I've been tracking my weight lass losing the scale that Chantel got me for Christmas.  It's a nice scale and it measures weight and body fat percentage (BF), and water percentage as well.  I've heard that these scales are not especially accurate in the BF measuring area, but they are easy.  Well I've noticed that the BF and H2O% are closely connected.  The higher the  H2O% the lower the BF.  I don't know why this is but every time I have a good BF reading it means that the H2O% will be high as well.  The BF is going down consistently but it jumps around quite a bit.

When I used to follow the Burn the Fat Feed the Muscle book the author of that book said that the best way to determine fat content, besides an underwater weighing, which is obviously a very difficult thing to do, is to do a skin fold test.  Certainly a skin fold test would not be a subject to jumping around as much as the scale.

So last night I found the old spread sheet that I was using to track my BF last year.  (It was pretty easy because it was on Google docs.  I really like Google docs.)  The skin fold test had gone from 15mm to 9mm which is pretty good I think.  Actually I had a bout 2 months worth of measurement and they'd actually gone from 20mm to 15mm.  Also, the measurement around my gut had gone from 45" to 42".  I would have like to see that measure be better but what the heck.

Here's my quandary.  According to the scale I'm at 26% BF, and the skin caliper it is 15.32%.  That's quite a big difference.  I don't have any idea how to decide which one is right.  It's a difference of about 25 lbs.  I guess I'll just go through the next phase of the diet and then think about a way that I might be able to figure out a little better which one is the right one, although I think that I lean towards the caliper test, I'm still going to have to think about it.

hCG, Another "Ah Hah!" Moment

Mom and I have started the hCG diet.  It's a diet that Darren, Patrick his father and Marilee his mother, who are all in our ward, have done and they've been very successful at it.  I've been thinking that I would try it, and Mom has as well, and Mom decided that we would start immeadiatly, so we started on Monday.

Of course, as with anything I'm thinking about, I researched it first.  hCG is a hormone that women produce only when they're pregnant.  In fact it's what they use in pregnancy tests.  In looking around for information I eventually found this pdf file on line called "Pounds and Inches" by Dr. Simeons.  I found that book by reading a review of a book by someone named Kevin Tredeau.  His book was called "The Weight Loss Cure They Don't Want You to Know About," but a lot of people say that he's really a charlatan, and that he's just implementing Dr. Simeon's diet, which you can find on line for free (although Amazon also sells it as a book as well).  So I read "Pounds and Inches."

You can read a lot about hCG and Dr Simeons on Wikipedia.  Basically though, Dr. Simeons was a gifted endocrinologist, and he wanted to find a solution to obesity.  He felt that although there might be many causes to obesity, there had to be an underlying cause that would apply to all who were obese.  While he was in India studying pregnant women in India on calorie-deficient diets, and "fat-boys" with pituitary problems.  The "fat-boys" were young men who had unattractive deposits of fat and underdeveloped sexual organs (it's called Froliech's Syndrome).  He noticed that the pregnant women seem to be able to carry the babies without depleting their lean muscles, and that low doses of hCG to the young men allowed them to develop their sexual organs, as well as lose weight, again without depleting their lean muscle mass.

When he went to Italy he developed the theory that there are 3 type of fat

1. Structural Fat: The kind of fat that surrounds and cushions your organs.  (Karen found that their is structural fat on the heel of your foot that pads the heel, and that some people, herself for instance, start to have pain in their heels when they walk because they lose that fat.)
2. Normal Fat: This is the fat that the body store excess glucose as, and draws on if for energy when needed.
3. Abnormal Fat: This is a kind of fat that the body deposits when there is excess sugar, but because of a problem in the diencephalic region of the brain.  (According to Wikipedia it's also know as the "interbrain".  You can find out more about it as diencephalon.)  This region get out of whack and starts to store this abnormal fat in a way that it cannot get access to it again.

It's Dr. Simeons theory that the reason that women produce this hormone is so that the fetus and women can survive during pregnancy.  It makes all reserves of energy in the body available to the baby and the Mom.  He also thinks that what happens during a regular attempt at dieting is that the body first burns off the normal fat, the the structural fat until there are not more reserves there, then it starts burning off the abnormal fat.  This is why dieting can be so hard, and why people hit the "wall" so to speak.  This makes since to Karen and myself for the following experiences in our lives. 

