Category Archives: science

The body’s dual fuel economy

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For the duration of this essay, we shall assume that eating and exercising are separate activities. If you run a marathon, adding carbohydrates may be a good idea; if you run for the bus, probably not so much.

Since understanding these things is becoming a matter of life or death, I tend to pick it up wherever I find it. And since it affects millions and millions of fellow earthlings, I should probably share it. Let us talk about exercise and body fat.

I read an article in the Norwegian business daily DN. They have a popular section on health and fitness. Businesspeople need to stay in shape, they don’t get it as part of their job. This article said to forget pulse watches and such, and talk instead. If you could (just barely) lead a normal conversation or recite a familiar text, you had the ideal speed for burning fat. Faster than that, and the body switches to burning carbs instead.

This is correct, in the sense that fat is a much more complex form of molecule and takes longer time and more oxygen to burn. Therefore when you exert yourself, your body resorts to sugar, which is what all carbs come down to eventually. Sugar is simpler and burns faster and easier. And unlike fat, you can get energy from glucose without enough oxygen. There is an enzyme that can split glucose and release part of the energy directly. The result is lactic acid, which is then burned later when you get enough oxygen.

(Until recently it was believed that lactic acid built up in the muscles and was the reason why people got stiff and sore after exercise. This is no longer considered a fact. It seems lactic acid is harmless in the levels found during and after exercise. It also leaks easily into the blood and is greedily accepted by other cells who burn it for food or restore it to glucose for later use.)

So it is true that you burn the most fat while you are still breathing freely enough to talk.  But there is a difference between “nothing but the truth” and “the whole truth”. Other authorities urge you to press yourself harder. After all, this carb burning may be faster, but it is less efficient. When you run, you spend a lot more energy than when you walk: Not just per minute, but also per mile. Running is not energy-efficient. And fat is stored energy. If you spend more energy than you eat, no matter how, you will lose weight.

To explain this, we have to look at the body’s use of energy. It actually has two separate but overlapping “economies”. Carbs are fast energy and can be compared to cash, while fat is slower and can be compared to putting money in the bank. Just like most of us carry a little cash on us, the body stores enough carbs for about a day of normal activity without eating. So in theory you only need to eat every other day! But your stomach probably disagrees with this; mine certainly does. Still, there are people who live this way. They are generally in good health and tend to age more slowly, or so they say. (Controlled studies show more varied results.) Whether they are able to concentrate on their work while their stomach is busy faking its own death, I do not know. You may want to ask them.

Since most of us eat every day, many times a day, it is common that our carbohydrate storage fills up and actually overflows. In this case, the body burns carbs first and the fat you eat goes straight at your belly for use in the next famine. If there are still leftover carbs, fat cells try to convert it into fat. However, humans suck at this, and much of the energy is lost in the process. (Well, technically energy cannot be lost. It is spread in your body as heat. So you may want to try a sugar rush during the arctic winter.)

One exception is fructose, a sugar that can be converted to fat in the liver with very little loss. It is a common ingredient in sweets and soft drinks in the USA, but in the rest of the world it is rarely found except in honey, which we probably get less of than we should. In the USA, negative publicity has caused many suppliers to illegally rename their product “corn sugar”. So if you buy something that contains “corn sugar”, you can assume that 1) it will end up as fat if you eat it, and 2) it comes from liars with a bad conscience.  However, if you swear to a high-fat diet, fructose is probably the closest you come to fat while still tasting sweet.

Now instead of fasting every other day, you may decide to work out instead. Let’s say you are not an athlete and so you just go for a brisk walk. In the beginning, your body will mostly burn sugar, because there is already too much of it. During the first part of your walk, your pulse will probably be lower. But after a while your blood sugar will fall slightly, and your pancreas will make glucagon,  the “anti-insulin”. Just as insulin told your body to stow away sugar from the blood and store it first in your muscles and then as fat, it now says the opposite: The liver puts more sugar into the bloodstream, and muscles burn fat in addition to spending their own carbs storage (glycogen – why do they make the names so similar?).

Now while merrily you stroll along, your body is burning both sugar and fat. (Actually it always does, but the fat is only a small part if there is plenty of sugar.)  Now you can either keep walking, or start running.

If you have limited time, running is the obvious answer. You spend a lot more energy that way in the same time. So what if most of it is carbohydrate? That just means your muscles and liver will be reasonably empty even if you have not fasted for a day. So the next time you eat carbs (bread, pasta, rice, cane sugar etc) your body will be busy restocking its glycogen reserves, while using fat as fuel. Instead of the other way around, as it used to be. You still lose weight in the long run, and this probably makes you happy if you have read this far. (There are people who don’t need to lose weight. They are probably doing something else by now.)

