ketosis update jan 27

Well, it's official. I'm in ketosis (and it appears to be a safe level)

I've been burning fat slowly for several months so I knew there was some going on but despite my awkward start to this experiment I ramped right up to were I should be. For the next few days I will take 3 or 4 tests a day to check levels: when I wake up, before I eat lunch, a couple hours after lunch and late at night.

Next trick is figuring out a workable diet that gets close to the fat levels I think I should have.

I won't make it today because of the amount of olive oil I'd have to consume. I think, starting tomorrow, I'll add some olive oil to breakfast and lunch.

I am absolutely mortified by the thought of 2300 calories. We shall see.

Lessons Learned

I've been wanting to write about delusions for a while. I recently heard a very smart person talk about how he tried "positive thinking" knowing it was all bullshit and it worked. Over and over again he succeeded in his life by carefully looking at what potential was around him, deciding what thing he wanted to do and simply telling himself I am going to try this and it is going to work. It was a very confusing discussion to listen to because he kept saying "I know this is bullshit, but I told myself I would accomplish my goals and I did"

Well, I've considered this delusion dilemma. I'm one of those people who is always inside his own head. It's not the quiet hours at home when I realize my fragile existence in the universe; it's always. I know I won't win the prize, you have to try and if you do win, that's just more problems and it took luck to get you here. I know I can't master the art, someone is always better, more dedicated and more capable. You see I have a serious philosophical problem here, right?

That being said, I am constantly on the look out things about which I am delusional. This week I found one while messing with my diet.

I drink wonderful Kentucky bourbon made by the fine people at the Jim Beam distillery in Clermont, Kentucky. I have had all manner of bourbons in all price ranges and when it's my $ being spent Jim Beam is always my choice.

*Norris waits for the complimentary cases of Jim Beam to arrive*

That being said I hadn't thought about calories of liquor. Well it turns out that two things are at work here.

#1 My 4 oz "doubles" of which I have several each night are 268 calories per glass. I am only eating 1000-1200 calories per day right now in "food"  (that's 2 cokes, 2 snickers and a small bag of doritos to you 'Mericans out there) and then matching it with bourbon each night.. (that's like also eating 2 pieces of pizza and a pint of ice cream)

#2 all calories aren't the same. The body burns the easiest energy source first. If all you have is fat, it burns fat. If simple carbs are present it burns them first. But if alcohol is present guess what? It burns the alcohol first. I've been carefully controlling my simple sugars and feeding my body reduced carbs, making sure I got lots of protein and dietary fiber and all the while I was feeding it an alternate energy source.

This brings up something I say over and over again in my real life: your diet is everything you put in your body. It's not just the food you eat or what you drink, it's the medicine you take, it's the air you breathe. It's everything that you have to use or filter out. Drinking is my delusion. I do it. I know I do it. I like to do it. I want to keep doing it. I know it has a long term affect, but I don't count it.

Having said that am I better or worse?

My ketogenic kickoff

Sunday I had some extra protein (in the form of surprise chicken) and got plenty of sleep because this is the week I'm going to try to get into ketosis! Although, not in the most hardcore sense. For example, I refuse to do long term fasts. 12-18 hours is all I can stomach (so to speak) without good cause. Also, I have not planned to take any supplements like CMT powder. But maybe I'm showing my ignorance. I've been on a very low carb diet for almost 5 months and I thought it would be no problem to go ketogenic.

Problem: Like a moron I thought I'd just modify my diet in my head like I'd been doing for total carbs and calories. I've been paying close attention to simple vs complex sugars and especially dietary fiber, but balancing protein and fat ratios requires a deeper understanding of my diet so.....I made a spreadsheet. (Hooray!)

Quick note: I've been using ketogenic-diet-resource.com for all the handy rules, guidelines and pointers. I went to google and my kitchen to round up the food info. I will adjust these values as I get more information.

This first chart is a reference of what I've been eating up until Monday. At the top you can see I've used the 10/20/70 formula from ketogenic-diet-resource.com by calculating the protein I'll require at my target weight. (this weight is about 15# lighter than I am now and 5 # lighter than I had initially planned, but hey, let's see if this thing has a healthy floor on it.)

