AndyJ's Body Enhancement Thread

Yeah, surprised the hell out of me!

I forgot to mention that 7-3/4” flaccid was only 7-1/2” half-hard. [sigh] The half-hard wouldn’t go away and it didn’t want to turn into a full erection, just out of general contrariness. NBPEL was 6-1/4” back in October. That’s a larger than usual gap between erect and flaccid, but I attribute that to being cut so tight. I’m doing skin stretches as well as jelqs now.

I am a master procrastinator. That’s why I make heavy use of lists and check sheets.

My heating pad is running at 128.8F: AndyJ - How Everyone Is Wrapping Heat Pad

Wow, that’s cooking! I’ve got just a generic from Walmart, I think i paid like $10. It gets up there on high also, upper 120F. Medium hangs out around 108F. I usually run it high to warm the tube while I’m doing my manuals. 5-10 minutes after I’m in I turn it down to medium, for heat soak. Works well enough that way.

Mine just has “on” and “off.” It only got to 104F when simply folded over the tube; wrapped and held in place with paracord, it was almost 130F. Oops.

I have an external temp controller with a thermocouple, tonight I’ll get that set up. On the other hand, while it can sometimes be uncomfortable, the temperature doesn’t seem to be hurting my penile skin any, and given the amount of blood flow, the internal temperature is probably still below the plastic zone in the papers that Kyrpa found. So I’m considering just setting the regulator so the pad won’t get any hotter than it does now.

I tell ya one thing, though - with the heating pad running, I don’t need the electric blanket on cold nights!

Had an appointment with the endocrinologist this morning. Just a few questions, a couple vials of blood, and out the door. Basically a gimme billing to my insurance company.

I dug out my hearing aids this morning, first time in three or four years. The endo is from India or Pakistan and she speaks softly, so it’s hard to understand her sometimes. Plus the fucking face-diaper means I can’t get cues from mouth movements.

I got the aids in 2016; they’re were state-of-the-art at the time, programmable with internal graphic equalizers and selectable filters for various types of noise. I went back for several visits getting the settings tweaked, including a hard sound level limiter like my shooting muffs. I actually have fairly good hearing through most of the range, except for the common “cookie bite” in the human speech zone. That’s what audiologists called it back in ancient times; for some reason they used polar graphs back then, so the range of hearing loss make the graph look like a Pac-Man character. Plus I have fairly severe tinnitus, which was probably aggravated by motorcycles, guns, and rock-and-roll, but it was bad enough to be a problem even as a small child. Simply making things louder is counterproductive; past a fairly low point it aggravates the tinnitus, and all I get after that is “REEEEEEEE”, which can last from hours to the rest of the day. So the aids are programmed to make certain frequencies louder, but not *too* loud, which would be counterproductive.

Unfortunately, even with the best of technology, the aids didn’t help much. The doc is a mumbler. That’s why I quit wearing them shortly after buying them; many people *think* they’re speaking English, but they’re just emitting a sort of modulated whine, or mumbling like they just left the dentist, or speak in sentence fragments. They *think* they said “the pen is on my aunt’s dresser”, but all that’s actually coming out of their mouth is “the pen” or “my aunt’s dresser.” Not having telepathy, I have no idea what it is they’re trying to say. Yes, I’m hard of hearing, but it’s not my fault they talk like a wino after two bottles of Ripple.

I removed the heating pad from the tube, wrapped the tube in aluminum foil, then re-wrapped the pad with the thermcouple from the temperature controller about halfway down the length of my shaft. The controller was set for 43C, which just felt comfortably warm compared to before.

Somehow I’ve moved from a tube and hand pump to a tube, heating pad, protective cover for the pad, thermostatic control with two digital readouts, an electric pump, a pushbutton timer, a power strip, and various electrical cables. [sigh]

A few days ago I figured since I was now using the heating pad regularly while pumping, my shaft would be nice and warm for jelquing. I’d read many comments from jelquers about how it improved their flaccid hang; that seems to be true for me as well. I’m very pleased with that. I hope that continues.

Starting heated pumping kills my EQ. This time I kept at it, and it started coming back intermittently after a week. It’s still ED-level unreliable, though.

However, I’ve recently begun measuring my NBPFSL every day. So far, it has remained steady at exactly 7.75”. It’s not *quite* bone-pressed, but it’s close now, and more importantly, it seems to be a reliably consistent figure.

I’m pretty sure Kyrpa (or Tutt?) mentioned NBPFSL being okay to use for strain measurements for ultrasound. Now I have to bore through a couple of giant ultrasound threads again.

In other news, despite a collection of vacuum extender bits, I’ve been experimenting with an old-fashioned noose arrangement and weights. It’s just a short piece of parachute cord and a couple of spring stoppers; one loop around the glans, the other for the hook for my pulley-and-weight setup. I’m working my way up slowly, so far without any problems. The noose goes on in seconds and doesn’t slip off. So far I’ve only worked up to 1-1/2 pounds for 10 minutes, but the glans doesn’t go cold or lose sensation, and there has been no soreness or other problems. Granted 1-1/2 pounds isn’t much, but it took months for me to be able to work up to that with a vacuum extender, so I’m taking it very easy.