But if you have plenty of time, continuing to walk may be more pleasant, and therefore you are more likely to do it again. People, like amoebas, tend to withdraw from what causes pain and stretch toward what gives pleasure. And usually – unless you are really dedicated to your food – you are at least not eating while you walk. So that’s something. ^_^

The thing is, you can keep going much longer when you pace yourself. Muscles can only store so much glycogen (although it improves with regular training). When they begin to run out, you “hit the wall”. Think of it as suddenly having just one engine instead of two. You used to have sugar and fat to fuel your muscles, but suddenly there is only the fat engine running, and that is the slow one. You won’t die (unless you have some preexisting condition) but your body will no longer be able to respond to your will. Even if you tell it to run, it will at best be able to walk, and even that reluctantly. This is a quite unpleasant experience, apart from the stiffness and soreness that you anyway get after pressing yourself. So not motivating.

Therefore, I recommend pacing yourself if you have plenty of time, but racing yourself if you have little time and no heart or lung problems.

I hope you now see how people can have two opposite opinions on this matter and both be right! This is actually something that happens often in this world, and causes conflict or at least discord. By knowing more, understanding more and seeing the whole from a higher perspective, you can overcome this source of conflict and experience harmony and happiness.  ^_^

 

 

75% control?

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“You can sit there and reflect on what you did!” That sounds like a good idea, but you may sometimes find that it was actually mind parasites (complexes) that influenced you to do it. That is not exactly an excuse – life can be reclaimed from those. But first we have to throw the light of awareness on them.

Recently I was walking and outlining an entry in my head about religion vs mind parasites. By a strange coincidence, this week’s broadcast of Happy Science on Air featured an answer by Ryuoho Okawa about destiny and the degree to which one is in control of one’s own life. Okawa answered that one controls about half of one’s life through the choices one makes. A quarter is decided before we are born. And the fourth quarter is decided by spiritual influences, good or bad. So by religious training the part of your life that you can control goes up from 50 to 75%.

That is what Ryuho Okawa says. But he also occasionally says that he is God and comes from Venus, so you may want to call a couple more witnesses before making your final decision.

I think even 50% is actually very rare in typical humans. I mean, I suppose technically you can make that many decisions if you are wide awake while living your life. And there are a number of secular philosophers who just may have lived that way even without religion as we usually think of it. So I suppose the potential exists. And it could be argued that to not choose is also a choice, although I wonder how accurate that is if people don’t even KNOW that they have a choice.

Making people aware that they have a choice, that reality is not as small and bland as it sometimes looks, is one of my major aspirations in life. But I wonder if I should be more selective about it. A number of my friends did wake up a bit and began to think for themselves. They went on to think wrongly and went astray, as in causing suffering for themselves and others. But I guess at least they were not bored. Still, I sometimes wonder if this restriction on seeing the freedom, this “sleep”, may have been put upon people for their own protection.

And yet, to me this is important. Personal growth, as I see it, is the growth of the conscious, reflecting self at the cost of the mind parasites or rote habits. By habits I don’t only mean outward actions, but habits of thought and even habits of seeing the world in a particular manner.  These are usually programmed into us early in life by family, friends, teachers and the wider culture.

This does not mean that everything we learn is wrong, of course! But in a manner of speaking it does not really become ours until we consciously observe it and reflect on it. A good habit may also exist for many years and we have not really made it a part of ourselves because we don’t see what we are doing.

But often the things we do and think and see are not a conscious expression of ourselves, but the doings of free agents of the mindscape, mind parasites or (if we are lucky) symbiotes, and snippets of brain software that runs on its own, somewhat like the Android programs that don’t close down properly and drain the batteries of your smartphone unless you have Juice Defender installed. They may have been useful at some point in the past but keep running in the background without us being aware of them. Most Windows machines also tend to run gradually slower as all kinds of junk builds up, mostly harmless (although the occasional virus or worm may also be there) but not useful, and not really wanted. We just don’t notice it. So it is no miracle that the brain has the same problem, and probably more so, since some of this junk has built up for generations! “That’s the way we do it around here.”

So sometimes we wake up and find that we live in a corner of our own brain, while most of it is dedicated to things we don’t exactly hate (although that may also happen) but just don’t recognize as us.

