For those checking the dates, I post these with a 1-week lag.
Summary:
Active & Planned Experiments
- Comprehensive bloodwork:
- Goal: Establish baseline for a broad range of biomarkers and check overall health
- Approach: WellnessFX Premium panel
- Status: Complete, need to write up.
- Testing blood glucose impact of low-carb foods
- Goal: Check blood glucose impact of new low-carb foods I’d like to incorporate into my diet
- Approach: Follow the same protocol from my previous study
- Status:
- Baseline:
- Glucose re-test: In queue
- Low-carb foods:
- Meal replacements: 2/3 complete, (Ketochow previously reported)
- Flour replacements: 1/4 complete
- Tortillas: Reported
- Bread: 1/8 complete
- Snack bars: 0/8 complete
- Ice cream: 2/11 complete
- Cereals: 4/7 complete
- Supplements:
- Vinegar: In queue
- MSG: Reported
- Testing methods of sleeping longer:
- Goals:
- To determine if taking melatonin supplements in the evening extends the duration of my time asleep and subjective fatigue given a consistent bedtime.
- To determine if taking melatonin supplement and/or sleeping longer affects subjective fatigue, blood glucose, heart rate variability, or pulse
- Approach: here
- Status: Data collection complete. Ready to analyze.
What I’m tracking
- Sleep:
- Metrics: total time, heart rate variability, pulse (sleeping vs. waking)
- Method: Apple watch + Autosleep app
- Frequency: daily
- Blood glucose:
- Metrics: fasting BG, Avg. BG, coefficient of variation, time 70-140 mg/dL, time <60 mg/dL
- Method: Dexcom G6 CGM
- Frequency: continuous
- Body:
- Metrics: weight, waist circumference, BMI, waist/height
- Method: scale + Renpho tape measure
- Frequency: weekly
- Other blood:
- Metrics: hemoglobin, cholesterol, blood pressure, pulse
- Method: Hemocue 801, Cardiocheck PA, Omron 10
- Frequency: weekly for blood pressure & pulse, every 2 weeks for hemoglobin & cholesterol
Observations
- Sleep:
- 2 days left in my sleep experiment and still seeing significant discrepancies between the auto and manually tracked metrics. I’m going to hold off on analyzing the data until the experiment is complete so as to minimize any impact on data collection.
- Sleep back up to normal.
- Blood glucose:
- Coefficient of variation back to normal this week.
- Coefficient of variation & fasting BG starting to look like there’s a downward trend. Probably due to weight loss.
- Body:
- Lost more weight than normal the last couple weeks (2 vs. 1 lb/wk). Still in acceptable range, but I don’t want to go any faster.
- Still have time, but I’m 4 weeks away from having to change my diet to stabilize my weight. Current plan is to add calories to breakfast.
- Blood:
- Hemoglobin is the lowest I’ve seen this week. Still well within the normal range, so nothing to be concerned about, but will keep an eye on it.
- Cholesterol was much better this week, but probably an outlier.
- Pulse has been steadily dropping (0.16 bpm/day, R2 = 0.54). This is showing up consistently on the Omron (resting) and Apple Watch (sleeping & awake). The only thing I can think of to cause this is the weight loss. I’ve found several studies reporting a correlation between heart rate and BMI (e.g. here), but they’re mostly in obese patients or population studies. Will try to find some in non-obese people.
- For blood pressure, no obvious trend over time. Slightly higher than I’d like (~125/82), but won’t know if that’s real or measurement error until I calibrate against another instrument.
Data:
Blood
Body
Sleep
Methods:
Measurements: See summary section above
Data Processing & Visualization. Data was visualized using Tableau.
Data: here
– QD