This next chart is how I might change my existing diet to meet the carb & protein requirements of the estimated ketogenic diet.

Obviously fat is an issue, I'll get to that in a minute but first: How did I do on day #1? meh.

Today is day #2 and I started out with what felt like was a plan but then I put this spreadsheet together and realized I should have done the spreadsheet first.

I fear that getting the level of proper fats for this diet is going to require a radical change and we hates changes don'ts we, Precious? I am proceeding with care and reading more about what I am trying to do. The real lesson of today is I should have done this before I changed my diet last August. It would be cool to have all those numbers about which foods I ate and what resulted in weight loss and when. Think of the awesome charts I could have made! Oh well.

Energy Addiction:

I work in the oil & gas industry. I know, shame on me.

I mean, screw you! I have a job and pay taxes and stuff! Harumpf

My career hypocrisy aside, I live with a couple realities that some people have a hard time processing.

#1 releasing the stored energy in the bonds of fossil fuels is bad for us and pretty much everything around us. (We’ll talk about this at a later date)

#2 I could wake up tomorrow to find that some smart cookie has worked up a slick new way to generate large amounts of energy that can be developed into an inexpensive industry ready for global deployment in my life time, that some other smart cookie has come up with a relatively safe way to store said energy that can be standardized into a package the average human can handle and BLAMO! I’m looking for a new pay check.

(please hold your comments about conspiracies to keep new energy sources off the market, I’ll get to that)

Let’s face it, the reason we don’t have flying cars is that the energy revolution never happened. After we split the atom things kind of stalled on that front. We had to figure out so much infra-structure stuff to take an industrialized nation (I’m just talking about the US here, I don’t know what’s stopping Syria from achieving an energy revolution. Oh, wait. Yes I do.) into the modern age that we ended up concentrating on how to process the data required to make things happen. And so the data revolution happened instead.

 Now, it’s easy to think of data as something purely mathematical. To think of it as sales figures, credit card transactions, or interest rates. It’s also easy to imagine that data is just the binary translation of our songs, photographs, and amazon.com purchase histories. But data is actually everything we know, think, feel and experience as recorded and communicated.

Write it down, take a selfie with it, bitch about it to your friends, get it tattooed on your neck, it doesn’t matter. If you do anything except try to remember it, it becomes part of the database of human experience. There’s a knock-on effect to recording and sharing whatever you think, feel or experience. (This is part of a much more complex discussion about sentience and causality that I’m not qualified to get into.) Humans naturally seek to record and share their data and, as our accomplishments and understanding of ourselves and the world around us exploded over the last couple centuries so did our ability to record and share our data. (The data revolution really kicks in with the late 19th century arguments over computational mathematics and an army surgeon who tried to make the US census work better but that’s a story for a better story teller than me.) 

The mid to late 20th century is marked by faster communication, bigger networks sharing information, greater standardization of rules and components and automation of every conceivable thing in our lives; all of which has been controlled by data. I imagine you imagining computer networks and the internet as they are now but I’m talking about things like building national highway systems, standardizing rules for driving and flying, developing and sharing new medicine, redesigning our factories and neighborhoods, all done over the last 70 or so years. Sociologically speaking, the civil rights movement should be a perfect example of data used for standardization. And it was freaking hard to get most people to accept the data. (Someone’s going to ask “what do you mean by data?” It’s a literal analogy, figure it out.)

 This data had to be processed. This is where computers come in. This is why our cell phones have given us 9 wonderful years of internet access. Seeing and knowing aren’t enough anymore. We have to share what we see and know and we have to be able to process it into metrics that have value. This is what most people think of when you talk about the data revolution. Computers that get more powerful and thus smaller to do the same job. My cell phone in 2015 could more than what my laptop in 2005 could do. Notably, I feed more personal data into my cell phone every day than I would have given my old clunky laptop. But my never ending stream of data is being never endingly processed by whatever I stick it into (there’s a dirty joke there somewhere).