Whether we – the person – actually exists? That is a deeper question that I don’t think we should try to answer until we have a thorough understanding of how the rest of our mindscape looks, from a long time of direct observation. I will just briefly mention it: The body may look from outside as if it is mostly “one piece”, but inside it is actually made up of many different organs, and these again are often made of smaller structures, which again are made of tissues of myriad cells. And even the cells again are made up of smaller parts and so on. So does that mean the body does not exist?  That is clearly wrong too, if you mean that there is nothing there. It does not disappear and is not reduced by our knowing. Seen from one perspective the body remains, but seen in another way we see many other things also in its place. It is no surprise if the psyche is similar.

It may seem like a horrible idea to expand the conscious “I”, if we want to get rid of it later. But consider the alternative: Letting the brain fall prey to the mind parasites for as long as we “live” – I cannot even fully use the word live, in the sense of living a human life, if we are run by mind parasites most of the time in most of the ways. So dismantling these is a priority. But then we also have to dismantle our pride and our sense of being the greatest and most important thing in the universe. These things can happen in parallel. But until there is some room in the chaotic mindscape for clarity, we cannot really begin to see ourselves.

I constantly see people who have very little control of themselves, although they may think so. The parasites are in charge. And one of these people has been me. It surely still is, in the many areas where I have still not reflected on myself in an objective way.

 

“Humans with breasts”

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“Men… As long as they see huge breasts, they don’t care who it is?” That is actually true on one level, but far from true on another level.

When I make my way through the city, my peripheral vision just registers people as vaguely humanoid shapes when I don’t look directly at them. But sometimes, and that included today, some of them appear as vaguely humanoid shapes with breasts. That is to say, even though I don’t look at them directly, some kind of breast detection module of my brain still manages to notice, even while I am thinking of something else. And I usually am – I am long past the years where a man would walk through the city thinking about breasts. Well, this kind of man at least. Your man may vary.

So we could say that on this level, which is close to actual instinct and operates automatically, it is true that a man does not care who it is. Important details like breasts and birthing hips are registered by what we may imagine as an separate circuitry of the brain, to use the computer metaphor.

It is a completely different thing to obsess over it. Seriously guys? It is a completely different thing unless you are lacking most of your brain, or it is there making your head heavy but it is not working.

This awareness that some humans have breasts is like level one out of five:

1) Aware

2) Considering

3) Willing

4) Wanting

5) Decided

In order for the species to continue into another generation, at least one of the parents have to reach level 5, and ideally the other should be from 3 upward if we don’t want to have a criminal case on our hands.

So in that regard, being simply aware of the physical differences between the sexes is pretty far from getting it on. It is certainly in itself no threat do my celibacy. Your celibacy may vary, depending on whether you are a complete idiot with bad habits. In which case your celibacy is probably not voluntary. Long may it last anyway.

That said, there certainly are situations already in this life where it would be preferably to simply see the other person as a human, and not as a human with breasts (or with the thing women become aware of, as I am pretty sure they also are aware of the opposite sex).

I am cautiously disagreeing with the Norwegian government when it decided to mandate by law that corporations needed to have at least 40% board members of each sex. (In Norwegian we have the same word for sex and gender, so I am not sure what they do about gay and lesbian directors. Do they qualify as 40% of each?) While I am sure that women have many ideas they can contribute in the boardroom, I am also certain that men are likely to lose some of their ideas, and power of thought in general, in the presence of a multitude of women.

In America I hear they are taking this idea even further, and writing laws that mandate 50% men and 50% women in each marriage. Well, I suppose that is taking things to its logical conclusion. An extreme case of government meddling in people’s affairs. You start in the boardroom and end in the bedroom. Darned leftists can never get enough government!

In Heaven we won’t notice people’s breasts. (Or lack thereof.) Or that’s what the voice in my heart tells me. In that regard, I am in Heaven pretty often. But not yet all the time.

 

The perfect diet

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There is a lot of research about the effects of what goes into our mouth. Today I’ll write about that.

Hopefully you are at least as fed up as I am with minutiae of my calories, so let’s talk about humans in general. This week a new study from NTNU, a Norwegian university, finally revealed what food is best for humans. Well, the moderate number of humans who were tested, at least. And rather than asking the test subjects, these researchers asked the genes: They checked the gene expressions after various types of diets, on the same people as they gradually changed their eating habits.  This way, the test subjects were their own control group.

This test was of the macronutrition, that is to say the main food groups, rather than vitamins, minerals etc. And the genes’ favorite diet turned out to be none of the current big names.

For a couple decades, the low-fat diet got the support of most of the scientific community. After all, the main cause of death was cardiovascular, and there was no doubt that the plaques on the arteries were made up largely from fat. Also the patients with these problems tended to have more cholesterol and triglycerids in their blood, both of these are fats. For good measure, fat people were far more likely to suffer from not only circulatory diseases but also diabetes and even some cancers. The obvious answer was to remove fat from the food. And this also worked, when you took it to the extreme, as with the Ornish diet and lifestyle change, which can actually remove plaque from the arteries and reverse pretty much all the so-called lifestyle diseases.