1. Karen has always lost weight overall during pregnancies.  Meaning that she genearlly weighed less after delivery than before the pregnancy started.
2. Karen says that her feet hurt when she tries to diet, which would follow that she's burning structural fat of which the pad on the heel is part of.
3. I can follow a pretty rigorous diet and exercise program, and I know that I'm losing weight and getting smaller, but I my big ol' gut and double chin never seem to get much smaller.
4. When my Dad died, he was skin and bone, everywhere except for his little pot belly that he always had.

So as I'm reading about this stuff it's hitting home to me.  Then I read that the FDA has come out against it!  Well that's like ringing a bell for me.  Turns out that Dr. Simeons developed a very rigorous protocol at his clinic.  First it is low carb, high protein restricted diet.  OK I like that obviously.  However it is VERY restrictive at 500 calories. a day.  However, you don't feel hungry on the diet because the deficit is made up by all the fat that your body can easily burn because of the hCG.  There are also very strict rules about types of shampoo, body soap, make up, deodorant, vitamins etc that you can use because many of these products have fat's and other things in them that can cause you to stop losing weight.

Dr. Simeons would inject the hCG into his patients daily; 125 mg.  In the US you can get homeopathic blends of the stuff.  The FDA has kindly pointed out that there is no evidence that homeopathic hCG works.  Thanks FDA for trying to keep us fat, and diabetic.  However, there can be vitamin charlatans out there so I asked Darren what he was using and he said he used the HCGMadeSimple.com site.  He also said that he'd started using another brand but felt miserable on the diet, until he switched to the hCG from this site.  He found this site because his uncle's chiropractor used it, and his uncle lost over 130 lbs on it.  OK if someone proves to me that something works and it doesn't sound totally crazy I'm willing to give it a shot, and so is Karen.  Karen got a membership at the site and bought the hCG.  The site has a lot of very helpful information and I think it was worth it.

The results.  We've only been on it for the first week, which included the first phase which is called the "gorging phase".  Really that's what it's called, and the HCGMadeSimple.com (HMS) said that many people don't really gorge on this part because it seems counter intuitive, but it's important to have your normal fat reserves full for the diet.  Also, the hCG is not effective during the first two day anyway.  I didn't weigh the first day we took it the hCG, but I did gorge.  I weighed the second day.  HMS says to weigh right after you get up in the morning and do your business.  I know this is true, because your weight can swing widely during the day, however, I like to weigh after I exercise because then I get the water weight loss of exercise, but then that's variable as well, but I've now repented. 

I weighed 251.8 the first day, then 255.6 after the second day of gorging (See I'm good at something) or the third day of the diet.  However, that morning my BG was 156!  Yikes, and it stayed high all day only getting down to 129 at it's lowest.  OK I did stupid gorging that I knew that I shouldn't have and I felt pretty miserable for it.  However, today I weighed 242.2 and my BG was the lowest in the morning that it's been since I started monitoring again after the last scare of super elevated BG.  Also, the diet calls for a couple of pieces of fruit a day.  I did the calculations on the fruit and figured that if I cut the orange or apple in half, I might be OK, but I needed to check.  Turns out that it's OK to do that.  I'll have to make sure that it's still OK when I go off this 500 calorie a day diet but I've been eating fruit for the first time in 10 years or so this week, and really enjoying it.  Also, I'm really not hungry it's amazing.  Although, I do think about eating my next meal, I'm not ravenous like I've been on some diets that had more than 3 time the calories allowed in this diet.  There have been a couple times where I've forced myself to eat the last little bit of food for the day.  I mean I knew that I need it, but I could have gone without it.  Karen's also lost around 5 lbs this week, but that's still really good.  She hate's it that I lose weight faster but that's part of having a higher metabolism because of more muscle mass, and the fact that I'm exercising more than she does.  The diets say that you don't have to exercise but if you do it's more successful.  It also says that during the diet is not a time to start a new exercise program, but that if you've been doing an exercise program you can continue it.  That's where I'm at, I've been exercising so I'm just going to continue.  So I'm losing weight and my BG seems to be going in the right direction as well.  Over all I'm really pleased with the results so far.

Diet Update and more Colloidal Silver

I hate that diet sems to be the thing that I mostly seem to be writing about on here.  However, eating is something that we all have to do and when you have diabetes diet becomes even more critical.

