February Weights and Measures

I just got back from a two week trip to India, so this is pretty late. I might make an interim post or handle that experience in the March report. You'll notice in the dataset that the first fifteen days of March are all the same - I didn't log anything over there and thus there's a two week hole in my records. I just filled it with something that seemed to be average.

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Seventh monthly roundup of measured data and analysis.

Data

Since blogger is annoying in how it handles images, I’m going to upload an Excel (2003) spreadsheet. Here’s a link:

http://www.forefrontpb.com/phildiet/Diet%20Records.xls

The "Weekly Graphs" worksheet shows the weekly average of weight and the weekly average combined BM score and quantity. Also added average frequency.

The "Weight Chart Daily Graph" worksheet shows the daily morning weight.

The "BM Score Daily Graph" worksheet shows the daily combined BM score and quantity.

I'm keeping a food log and notes in a written notebook, which for the sake of putting off an annoying task, I will scan and upload when I'm done rather than every month.

Analysis

February was uneventful. My second liver test came back normal in all categories. Whether this was because I stopped working out for a week prior to it or for some other reason I’ll never know.

The log is getting more and more difficult to keep, simply because I appear to be functioning normally and who the hell writes down everything they eat and every bowel movement they have? Sometimes you want to go back to whatever you were doing when you get out of the bathroom rather than hunt down a notebook and try to quantify the crap you just took.

I had to switch to a new notebook, having filled the original, and I flipped back through my old notes to see how things have progressed. I certainly have come a long way from August and September. It’s hard to remember the transition period clearly, although the log shows that it sucked. If a very low carb diet is generally effective in maintaining a Crohn’s remission, and a study organized where many people attempted to follow the diet, probably the hardest part for people will be getting through the first three months without losing hope (or too much weight; 6’3” and 151 pounds doesn’t feel healthy at all) or thinking, “This is bullshit; I’m crapping my brains out.”

That brings up the question of how I’ll ever be able to explain this approach to people. In a society that values a solution in a pill, especially one that promises a quick return to the imagined “normal” where one can eat whatever with no consequences, can an individual ever make a case for a low carb, low starch, low fiber approach without instantly turning away 95% of their audience?

Probably not. Maybe I’ll write a book titled, “The Crohn’s Cure: There isn’t one, deal.” I can see that being popular with publishers.

Anyway, I stopped overeating about halfway through the month and promptly lost five pounds, then stabilized at 180. My workouts have suffered since the week off, which seems to have interrupted my scheduling. Also, I’m going to India for two weeks on March 1, where I won’t have any access to weight training equipment, so there’s some sense that I’m just wasting time working out now. Oh well, I’ll jump back on the horse when I get back.

I suppose the only negative thing is that it’s getting harder and harder to wake up in the morning. Unfortunately, there’s a furry confounding factor in all this (my cat) who likes to make sure that I never get more than 4-5 hours of uninterrupted sleep on a given night. Is my diet making me tired or is it my cat? I’ll have to experiment with shutting her in the basement for a few weeks and see if that actually helps things.

I was very lax with my vitamin D supplementation this month, and I won’t be taking any in India, so I’ll have to resume that when I get back. Maybe that will help. Maybe I’m deficient in something else. Or maybe chronic lack of sleep just makes you tired?

Seven down, five to go. Over the hump!