Took a moderate walk around town, ending at Mme. Collette’s for an almond croissant. Yummy carbs, no more keto.
Finished writing up the results of the keto diet experiment (previous post) and posted a link to it from the Keto Chow sub-Reddit. Comments there are all along the line of “you didn’t keep it up long enough, it takes weeks to adapt to keto,” etc. Which frankly seems like a facile excuse. But we’ll see.
Spent some time clearing out a folder full of pictures, several month’s worth of pictures that I’d set aside, saying, I need to tweak this a little and save it in the permanent collection. Processed about 2/3 of them.
The special Easter Lunch arrived, the first Channing House meal I’ve had in 15 days. It was OK.
Spent some time working on my spray booth, and I’m afraid I damaged it. While opening and closing the different panels on it, somehow I pulled one of the two wires out of the little LED light bar I had installed a few months back. There’s no way to get inside it and reconnect the wire, unless I get the light bar off the underside of the lid. Unfortunately I stuck it on really, really well with double-sided tape. Trying to break it free, I started to break the glue bond on the hinged plastic lid I had installed. The whole thing is basically F’d. I will not use it with a dead light bar hanging on it; I can’t get the light bar off. I am strongly tempted to trash it, get another one, and start over.
Finally at 3pm it was time for the NCAA national championship women’s basketball game, Stanford v. Arizona. For a couple of stretches Stanford played like the smooth scoring machine they have usually been, and during those stretches they opened 10 and 12-point leads with seeming ease. The rest of the time, Arizona’s defense made Stanford look like clumsy beginners, giving up close to 20 turnovers.
At the end, for the second game in a row, it came down to Stanford leading by one point with seconds on the clock, and the ball in the opponent’s possession — and the opponents failed to score. The similarity to the end of the prior game against South Carolina was amazing, with the opponent’s star getting off a shot that could have won the game, and it bouncing off the rim at the buzzer.
So not a ringing victory, but a lucky squeaker. Never mind, they won, and are national champs. Until next year.
I remember in prior seasons, Marian and I would go to the Final Four games, and then, win or lose, flying home, we would say to each other, well, basketball is over. What are we doing the rest of the year?
I have a problem with high blood pressure. (Note I do not suffer from any type of diabetes or metabolic syndrome and am not obese: 5’8, 164lbs at the start, BMI 25, top of normal range.) Following a surgical procedure last fall, the surgeon recommended that I try to get my systolic BP down to 120 or lower. My cardiologist prescribed two BP meds, and later tweaked the dosage. My BP flirted with 120 for a while, then edged back up to 140.
What to do? I have an appointment with the cardiologist in May. I can message her anytime. Next step should be to message her and be prescribed a different dosage or a different drug. But I thought that first, I would try a short “N=1” experiment. Anecdotal reports say the Keto diet fixes all sorts of things. Could two weeks on full Keto alter my average BP?
Keto was easy for me to do
A spell on full Keto would be easy because I have in stock several flavors of Keto Chow, a meal replacement designed to support a Keto diet. That was not because I have ever been on a Keto diet.
I live in a fancy Independent Living facility for seniors. We are supplied with three meals a day, normally in a nice dining room but during the pandemic, delivered to our apartments. I don’t care for the timing or content of the usual breakfast delivery, and have chosen to do my own breakfasts for the past year. Lunch and dinner I received as the usual in-house meals.
I have some knowledge of the world of meal replacement products, and a year ago decided to use a meal replacement for my breakfast. I tried several makes and settled on Keto Chow, not because I was into the Keto diet, but because of its wide assortment of flavors and smooth texture. That’s why, at the start of the experiment, I already had a good stock of large bags of Keto Chow, enough to supply all my meals for two weeks and more. I could just cancel all my in-house meal service and go with the Keto Chow.
What I ate
For two weeks my main source of calories was Keto Chow, three shakes a day, mixed to 400 kcal per shake. That’s not sufficient calories for weight maintenance, but I brought in several keto-friendly grocery store items: sausage, cheeses, roast chicken, cashews, dill pickles, canned tuna. I also had a few hard-boiled eggs from the house kitchen.
I bought a jar of natural (no added sugars) peanut butter. One of my favorite snacks was to cut a narrow stick of Havarti cheese and dip it into the oily peanut butter.
I cancelled all house meals for the two weeks. Besides lots of no-cal soft drinks, the above was my diet for the two-week experiment.
What I recorded
I kept the same physical records I have been keeping in a spreadsheet for over a year:
Blood pressure, 2-4 times a day, using a Wells-Allyn home meter
Morning weight from a digital scale
Morning temperature from a digital thermometer
Stool quality on the Bristol scale plus a note on whether my stool floats or sinks
The latter item is because I’m a touch paranoid about pancreatic function, as someone close to me died of pancreatic cancer.
Effects of a Keto diet
Emotionally, the diet was no problem. I got a bit tired of the shakes despite having a different flavor every meal. I noted the following physical effects.