I'm striving to get my blood sugare under control.  I seem to be doing pretty good but hopefully I can do better.  For a while there I was getting readings below 100 pretty regularly.  I then caught a cold, then, apparently have alergies and they kicked up.  That was weird because I started coughing on a Friday afternoon at 2:00.  I was talking to someone at work when it happened and I thought it was wierd because nothing seemed to cause it.  I didn't have a runny nose or anything else, I just started coughing.  By that night I could hardly talk and I wasn't able to sleep because when I layed down the coughing got worse.  Karen went with me to the doctor the next week and with Karen talking to him they decided that it was probably allergies.  That's OK, if that's what it is, because hopefully I'll be able to keep it from turing into an anual case of bronchitus.  However, with the possible cold and hay fever making it hard to exercise my BG started getting a little higher.

When I went to the he ran another HbA1c.  The first test on 1/25 was 7.6 (171 mg/dl) and this last one on 3/24 was 6.4 (137).  That's a pretty good improvement but I was hoping that it was better.

Also I've lost a little wieght, but even more importantly on the scale that Goose gave me that made me fat and stupid it says that I've reduced my body fat percentage by 3%.  That pretty good.  I've lost about 4 pounds as well.  Losing weight can also help me get my BG under control as well.  I guess that I'll just have to keep trying the slow and constant method.

I've thought that the HbA1c was an average of 3 months with the last month being a little more influential.  My doctor said it gives a reading for the last 2 weeks.  I hope that's not right, and since I usually follow what's in the Bernstien book I guess I'll just keep following that.  I'm just going to schedule the next test 3 months from now so there won't be any overlap.

I got a rash on my hand that was pretty painful.  Iwanlani and Karen said that it was probably exzema.  Someone or somewhere I've heard that it is caused by the chickenpox virus.  (I thought Nini told me this but she says that she didn't.)  I don't know if that true or not, but after a couple of weeks it got worse and was cracked and bleeding.  I showed it to Karen for some sypmathy and she asked if I'd poured the silver water accross it.  I said that I was going to wash it with the silver water to see if it'd get rid of it.  That's wat I did, and by that afternoon it was cracked an bleeding and didn't itch anywhere near as bad.  Karen was pretty impressed, and fankly so was I.  So fat the silver water seemed to clear up the congestion in my lungs, kept 3 canker sores from getting painful, pretty much a little hole starts in the mought that you know is going to be a canker sore, and the silver water just keeps it there and then it goes aways.  Doesn't become a hugh painful crater.  Then it seems to have cleard up the rash/exzema on my hand.  Not bad.  I think the stuff actually works.

Photos and Stuff and a Diabetes Update

On Friday I spent a lot of the day working on my iPhoto libraries.  iPhoto is cool, but the library can get huge.  In order to fight that I've found that I could use a program called iPhoto Library Manager that will let you launch different instances of iPhoto.  What I've started doing is keeping an iPhoto Library on an external TerraByte drive and a library on my laptop.  The library on the external drive has 16000 items and is 50 GB.  The one on my laptop has 1600 and is 5.6 GB.  See how that is a little better and easier to work with?  Well Friday I spent some time trying make sure that Karen, my and the Big Dog (that's the external drive) were all in sync somewhat.  AFter that I started working on trying to fix my blog the way that I would like it.  The faces really helped set up the slideshows that I used on my blog, and the photo of Karen.

The next day I was feeling virteous and decided that I would scan in the pictures that Karen had left for me on my desk.  It was a very big time consuming job.  It turns out that these were photos that Karen had gotten after her mother passed away, and they were some very cool pictures that I'd either never seen, don't remember seeing, or hadn't seen in a long time.  I finally just conked out working on the pictures Saturday night, and thought that I'd be able to finish up on Sunday.  I thought that I'd gotten all of the photos out of the envelope but I moved it on Sunday and realized that there were a lot more pictures in the envelope so there was still a long way to go.  I was to disappointed to finish, so I did a few other things, like balance our checkbook.

So today I finally finished scanning in all of the photos.  Turns out there were 265 pictures scanned in when I was done.  I thought that some of the family might like to see, or copy these photos so I put them up on the web.  I think that our daughter might especially like the photos of their Mom when she was in High School.  I assume that she was in high school, it look like that about her age.  There's also a few pictures of her on her mission.  So for whoever is interested here are the different slide shows that will link back to the albums.

I'll start with pictures of Grandma Norma and her family. Some of these you'll have to check with Mom to see who they are. This also includes a painting of the picture of Phillip, Mom's brother that passed away.


Next are photos of Karen from when she was a curly headed little girl, similar to Teda when she was young, to the beautiful lady she became.


Next are family pictures of our family as we got older, and in my case bigger. These also include pictures of Mom and I by ourselves or with family members.