 If you believe the experts, we are about to hit a wall with the hardware part of the data revolution (unless that quantum computing thing does something cooler than it’s doing now) so maybe the energy revolution can kick off. This feels like a good place to discuss that conspiracy thing from earlier. Powerful people and corporations make a lot of money off the current energy market and people who are winning never want to change the game. But, my personal opinion, is that the game is more about money and less about energy and the people who are winning are really only competing with each other. So, if the new energy had the right earning potential, and the big players stood to beat out their rivals, I feel like it’s more doable than the conspiracy nuts think.

 Hooray! Based on my completely speculative and biased opinion and what seems to be some syllogistic reasoning everything will be fine if we just get a couple smart cookies and some big shots capable of being manipulated by a guy who still can’t touch-type.

But what if the energy revolution does happen? Just, what if?

Let’s start with the climate-change perspective of this argument. (I’ll do another post, later, about my problems with the climate change debate and No, I’m not a climate-change denier but I’m sick of being told the world is coming to an end.)

The largest % of world wide carbon emission comes from energy generation. If you could come up with something to generate 50% of our national electric energy without adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere that’s the same as  removing every car, truck, train, ship and plane. Suddenly you can sleep tight knowing that the power plant providing your Prius with a charge isn’t the biggest polluter anymore. And NASCAR can keep right on turning left at <5 miles per gallon.

What will happen to the other energy sources and the people who depend on them for a living? What happened to the coopersmiths, haberdashers, travel agents, and block buster cashiers? Sh1t changes, bro. This goes back to my if-you-can-make-money-doing-it-the-rich-people-will-be-on-board-directly argument. Do you really think that wealthy people will miss an opportunity to stay wealthy? I think…..

*Norris’s phone rings*

Hold on. Hello? Oh!

*Norris turns back to the audience*

It’s the American manufacturing industry from the 1950’s, 60's,&70's. They want their make-more-money-every-year-while-consumer-goods-stay-cheap paradigm back. NO? I’ll tell them it’s a pipe dream.

*Norris turns back to his phone*

They’re too busy trying to save American jobs in the energy sector while preventing global warming without having a socio-economic effect. They’ll have to call you back.

*Norris hangs up*

Eggs + break some + hard work on all our parts = omelet

If you want to discuss what we can do to offset this effect I’ll make a new post for that, too. I have some ideas based loosely on the fact that our economy is imaginary. (Good stuff)

Finally let's talk about what was so important that I made it my topic: We are addicted to energy. If we come up with a cheaper safer source would we really see a net-benefit? Probably not. The history of electricity in our homes is each generation of appliance uses less energy but we have more and more appliances. The 1940's family that had one tube-powered energy sucking radio turned into the 1950's family that then had an energy efficient transistor radio and a huge tube powered energy sucking TV and oven and washing machine. By the 70's we had a house full of appliances, blenders, mixers, washers and dryers and steroes and TV's and air conditioning everywhere!  By the 90's there were multiple TV's, radios, game consoles, cordless phones, all types of appliances and now some computers in every house. 15 years later everything we buy plugs into something (note to self: there's a sex toy joke here). The epa greenhouse inventory report  (you have to download the full report which is over 450 pages, this link just goes to the source page) shows that the per capita greenhouse gas emission has gone down it he US over the last 15years but the population has gone up...so guess what the net effect is? Yup. Up. The point being, our total usage of energy is going up even though things are much more efficient with each generation. TV's use less power per diagonal inch of screen area and so we make them bigger and buy more of them per household. I'm not preaching here, I have a lot of things that plug into the wall too. I try to offset my little things by carefully regulating my big things. It's 56 deg F in my house right now because I haven't run the heater yet this year. (Another reason I am single)

One of my fictitious readers, Ur4M0r0n writes, “But if there was an energy revolution would I finally get my flying car?”