Stool quality in the first few days strongly suggested incomplete fat metabolism: stool floated and had a paler, yellow-green cast than usual. There was one day of loose, almost diarrhetic stool, which I suspect was caused by some funky “beef chips” I picked up on a whim at Whole Foods. Then the stool settled back down to normal color and mostly sinking, indicating complete fat metabolism. I took that as a sign showing I had reached metabolic ketosis. (I did not have any way to monitor blood ketones.)
I was noticeably more thirsty. More often than previously I would feel very thirsty, and drink 8 ounces or more of liquid. I take this as another sign that I was in metabolic ketosis, or at least, some metabolic state different from previous.
My weight dropped sharply. My weight had been generally stable, on a very slow climb from a post-surgery low of 160 lbs, to 164 lbs over the prior three months. In the first four days of the Keto diet it dropped three pounds, then stabilized, then slowly dropped over the final week to 158.8. That’s a 5+ lbs loss in two weeks, with a noticeable effect on my waist size (belt one notch tighter).
This indicates I was not taking in enough calories for maintenance, despite snacking freely on salted cashews and Havarti dipped in PB. Yes, I am well aware of Keto cooks like Chef Taffy Elrod, who publish cookbooks of yummy Keto meals. I have no cooking facilities other than a fridge, a sink and a microwave. So my ability to have a varied Keto diet was limited to what I could buy at the grocery and prepare with a paring knife and a spoon. Apparently that was not enough, although I wasn’t troubled by hunger at any point.
And the blood pressure?
So what was the result of this short, N=1 experiment? Besides affecting stool quality, thirst, and weight, did my systolic BP show any trend during roughly 10 days in ketosis?
Nope. The dark blue line connects all my BP readings (2, 3 or 4 per day depending on how often I remembered to take it) for the period one week before and two weeks during the diet. The light blue line is a 3-measurement rolling average to smooth out the results.
Being in ketosis might possibly have raised my BP a few points, but that is dubious. It might have made my BP more variable: the dark blue line seems to get more bouncy in the right-side two-thirds of the chart. But really, there’s no result there.
What ketosis definitely did not do is to lower my BP in any meaningful way.
So on the 15th day since the start of the diet, I resumed normal eating with an almond croissant from my local coffee shop.
Spent an hour writing up the results of my 2-week experiment with a Keto diet. Did a little work on my modified spray booth, but got stuck figuring out how to glue some parts. Took a moderate walk. That was about it.
Went for the usual walk. Then met Margaret one more time at the coffee bar to go over Mac problems. One was, she had the issue, which is apparently fairly common, that iTunes (or iCloud) repeatedly prompts for your Apple ID. If you enter it, or if you click Cancel, doesn’t matter, it comes right back again. I googled it and found several websites that had the solution, which is to sign out from iCloud, reboot, and sign in to iCloud again. They didn’t say, when you try that, iCloud has all sorts of things it wants you to do first. I got through that and did some of the things and canceled others (you don’t need to download 8000 photos from iCloud to this machine, etc.) and the problem was gone (ominous foreshadowing).
Middle of the day, I started to craft a paper pattern for the cloth front I want to put on my spray booth. Interrupted in that by a call from Margaret. Her signatures had disappeared from Mail. I don’t use Mail so hadn’t realized it lets you store little boilerplate things to put at the end of your emails, and her little boilerplates were gone. Undoubtedly because of the way I had signed out of iCloud abruptly.
But now it was time for the national semifinal game between Stanford and South Carolina. As to be expected with a game between two #1 seeds, it was close right to the final 3 seconds, when with Stanford ahead by 1, S. Carolina had the ball, put up a shot which bounced off the rim. Their center caught the rebound perfectly and went to put it back, which would have given the Gamecocks the win by one point. Unfortunately she put the ball up too hard and it bounced off the back of the rim. Buzzer. Stanford wins. Big girl kneels down on the court in tears.
In the second semifinal, Arizona, a three seed that Stanford beat twice in the regular season, soundly defeated UConn, leading every minute of the game, sometimes by 14, and holding on in the final minute.
Got around my zoom problem and managed to join Veronica’s aerobics at 8:15. After that I tidied the apartment anticipating Wanda coming to clean at 2pm. Also paid two bills.
Chores done, I drove down to FOPAL. Better to go twice a week than to find 6 boxes waiting on Tuesday like last time.
Back home, had lunch and a nap, and then it was getting close to time for Wanda to come in. I had decided to try out the 500mm mirror lens at the Baylands. Since on Sunday morning at 8am the tide had been super low, I figured that 6 hours later the water would be high.
Wrong. The water was almost as low as 5 days previous. Hardly any bird action. I shot a few but there is a problem. The 500mm has very shallow depth of field, which is to say the distance at which things are in focus is very specific, and anything closer or further is not sharp. Case in point, this egret, who I caught with an actual fish in its beak.
Well I think it’s a fish. Could be a rubber boot sole. Anyway, notice the egret is not in sharp focus? Five to ten feet beyond the egret, see the jagged stump on the left and the leaning granite rock behind the bird? Those things are crisp. That’s shallow depth of field, from the stump to the rock. A very minute rotation of the focus ring would have moved the zone back to include the egret and I’d’a had a good picture.
