretics, for “when needed” to control blood pressure. A non-issue for the last several months.

Detail log page, bottom half.

I take supplements for three different things: known or suspected vitamin or mineral deficiency, PE/ED, and nootropics. I vary the times, and I don’t always take one every day, to avoid stress on my kidneys. Anything that’s not used - and uptake on some is poor - get filtered out by the kidneys, and I’ve already had two bouts of lithotripsy and several stones that eventually passed without medical assistance. They’re painful and expensive.

A few days ago I did some web searching on “when to take xxxx” as far as dietary supplements, and I’m using more of a set schedule now, since some have better uptake with food, and some (like zinc and copper) will make me nauseous on an empty stomach. Others, it doesn’t matter when you take them.

I haven’t taken L-tryptophan in six months or more, and gave most of it away. I just edited my log template and removed it. It didn’t do anything noticeable as far as an erection aid, and though it worked very well as a sleep aid, I haven’t had any sleep problems since early this year.

I haven’t played with most of the nootropics yet. I started L-carnitine a few days ago; it’s not in this day’s log.

“lung vol.” is from your ordinary Volodyne D-5000 gauge, the big plastic thing some hospitals give you to use for a week or two after surgery. Lung volume is pro-rated by age; mine was fairly poor a year ago, good last month as shown here, and suddenly “very good” this month.

“sleep” and “mood” are arbitrary, poor-OK-good

I ran 177 days on keto before the two-week break in late May. I decided to call that “cycle 1”, which makes this “cycle 2”.

A tortilla or “wrap” can have a lot of carbs depending on the size and thickness. According to Subway, their wraps have 56 carbs. A local grocery store stocks low-carb wraps made out of “processed” wheat flour. The company’s web site doesn’t describe what the processing entails, leading me to wonder if radiation, cancer-causing chemicals, demonology, or all three might be involved, but they taste fine and they claim their medium-size wrap has 4 carbs. A pack works out to fifty cents each, more than double the price for regular wheat or corn tortillas, but I’m a Southerner; given a choice, I’ll eat with my fingers instead of a fork.

Have you considered making your own tortillas? Then you know what’s in them if you can guarantee the quality of the ingredients. You can also use alternative flours (like coconut) and make them as thin as you want (within reason). Personally I’d recommend the pizza base from a fat head pizza as an alternative that works well with coconut flour and is easy to make* .

Going back to the pork/chicken thing. Somehow I missed how you gave up on beef. I thought that was a problem that was sorted out with zinc. I’ve talked about the problem with fats in monogastric animals, so I won’t bore you.

Yes; that’s how I started. I bought a tortilla press to flatten them. It’s a hassle to mix everything up, press them out, stack them between layers of waxed paper, and then they have to be fried one at a time. With cleanup, a batch of four takes right at an hour. Almond/coconut flour wraps are very fragile, and often break apart when turning them in the frying pan. And then they come out to four to six carbs apiece, depending on the recipe. Fifty cents apiece seems like a bargain for the store-bought ones.

Zinc took care of the beef allergy.

I haven’t given up on beef. It’s mostly that the grocery store is now selling pre-cooked pork and chicken for less than they charge for raw meat. It comes in plastic boxes. I can throw some the microwave or eat it cold. Beef has to be cooked, which goes back to the marital issues that I mentioned back in November.

I remember you mentioning it some time ago, but you didn’t go into detail.

I’ve been doing the DIY cryolipolysis thing intermittently for a year, and regularly for the last month, moving from area to area. Hard to tell the actual effectiveness given the general weight loss, but every little bit helps.

According to the nutritionist types, fat cells don’t go die off then you lose weight; they just shrink. It can take five to seven years for them to go away.

Cryo only works down to about a quarter inch of depth below surface level, but it kills the fat cells, which are then eventually absorbed or flushed out of the body.

I need to work the cryo thing harder, I think.

Yeah, I agree with the fragility and hassle of homemade wraps. That’s why I mentioned the pizza base. It’s a lot easier, low carb and avoids meat. Obviously it’s more work than buying prepackaged but I don’t trust prepackaged stuff that much.

OK, I’ll bore you with the chicken/pork vs. beef thing. Beef, even when finished on a feed lot contains saturated fats because of the way the stomachs of the animal work. Their gastro-intestinal system will turn bad quality fats into good quality fat with the help of their complex microbiom. Whereas animal like us, pigs and chickens can’t convert fat, so if we ingest unsaturated fat that’s what the body runs on and stores.

Chicken and pork tend to be fed crappy diets and they don’t convert the bad fats they are fed (say in corn) into good fat, then we eat that and our bodies also can’t convert it into good saturated fats. It’s basically like chugging mazola in terms of the fat content of the meat. You can avoid it by buying chicken breast which is very low in fat or by buying pork that’s raised without unsaturated fat in it’s diet.

You can still get away with a very low fat diet because you have the fat covered. Once you’ve burned through your stored fat (which is probably mostly unsaturated as it stems from SAD) you’ll need to start taking in good quality fats.

Bored yet?

I’ve looked at the Fat Head recipe before, but the hassle and the cleanup have turned me away from it each time.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.

The breast is the only part of the chicken I’ll eat. Well, I used to be fond of the BBQ chicken legs at the local Chinese restaurant, but they’re glazed in sugar, so I had to give those up when I went keto.

I have no idea where the pork I’m buying comes from or how it was fed.

I have another year to year and a half before that becomes a big issue. The anti-inflammatory benefits of keto are still enough to stay with it then, but I’ll have to actually do some diet planning.

What are the long-term effects of staying mostly carnivore? What I can find on the web is all polarized between extremes. Plus too many web sites mining each other for “content.”

Nope!