The short answer is "No". Consider the freaking trouble we are having figuring out drone etiquette. Do we bomb the whole wedding party to get the one evil groomsman? YES! Can I take pics of your sunbathing wife in your back yard? NO! America is a confusing place. (That’s a joke, yo. Save your angry emails)

 The straight up math of energy required to make things fly reliably in almost all conditions, how complex the technology must be for it to be intuitive enough for everyone to be able to use it, the ability to train and police a mobile population who can now travel unrestricted through the air and the required cost of new technology on an undeveloped market place make it seem pretty doubtful that this technology will advance fast enough even if we had the power. What’s more likely is that a badass new power source would be misused by the government for a decade or two before a handful of guys in their garages do something interesting but dangerous with it and then it gets popular enough for someone to risk corporate capital on it. Basically this is a multi-generational technological advancement that can’t happen until we have a radically new power source. Get to work on that and then we'll talk flying cars.

 I feel like I could have talked a lot more about this, that I rambled all over the place with it, and that I really misused used conjunctions. But I’m tired and it’s bed time.

This week’s diet update:

I am down to 205# That’s a weight I have not seen for almost 20 years. Now, before you rush to your BMI charts and start imaging me as one of the people of wal-mart, please be advised that I’m a fairly mesomorphic body type. Even at 230# I looked pretty average for a 5’10” male, but I didn’t feel it. My job has changed and I spend a lot of time at my desk now, so my increased weight was hard on my ankles, knees and back. What I did was really simple. I cut out all simple carbs (refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, bread, pasta, etc). I added daily fruit and more veggies, kept my protein (primarily fish, lean chicken and some beef & pork) and watched my total calories. I have steadily lost 1-2 pounds per week with no ill effects (fatigue, back or joint pain, dehydration, sleeplessness, etc). But now that I have my diet so under control I am thinking of messing around with controlled ketosis.

For those who don’t know, ketosis is when you replace carbs with fats as your body’s primary energy source. If you diet and lose weight, you did it through ketosis. If you are lost in the woods and don’t eat for 3 days the weight you lose is also through ketosis. We tend to associate it with starvation because that is its evolutionary purpose. (You do realize that your ancestors did not eat every day right?) However, if you mindfully control your diet and feed yourself plenty of the right types of fats and proteins you can make this human body machine in which you are stuck work at a whole new level.

I am now setting the stage to play with this for a few weeks. I have started by rounding up some urine strips to measure the levels of ketones in my blood. I have also begun to document my normal daily diet. I’ve been doing this mentally for the last 4 months, just making sure I followed a routine.

#1 Fruits and fats for breakfast (<500 calories) This spiked my blood sugar but I needed energy for the morning which is typically my most active part of the day.

#2 I snack on fruit and nuts as I need through-out the day with a very low calorie lunch. 300-400 calories between 8am and 6 pm. Only water to drink. This keeps my mind working and (I thought) keeps my metabolism going.

#3 A low calorie dinner which is high in fiber & protein (<500 calories). I have salads 3 or 4 nights per week and meats & veggies the remainder.

 This all seemed sensible to me I kept my daily intake to 1000-1500 calories range with lots of greens, lean meats and only complex carbs. As I started losing weight I raised my daily activity level with a mixture of weight lifting and cardio exercises like bicycle riding. I am happy with the physical results and I feel, emotionally, better than I have in ages (I attribute that to not having the massive glucose/insulin spikes caused by daily candy, soda, etc)

 But now I am paying attention to deeper, more scientific studies regarding our bodies, their metabolic processes and the food we eat. It gets tricky. Things like: eating a lot of protein can spike your insulin levels just like eating candy unless you take it with adequate fiber which is also a carb. Also, there are tons of supplements you can take to speed up or stabilize these metabolic processes. I will not be supplementing for this experiment. Fasting for 1-2 days can fire up ketosis. I will not be fasting. I will alter my quantity and quality of dietary intake.

 For a wonderful discussion about ketosis listen to the Tim Ferriss podcast with dr dom d’agostino or go read at ketogenic-diet-resource.com

 Disclaimer: there appears to be no right answer with regards to diet. I have been reading about athletes in particular and they run the freaking spectrum from eating nothing that spikes their blood sugar to eating 30 bananas per day to drinking beer or wine and eating only bread and pasta. How do you argue with life-long athletes and world record holders? How do you know what you, yourself should do? Well, to start, you get real damned honest about everything you put in your body. Make a log for a few weeks and then, if you can, go see your Dr and let him/her now what you are doing and what you want to do. (I'll eventually get to a post about the separation between "diet" and "exercise".