Some of my favorite pictures are pictures that I call daughter pictures. They pictures of our daughters in different combinations.



The girls as the grow up starting with Kiki and working down to Gooey (Chantel).













Diabetes Good News
I have some good news on the diabetes front. I was excited when I was able to keep my BG under 120 for a whole day. Well on Saturday I was able to keep in under 100 for a whole day. This included the dawn effect. I exercised then ate breakfast and measured my BG two hours later and it was still under 100 BG. It stayed that way for all 4 readings. I was so excited that I didn't risk testing it at bedtime. I felt a little guilty about that but I didn't measure it anyway. I started feeling guilty and thought about getting up and measuring it but by that time I was just too tired and let it ride. Sunday the BG was still under 100, but I knew that since I wasn't going to be exercising. That was right it rose to 115 BG then started to fall by the time I went to Church around 1:00. When I got home it was again under 100, however I forgot to take my merformin. I don't know why it just slipped my mine. I slipped my mind until I measure by BG before bed and it was 127. I was a little depressed because I didn't think that I'd taken anything that would cause that spike. However that was when I realized that I had forgot to take the metformin. I guess that metformin stuff does work. Today it wasn't belier 100 when I got up, but it's been hovering around that all or a little below.

Tonight Mom and I tried one of the recipes from "The Diabetes Diet." It was parmesan crusted pork chops. Actually the recipe called for lamb chops, but we substituted pork chops. It was good but let me just say that next time we hope that the cooking will go a little smother. While we were shopping I read a suggestion on a package of feta cheese that suggested trying to put some feta cheese in mashed potatoes. I thought that sounded great and throughout that it would be good in mashed cauliflower. That's the substitution that is suggested in the diabetes book for potatoes and it's pretty good. So we tried that as well. Over all it was a pretty good dinner. I'll test my BG and let everyone know what it is right before I sign off tonight.

Well the final reading for the day is 116.  That means for the day it was 103, 103, 98 then 116.  That's not that bad but I've started getting used to the lower readings so it's a little disappointing.  It might be that I simply ate to big of a meal.  There is something called the "Chinese Dinner Effect".  I don't have the book with me (I lent it to someone) and don't remember exactly how it works, but I do remember that it does work.

Random Thoughts on Diabetes

First Though Gooey Made Me FAT – or Stupid

A while back we moved some stuff around the house and someone set my old scale on it's side and we left it there for a while. That is not the way to treat a measuring device, even a bathroom scale. It was fun to use though because you could easily lose 10 lbs. However, you could also gain the same amount. Well I stopped weighing everyday, so that meant I could eat whatever I wanted. Everyone knows that when a tree falls in a forest it makes no noise unless someone hears it; well that means that if you don't measure weight gain it doesn't happen right? Well that's how I see it. Then I caught my annual bought with bronchitis/walking pneumonia so then not only did I not weigh but I decided that I could eat as much comfort food as I wanted. Now an intelligent person could see that this is not a good situation.

Well Gooey is intelligent and knows how much I liked to weigh everyday, so for Christmas she bought me a new scale. It is a very good scale that measures body fat and water percentage. Gooey also programmed it for Mom and I to use. However, I did mention that you only gain weight when you measure it right? so I didn't start using it for a while.

Then I had an appointment with a Nephrologist. They had me do a 24 hour urine test and when I went back to talk to the Nephrologist the report said that my blood glucose was 170! Yikes! That was very bad.

I knew that I had to start weighing again and so I was going to use Gooey's gift that she gave me. The first time I used it it said that I weighed 260 lbs and 44% body fat. Oh my gosh that was terrible. Gooey made me fat, very fat. 44% body fat that was unbelievable but not really that much worse than 170 mg/dl blood glucose, so I decided that I'd just accept it and start trying to improve my diabetes control.

Teda called Mom and I started talking with her and was complaining to her about how fat Gooey had made me. Teda couldn't believe how fat Gooey made me. Well we both knew who to blame...Gooey.

Then I used the scale again and noticed that there were two readings, body fat and water percentage. I had missed the body fat reading and was looking at the water percentage. Oops. Well my body fat was still unacceptably high at 35%, but that's way better than 44%.

I hope everyone can see how Gooey has made me fat, by getting me a scale, and made me stupid by getting a scale I can't use.

