An Experiment of One

For a long time, I have been living my life as an experiment of one.  What I mean by this is that I’ve tried this or that to see what happens as a result of my choices.  Sometimes the results are good, others, not so much….

Luckily for me, I have been blessed for the last 7+ years to have a “partner-in-crime” who goes along with some of my crazy ideas.  What is even better, for me, is that she comes up with some of those ideas on her own…  Our regular readers will know that I am referring to my awesome wife Nicole 🙂 

This post, and the ones which follow, will not be my usual super polished posts, these are going to be a little more of a diary of how our experiment goes…

So….  Our latest experiment is a change-up in our Intermittent Fasting Regimen.  Previously, we had been practicing a fairly standard version of OMAD, One Meal A Day.  Both of us are what can be refered to as “Slow Losers” as in we lose weight slowly, not like many who adopt a new way of eating and see the pounds disappear faster than I used to watch a pint of Ben & Jerry’s disappear.  One thing which is lucky for us is that we have this in common…  I can speak for myself that I know it would be brutal if one was the tortoise to the other hare in the weight loss area.  

Picture This…

This doesn’t happen, but picture this scenario…  You and your spouse adopt a new WOE (Way of Eating) and in the first week, one of you races off to a 5+ pound loss, while the other hops on the scale to see no change, or maybe half a pound.  Yeah, I’m sure you can imagine how difficult that would be for a couple.  As I said, we don’t have this problem…  We have the “problem” that we lose weight or inches or clothing sizes slowly.

Let me get back on track… We decided to change up our IF Regimen.  What did we change you may ask???  Well, we have changed to what can loosely be described as Alternate Day Fasting.  This means that we will eat one day, and fast the next.  So, we’ll take last week as an example, we ate dinner at around 6:00PM on Sunday, then went all of Monday fasting, and ate again on Tuesday.  On that Tuesday, Nicole ate her snack at about 1:00PM, and I ate a little later, and then we had dinner together.  Wednesday we fasted, and then we had a wonderful Valentine’s Day dinner together, including dessert, which we don’t usually have, but since it was the holiday of love, we decided to indulge.

How did it go?

Since you have that brief outline of how we ate last week, this gives you somewhat of an idea of how our little experiment works.  I do want to make very clear, this is not an entry level fasting regimen.  I have no problem sharing that there were more than a few times that I was like “Forget This!” I’m going to eat…  There were also a few times where my usually hidden inner grump came out full force.  (Sorry Nicole!) Alternate Day Fasting is not for the faint of heart, nor for the newbie faster.

The Dawn Effect

As I have mentioned before, in this post, Liberate Yourself with a Libre! I use a Freestyle Libre to monitor my blood sugar.  The results from last week were interesting..    This picture here is my daily graph from February 13th..  a non-eating day.  What I found strange about this picture is that even though I had not eaten since about 6:00PM the night before, my blood sugar rose for most of the morning.  The blue bar in this picture is the range I prefer to be in which is 70-120.  Again, I had not eaten in more than 14 hours, and my blood sugar topped out at about 145 at 10:00AM.

For some of you, you are nodding and saying but Todd, that’s the dawn effect… Dr Jason Fung has a great post about it here… “The Dawn Phenomenon.”   Everyone experiences this to some degree or another, people with a history of Diabetes much more than the general public.  As a side note, nearly 1/3 of the general public is Diabetic or Pre-Diabetic, which I discussed in “I’m Batman” so maybe we need to reconsider using that as a baseline…  Why this is perplexing to me is that I have been fasting for over a year, nearly a year and a half, at this point, so one would think that I would have been able to deplete my glycogen, and fat stores in my Liver..  Ya think?    Well, I guess I still have some work to do in that regard.

(As a side note, the gap in the readings is from me not being so good at scanning my sensor…  You have to scan every 8 hours, otherwise you get those gaps)

To the Moon!

So… what happens to Todd, and specifically his blood sugar, when he eats dessert?

As Jackie Gleason was fond of saying… “TO THE MOON ALICE!” 

Yikes…  I guess I shouldn’t have had that cheesecake.  Well, I guess I should have made it myself, and monitored how much sugar was in the recipe. 

Forgive the gap in the readings, my bad.. I promise to be better this week since I’m going to be posting how each day goes as it happens…  

What is also cool in this picture, other than the moon-shot, is the rebound back up after the initial decline.  In response to my ingestion of more sugar that I’m used to, my Pancreas forced out a big slug of Insulin to take care of the free circulating glucose.  Then my pancreas was resting on his laurels a little too much, and the secondary spike  happened when that first blast of insulin subsided.  I may be a bit of a geek, but it’s pretty cool, in an interesting sort of way, how my body reacts to sugar.

Today

So, where am I at today…  Yesterday was an eating day, so can anyone guess?  

This scan was from a few minutes ago, and I’m going to do my best to get this wrapped up quick enough so the timing is still close…

Last night’s dinner was Salmon, and a salad which consisted of Romaine lettuce, cucumber, Parmesan cheese and Newman’s Own Creamy Caesar dressing.  As an odd side-note, the Creamy Caesar Dressing has virtually no added sugar, where the Oil and Vinegar based Caesar had about 6 grams of added sugars per serving…  With Salad dressing, who really has only one serving, am I right?

At about 10:00AM, I topped out at about 145mg/dl for my blood sugar reading.  Where, oh where, did that blood sugar rise come from???  (This is an open book test, you can scroll back up to check, I’ll wait.)  

Ok, you’re back…  It came from my Liver from the Dawn Effect!  

I’m glad it is coming down, and I look forward to it going even lower than the current 131, I just scanned again, and 30 minutes after the picture to the left, I’m at 127, so that’s an improvement…  

Stay Tuned…

I’ll back tomorrow with an update of where I’ve gone from today in this Experiment of One plus One.  Since tomorrow is a feasting day, I’ll have a post-dinner scan to show what happens…. Oh, and I’ll try to not have any gaps in the scanning 🙂

-Todd

P.S. Please be kind, if you see a typo, I did this on the fly… please send me a message to fix it 🙂