 When I look for scientific answers it’s just as confusing. The glycemic index is a maddening chart. This rice is good, that rice is bad. This berry is OK that berry is cancer with a stem.

The general feeling I get is that:

> Carbs must be limited and as complex as possible.

> Fats must be of the right type (I had a racist uncle who told me something like that once) and only consumed when you can use them.

> Protein is a serious daily requirement but useless without physical daily activity.

> Vitamins and minerals are super important but only in microscopic doses.

 If you are a sedentary asshat it doesn’t matter what you eat; you’re going to be a doughy, pudgy, lazy person who feels hungry because he’s tired, tired because he’s depressed and depressed because food doesn’t serve any purpose and his gut bacteria want more from this relationship (the human biome is definitely the future of human health).

 So, if all goes as planned, next weekend I’ll cut out the 2 or 3 sources I currently use for complex carbs and drastically raise my fat intake. BY a week from Monday I should be able to say I’m proudly in a ketogenic state.

Isn’t science fun?

Let’s talk taxes

I work for a small family owned company and I have, unfortunately, intimate knowledge of much of their “business”. Yesterday I saw an electric bill for one of their many, many properties and I noticed something odd. At first it seemed like just another surcharge but the name stood out: The Military Base Adjustment Factor. Military Base? There are no bases for hundreds of miles. There are only a couple National Guard Armories within 50 miles of here. (My father was in the military with several of those years being spent in the national guard) What is this surcharge?

So, to Google I went and what I found upset me.

 Disclaimer: Please note that I am not now, nor have I ever been a lawyer. I am not qualified, by any standard, to read or interpret the law.

Here we go:

The Public Utilities Regulation Act for the state of Texas (all 458 glorious pages). What you want to read is on page 131 of the .pdf document. It’s chapter 36 Subchapter H “Rates for government entities”, section .354 “Discounted rates for military bases”

Or if you don’t want to go through the whole thing here’s just chapter 36 in some weird text only short form:

What it says is that if you are the only electrical service provider in the area where there happens to be a military base you must give them a discounted rate. The wording is like this “in an area where customer choice is not available” meaning [paraphrase]if the military base HAS to buy electricity from you[/paraphrase]. Then you MUST offer your electrical service at a discounted rate set forth by the Public Utilities Regulatory Act.

At a glance, this seems to make sense. You can’t monopolize a utility and then charge a tax payer funded organization a premium. We can get behind that, right? If you read the whole sub-chapter it applies to schools and exempts small municipally owned power companies that operate on a very slim profit margin. What’s the harm, right?

Well the harm is that there’s a loop hole (there’s always a loop hole)

One company that, I can find, exploits this loop hole every time but only for the military bases. South Western Electric Power Company (SWEPCO) has not failed to file a petition every year since this bills passing to exploit a loop hole that allows them to collect a surcharge from their other customers for the reduced billing they are forced to offer the military bases.

Once again, I am not a lawyer, I may be completely wrong, please correct me if this is so.

This is the 2015 approval.

Here’s the clean copy of the petition stamped “approved”

Wow. What a boring and uninformed post. What could this even mean if I understood all this legalese, mumbo-jumbo?

 Here’s how I see this:

>  We pay taxes to the government, who funds the military.

> The military spends money which is our tax $$.

> The military gets state mandated pricing for services like electric power to reduce the cost to us, the tax payers (all good so far)

> And we, the tax payers, get billed by private entities for the tax payer money the military did not spend………

That’s a tax on private citizens by private companies (apparently only one) mandated by the state government which is regulated by state elected officials on behalf of a federal entity and not the tax payer or the utility using citizens.

We are paying for the tax payer money our military is not spending with our public utilities. So, if the military paid the higher rate we wouldn't be surcharged.

That's double taxation!

The libertarian in me is saying very bad words right now.