Blood Sugar is Getting Better

I went to my doctor about the bronchitis and the blood sugar since it was after the nephrologist appointment. They gave me a blood sugar test and it was 196 mg/dl. That was terrible. Awful. They also did the first HA1c test I've ever had. When I first started controlling my diabetes the HA1c wasn't being used and since I had my blood sugar mostly under control I've never had one. The HA1c gives an average of your blood sugar over about a 3 month period but it is geared towards the last couple of weeks. Well my HA1c was 7.6. You can get a quick reading on what that means by multiplying by 21 that's a 159 mg/dl average. However, that 21 number really works best if you're blood sugars are close to average. If you're really interested you can see the real formula here. If you run through the equation my actual average was 171.42. That sucks even worse.

I needed to get things under control. However, I still had a lot of comfort food around so I decided to eat it before I started getting the blood sugar under control. That makes sense right!? Right. I also had a new glucose meter, but I decided to put off using it until I figured out which strips my new insurance company would cover. Eventually, after a couple of weeks, I started monitoring. The first reading was 196 mg/dl. OK that depressed me but what depressed me even worse was that I kept getting readings that high, one was 206 mg/dl. So I then started taking my Metformin as well. It is an insulin sensitizing agent, which means that it makes your body more sensitive to insulin and helps you get the blood glucose under control. That helped quite a bit.

Here's a funny story in an ironic kind of way. I bought a pound of shrimp from Wal-Mart. Breaded popcorn shrimp. I know that I shouldn't eat stuff like that but I really didn't know how bad it could be, because I'd never measured it before, thank goodness, because it was 282. That's the last time that I do that.

I started measuring my blood sugar and the first week the average was 156 according to my meter. After a while I realized that I should really start logging everything so that I can see what is happening and start really getting a grip on what is going on. I'm also trying to make sure that the stupid bronchitis thing doesn't kick back up. I started exercising again, very slowly. The first week that I started was also the week that it got bitterly cold. My BG (that stand for blood glucose) was 169 an hour after exercising, and then I measured it again after walking to work and it was 177. That's terrible. My BG used to shoot up immediately after exercising and would return to near normal after about an hour. However, that was very vigorous exercise and this exercise hardly broke a sweat. Then I got sick again, so sick that I had to take another day off even though I didn't want to. The next week I felt pretty good by Monday so I started exercising again, and was adding pushups. I got sick again, but didn't have to take off work but I did stop exercising the next week and stopped walking to work. Mean while my diet was greatly improving and my BG was going down. This week I started to exercise again and while I started to feel sick at the beginning of the week I kept it up and felt better towards the end, and today.

I kept thinking about the BG readings and I realized that I needed to start logging them so that I could correlate what was going on when I ate different things. When I first got diabetes and kept a log, I did it in a little note book. This time I realized that I could probably find an iPod app that would do it and I found a really cool app called LogFrog. The ratings on the app made it sound like it was an app for kids. They said that the way the entries are made made it fun for kids, but it looked easy and like it kept track of everything that I needed it to do so I got it. It has a really cool graphing feature that I like here's picture of it the graph. The app is very fun to use, and pretty ingenious. I like it.

The graph is pretty cool. You can expand it just by using the reverse pinch motion on the iPod. I've squeezed everything down so that all the reading show and you can see the trend. You can also see the shrimp meal spike.

You can see by the graph that the readings are trending down. It also highlights the target range which I have set at 80-120. Wednesday was the first day that I had readings all in the normal range. Thursday I almost had them all in, but I had the morning exercise increase so I had a couple readings above 120 but it wasn't too bad. I've been working to try and figure out how to keep the morning readings down. Strangely enough I do it by eating. On the last fast Sunday my first reading was 126, then it was 145 a couple of hours later, then right before church it was 122 and then 115 after church before dinner. I noticed that the metformin bottle said that it should be taken with food, so I decided that I would try taking the metformin with a snack at the same time before exercising, but I was going to experiment with it by not eating any food with the medication at the first of the week and then try it with food at the end of the week.

It doesn't seem to really change the morning readings that much, but I started eating a little snack and taking the medicine right before I'd walk to the bus stop in the afternoon and the first time I did that the reading was 83. That's the lowest reading I think I've had in ten years. The next day it was 92. Thursday someone gave me a ride to the bus stop and then the reading was 115. Seems like exercising in the afternoon works great.

Right now my weekly average is 115 so that's much better. My monthly average is 130, but it still has to deal with the 282 reading. Once that falls off it will probably improve greatly. I'm supposed to be going in for the next check up in another month or so where I'll get my next HA1c. My weight and body fat is down as well. Getting my weight down will help with the BG so I'm getting serious about losing the weight once again. I'll keep everyone updated.