Besides the convenience advantage of the noose, it allows full access to the shaft for an ultrasound head, FIR pad, or red light therapy lamp.

I haven’t used the vacuum extender in a while. It took me a year and a half to work up to 4 pounds of tension; at 4-1/2 I’d get a blister about half the time. It seems I’m extremely prone to vacuum damage now. The noose may allow me to go past that 4 pound limit.

…and that held true until today, when my blood pressure jumped to an average of 138. That’s a steep jump.

Looking back through my logs, I’ve let the carbs go to 20 to 40 grams per day instead of the strict limit I had before. I log how many times I get up to pee every night; that went from an average of 3 to an average of 1. And three days ago I started taking a fish oil supplement.

The urination change may be a clue; the first thing the doc tried when my blood pressure was high was a diuretic. As to why I might be retaining water, who knows. Though I’m tempted to blame the carbs. I really doubt the fish oil has anything to do with it.

Plan A is to go back to strict carnivore and see what happens. I can always stop taking fish oil and go back on the diuretic briefly.

It’s still curious as to how sudden the change was.

Of course, if I come down with some kind of crud over the weekend, I’ll know it was just an early warning. The few times I’ve been sick in the last year, my logs showed BP going up and EQ going down a few days beforehand. And indeed, EQ went to zip a few days ago.

I started with a diuretic, and then another one. My blood pressure kept climbing steadily. Yesterday I started taking Lisinopril again. Blood pressure kept climbing, up to the mid-140s.

Took a major, painful dump - I’ve been constipated for most of a week - and blood pressure dropped to 103. It has been steady around 110 since.

Oh, come now… *really*?

Constipation isn’t something I had to worry about when I was running 0 to 10 carbs per day. Going to 30 or 40 a few times before, I got stopped up a bit, but I figured it was the dietary change. BP didn’t change then, but I was on the blood pressure med. This time, I wasn’t taking it.

Of course, it might not even be related to the blood pressure increase. But I’ve noted it, and I’ll watch for it in the future. I still have to see the doc to see about a 6-month, non-keto blood lab.

My Dad used to go on and on about how he’d just taken a wonderful shit and how good he felt afterward. >facepaw< Too Much Information, Dad! I really don’t need to know about that. But I’m about the age where he started talking about it. Hmm.

When I saw the cardiologist a couple of months ago we talked briefly about the lymphedema I have in my left leg. He said the major vein that returns blood from the left leg runs under the stomach to get to the right side of the heart, and the bowels sit on it, which can be another reason for swelling besides crapped-out lymph nodes. I didn’t notice any additional swelling, but I wear a compression bandage basically all the time unless I’m taking a shower.

So, anyway, I’ll keep monitoring things. Hopefully now that my blood pressure is back down it will stay there.

That’s hilarious. Take a dump and all is right with the world. There’s anecdotal truth.

If the carbs are stopping you up, you can lower the net carbs with extra fiber, 1 for 1.

I thought the fiber had to be part of the original food source? Not like the “fiber” people use as a laxative?

That’s kind of what I meant. More as a total of a meal, rather than a single source i.e. rice by itself is carbs, add beans and their fiber will net the carbs down. I don’t think it means there has to be fiber in a single source to cancel the carbs of that single source.

Though, I don’t know that dietary fiber as a supplement like Metamucil works the same way. I was always told it had to come from the food. What the difference is, I don’t know. Maybe the digestive system acts differently if it’s a whole food, rather than just fiber as found in a supplement. I think the stomach could react certain ways specific to what you put it in. Like the fiber can’t cancel the carb unless the enzymes to process the carbs are present at the time.

Now I gotta go look it up. Lol

Okay, there’s two schools of thought. Go figure. They both make sense to me.

Apparently canceling a carb is more geared to lowering the glycemic load, reducing the digested and stored sugars for diabetics. Since most sugar is stored as fat. Low glycemic rate foods will digest slower, and have less of an impact on glycemic levels, and be less likely to be stored at all as they will likely be metabolized as they digest.

For keto, the idea of canceling a carb only works as long as your total carbs are still low enough to remain in ketosis. Net 40-50 grams/day. If the total is still the factor, why bother with net? Simple answer again, glucose.

Though, it seems a big topic in search results for “does fiber cancel carbs”, the majority of the results were related to keto even though it wasn’t in the query. Many of the results seemed credible. Just as many seemed confused and didn’t know what they were talking about.

Put me in the last camp. I was wrong.

Keto wasn’t part of the military’s nutrition classes. What I learned and how to apply it, for high-energy visceral fat stores instead of low-density subcutaneous fat stores, doesnt seem to be useful in this case. My bad.

If you want to add complication there are two basic types of fiber: soluble and insoluble. Also the research on fiber is really poor. It’s based in part on studies of diverticulitis and some really poor anthropology which equates to something like “this tribe eats lots of fiber and they shit a whole lot”.