It’s been a lot of years since I’ve had to worry about manual focus. Our cameras have been auto-focus since… the 80s? But this lens does not allow for auto-focus; it is strictly manual. I shot maybe 10 exposures today of various things, and I don’t think the center of interest was in the focal zone on any of them.
I was using a monopod, basically a 5-foot stick with the camera on top. Maybe I have to use full tripod so I don’t have to simultaneously aim the camera with one hand and turn the focus ring by tiny little degrees with the other.
Keepint this short because, A, little happened and B, went to bed without writing an entry, got up to do it.
Went for a walk, and seemingly spent the rest of the day with my laptop. Posted good info about how to change your Zoom name, several people thanked me. Read a lot, locked at several videos. Helped a neighbor with a Mac issue.
Glued three large pieces of clear plastic on the mini spray booth. Now if I can figure out how to do the fabric part so I can put my hands in without allowing dust in (like how you put your hands into a sand-blasting box) that will be nice. I don’t have any means to sew.
Would have done the aerobics but no zoom link was posted. Went for a modest walk instead, to Gamble Gardens.
I had not done any writing but attended the writers meeting anyway. As usual, others had taken the cue “Box” and thought of all sorts of clever variations on it. However one wrote a very lovely, very emotional memoire about when she was 15, and unexpectedly found the box of her mother’s ashes. It was brilliantly done.
Off to FOPAL where I processed three boxes of computer books and thought, there, job done — and then noticed three more boxes just off to the side. Instead of 90 minutes I was there over 3 hours.
Bought some coffee and headed home. At 6pm I joined Kent and Marcia to watch Stanford play their elite eight game against the Louisville Cardinals. The first half was not fun. Stanford had completely lost their three-point shot (1 of 9 went in) and their two-point tries were rimming out also. They were down by 12 at the half.
Now came a striking example of a coach “making adjustments” at half-time. During the third quarter Stanford attempted no threes, but focused on driving to the basket instead. They may have changed some defensive moves as well, but that was the noticeable change. From 12 down they were soon 12 up, while the Louisville coach called two timeouts to try to stop the bleeding.
In the fourth quarter they started shooting 3s again, and hitting them, and finally won by a healthy margin. The Final Four games are on Friday, and the Championship on Sunday.’
Went for the usual walk (although for some reason the iPhone chose to call it 2.4 miles instead of the usual readout of 3.1 for the exact same route). Jogged two stretches of it, which felt fine.
Joined Margaret at the coffee hour at 9:30 and spent an hour consulting again on how she can arrange the illustrations for her pelvis talk (see 2.109). I had been directing her to use Pages, but she hates Pages and just doesn’t have a feel for arranging text and images in a word processor. Then she mentioned Keynote and I realized I’d been directing her completely wrongly. She wanted to make a series of slides not a document. Switched to using Keynote and things went better.
Spent time working out how to convert the open spray booth to a closed one. This is going to need sewing skills which I don’t have. Anyway I marked off two pieces of plastic. Took them to the small hobby shop on the 5th floor to find a box cutter, and cut them out. Next I need to attach them, but how? Finally decide, epoxy. Walk to Ace Hardware and buy some.
Got a call from Susan and Harry, would I like to come have a drink around 5pm? Sure. Do that. Tom and Nancy also there. Pleasant talk with nice people.
Dennis and I had arranged to meet at the Baylands parking at 7:30 am. I needed to leave by 7:10. So of course this morning I slept until 6:40. Well, time for coffee and to dress, and that was about it.
Had a pleasant walk seeing all the birbs hanging out doing nothing. I had thought I would bring the Nikon with the 500mm lens but at the last minute decided it was too clumsy to walk with the camera on a monopod (five-foot stick). And I didn’t see anything to make me regret that decision. The tide was out further than I’ve ever seen it, and there was nothing but mud as far as you could see.
Talked blood pressure, as both of us have an issue with it. I had to report that one week of Keto diet had not changed my BP at all. I am going to continue for the second week, although mainly because I canceled in-house meals for the coming week so whatever, I would have to feed myself. Might as well feed myself no-carb food. I will write up a report a week from now.
Back home I puttered around until noon when it was time for the Stanford Women to play their “sweet-sixteen” game against Missouri State. They had no trouble at all and won by nearly 30 points. Next up, Tuesday, is the “elite eight” game against a much stronger team, Georgia.
Felt low in the morning so was sedentary until lunchtime. Then I went out to a place I haven’t been in years, TAP Plastics. I have this notion about making my little model spray booth dustproof and that will need a piece of clear polycarbonate. So I went to TAP plastics with my dimensions, and they made it in ten minutes.
Stopped also at Safeway for some odds and ends, and Ace Hardware for some velcro. And that was about it, spent the rest of the afternoon reading and watching a couple of games of the NCAA Women’s tournament. Arizona did a terrific job to beat Texas A&M by ten points. Tomorrow it will be the turn of Stanford (at noon) and Oregon to try to advance.
Codgerville 