Welcome back to Day 5 of the Experiment of One!
Why do I hear the voice of the Guy from Headspace when I read that sentence? If you don’t know what I mean, be sure to check out Headspace for an excellent source of guided meditations. That’s not an affiliate link, I don’t get anything from recommending Headspace… Other than knowing that you all will be made aware of Headspace. I use it daily, and have found it to be very helpful. Today I linked it to my Alexa and took a break to meditate.
Migraine
So, I last left you with me struggling through a pretty bad Migraine. I am pleased to say that a solid night’s sleep, and a little extra sleep this morning have gotten me back to my usual self. Migraines have been a part of my life for decades, those of you who know me personally can attest to that. We’ve all had an occasional stress or tension headache, but Migraines are something different all together.
Your typical stress or tension headache is usually caused by muscle tension of the muscles either in your neck, or on the surface of your skull. As we experience these headaches, they can usually be relieved by massaging the tension spot, or removing/reducing the source of stress.
Migraines are something different. Migraines are the result of a spasms of a blood vessel inside the brain. It’s not like we can reach into our brains and massage that spasming blood vessel, can we?
No, not yet… Many who experience them can usually associate certain things, either food, or actions, which trigger our migraines. I, however, am one of the migraine sufferers who cannot pin down with any degree of certainty what causes mine. Lucky me… Occasionally, weather changes, or seasonal changes can trigger my headaches, but other times I don’t have any problems. For me, it’s kind of random bad luck.
Experiment of One
So, considering I’m in the middle of documenting my daily goings on in this “Experiment of One” and the fact that I have very recently made some changes to my way of eating, by going to a Alternate Day Fasting (ADF) you might be questioning whether the two might be related.
To be completely honest, I am too. However, my gut is telling me the two aren’t related. We know from Nicole’s post on our gut, Attention: This is Your Gut Speaking, that our guts do “speak” to us.
Why, you ask, is my gut not agreeing with the thought that the two might be related? Well, there are a few reasons…
- I wasn’t really experiencing LOW blood sugar.
- We did have a Snow Storm come through during the night, and I woke up with my headache.
- Lastly, when I did eat yesterday, the headache did not subside, and for a while it actually got worse.
So, I’m pretty confident that the changes to my Way of Eating(WOE) did not contribute to the onset of my Migraine yesterday.
Mad Scientist Time!
As I mentioned above, I needed to sleep a bit extra this morning. So I did. One of our overall messages here at T2D Adventures is that you need to listen to your body, and do what is right for you. I am going through this experiment, along with Nicole, right now to see if this will work for us. Alternate Day Fasting(ADF) may be something we occasionally work into our way of eating to toss things up. There are many people that do well with an intermittent fasting window of 18/6, 20/4, or any of the other window variants.
Dr Fung, in The Diabetes Code, has recommendations for either 30 or 36 hours fasts to get your body reset when it comes to insulin resistance.
This is what I’m trying to get sorted out in my body, and by coincidence, so is Nicole. I’m not 100% sure this will work for me, but I’ll never know unless I try.
The Results
A Wee Bit Bumpy, but it will have to do!
So, how did this morning pan out?
First off, No, I didn’t wake up at 9:48 🙂
However, the first picture I took of my meter was at that time.
What we can see from the picture is that I had a fairly normal night’s sleep as far as blood sugar goes, for a night after eating. It looks like I varied from a low of about 115 to a high in the 140’s. Now, when I compare it to the overnight reading from the day 3 post, Experiment of One Post #3, the first thing I notice is that the line is smoother, and that instead of 138, I came in with 124.
I consider this progress, and will celebrate the little victory! Other days, when I have been under the weather, or had a headache, the numbers from that night were all over the place, so undoubtedly, this is progress!
Getting Better!
Even more encouraging is that as the day went by, my numbers continued to improve. Just after 2:00PM, when I was coming up on 20 hours fasted, I was already under 100!
Again, referencing Wednesday’s post, my 12:47PM reading was 119, a full 20 points higher, AND my line today is significantly smoother.
What next?
So, where do we go from here?
Well, I’m pretty sure Nicole and I will be eating with our “normal” 20ish hour window this weekend, and will be discussing where we go from here. One of the best things I like about working on this experiment of one is that I’m not really an experiment of one… As the first post this week pointed out, it’s an Experiment of One Plus One. We are in it together, and learn from each other… The reason why I titled most of the posts this week An Experiment of one is that, well, I’m the one with the Libre, and I did most of the writing while Nicole was at work.
Since I’m now working from home, I have the time to write these posts for your reading pleasure. I do most of my work during the day, which means I don’t get the benefit of Nicole’s input…
I hope you all have a great weekend! I’ll be back next week with more good information for you…. plus a special surprise on Thursday!
-Todd
This week’s posts:
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