I’m always looking for collaborators for future experiments. If you’re interested in collaborating on scientifically rigorous self-experiments with low-carb foods, supplements, or other health interventions, please let me know in the comments or via the contact form on the right.
I was hoping to post the results from my bread testing yesterday, but due to a bunch of shipping delays, the last 3 breads didn’t come in time (last one arrives Tuesday). I want to report out a thorough data set, so I’m delaying the report until next weekend.
Experiments this week focused on the last few low-carb breads and some reader requests from the last few posts, including adding “control” foods for each category (regular, non-low carb versions). I’ve posted “requests for request” to this blog and various subreddits and will test them over the next couple weeks and report back.
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.
- Blood Glucose Impact of Low-Carb Foods
- Goal: Determine blood glucose impact of low-carb foods, supplements, and ingredients
- Methods of Sleeping Longer
Let me know in the comments if there’s any other experiments you’d like to see.
– QD
Observations & Data
- Sleep
- Bit worse this week due to two nights of insomnia. I’m now recording insomnia specifically and will looks for correlations once I get more data.
- Blood Glucose
- Numbers were way down this week. It also looks like there’s a trend towards lower fasting BG and higher time-in-range, maybe due to weight loss. After I hit my target weight and stabilize, I’ll take a look at this in more detail.
- Other Blood
- Hemoglobin came back up to normal, suggesting last measurement was an outlier.
- Pulse is back up on the Omron (resting) and while sleep, but continues to drop while awake. The last two weeks, though, I got ~1.5h less sleep than normal the night before the Omron measurement (that can explain Omron, but not the sleeping measurement from my watch). Interesting, but I don’t know what to make of it. Might be worth doing a more extensive exploratory analysis of the correlations between different variables and sleep. Last time I did that, I didn’t find anything useful, but I’ve got a lot more data now, plus the manual sleep measurements that may be a lot more accurate.
- Blood pressure was high again this week, but I had gone to sleep ~1.5h late. I’d really like to test this daily for a while to see if there’s any interesting correlations with sleep, but I need to find a more convenient way to do it.
- Body
- Weight loss back on target. Only a few more weeks to go until I need to stabilize.
- Looks like my waist measurement is flattening. Maybe I’m running out of fat there?
Sleep
Blood Glucose
Other Blood
Body
Methods
- Sleep
- Metrics: total time, heart rate variability, pulse (sleeping vs. waking)
- Methods: 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
- Methods: Dexcom G6 CGM
- Frequency: continuous
- Other Blood
- Metrics: weight, waist circumference, BMI, waist/height
- Methods: scale + Renpho tape measure
- Frequency: weekly
- Body
- Metrics: hemoglobin, cholesterol, blood pressure, pulse
- Methods: Hemocue 801, Cardiocheck PA, Omron 10A
- Frequency: weekly for blood pressure & pulse, every 2 weeks for hemoglobin & cholesterol