There is one small problem with this extreme low-fat diet, though: Few people manage to stay on it. The number is said to be less than 5%. You’d think people would do everything in their power to save their life and limb, but that is simply not true. Humans have a hard time resisting their instincts, and the instincts were not amused with eating beans and cauliflower.

Lately the low-carb diet has come into focus instead. It is easier to stick to, since fat really satisfies. It carries most of the flavor, the food stays longer in the stomach, and the brain also feels more fed. Protein is also more satisfying than carbs. And if you eat very little carbs, the body will switch to burning fat instead. Anyway, low-carb and no-carb diets have become gradually more accepted over the last few years.

So what was the message from the genes? None of the above. Of the combinations that were tested, they preferred to get about one third of the calories from each of the three main food groups: Carbohydrates, fat and protein.  (Since fat is twice as energy-dense as the other two, you would need half as much of it in weight to get the same calories.) But in the typical Norwegian diet, some 65% of the energy comes from carbs, in the form of bread, potatoes, pasta and cooked vegetables, sometimes rice.  This caused a mild inflammation-like state in the entire body, as if it was at the beginning of a flu or something. They called it “metabolic inflammation”. In addition, high-carb diet activated genes for cancer, heart disease, dementia and diabetes II. Or so they say.

Another discovery was that many small meals were better than few large, again if you wanted to keep this body-wide inflammation at a minimum. They recommend as much as 6 meals a day,  three main meals and two or three smaller. All of them with the mix of fat, protein and carbs.

***

Of course, there shouldn’t go too many days before some highly qualified experts find out that a completely different diet is even better for your genes. Or perhaps some other part of you.

If only there was this much research into the diet of the soul!

The terrorists have already won.

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By all means take sensible precautions. And then ride off into the sunset.

My younger online friend Bjørn Stærk has a 9/11 article in a Norwegian publication. As usual his words are filled with wisdom. If I were to extract the essence, he says that there happens very much in the world. We should look around and not let random groups of people decide our reality, whether they be terrorists or pundits. They know not what they do. The world is much more than this, and if we keep getting led by the blind, we will be blindsided again and again forever.

***

Looking at the USA, I think my headline is justified. The fragile safety was shattered, seemingly forever, and panic was made into an institution. Even now, people are being harassed by halfway-police deriving their power from that event.  And while trillions are spent chasing shadows, more people die in a day – possibly in an hour – from TV, couch and fast food, than from all terror attacks in living memory. Where are the trillions for your war on couches? Your war on fast food? Your war on passive TV consumption?

If you have nothing more to learn from 9/11, let it go. Good people are dying every day. One of those days it will be you. Don’t let a day go by without learning something, without seeing something with fresh eyes, without being alive at least for a brief moment, looking around, realizing: “I am here. This is now. I am alive in this world” before the habitual thoughts overwhelm you and sweep you away again.

 

Car tyres vs strolling: Fight!

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If you have hip pillows instead of gut tires, there is no pressing health reason to lose weight. You may still enjoy a stroll in the park though. And so may the people who see you.

“You don’t get rid of the car tires [around your guts] by strolling” wrote a supposed expert at DN.no, the website of the Norwegian business daily that I have followed for many years. The business site has its own health and fitness section, as is good and proper these days.

In Norwegian, we use the word “bilringer” (car tires)  to describe the rings of fat that surround the gut, especially on men. (I believe the phrase “spare tire” is used in English?) It has dawned on people that these adornments of easy life are not good for our health, but what to do?  Strolling in the park is not the answer, says the expert.

I think the expert is mistaken, and probably dangerously mistaken.  Strolling in the park is not only an answer, it may be the best possible answer. If you wake up with spare tires, going on a power exercise spree is potentially dangerous (even life-threatening) without medical supervision. Even if you survive unharmed, you are unlikely to continue for long, due to the unpleasant side effects.  In contrast, taking a walk for half an hour is unlikely to cause more than a mild tiredness and stiffness even for an untrained person, and even that will fade over a few days as the body gets used to being more active.

Now, I don’t have car tires around my midsection myself. In a sense, it would be more motivating if my fat was on the outside instead of around the kidneys, but I assume those with spare tires have those in addition to the kidney fat. Anyway, when I started walking an hour a day (most days) this spring, I burned like 550 calories in an hour. It is safe to say that if I had a couple car tires in addition, I would have burned quite a bit more, since I had to move that extra weight around. So I would probably have started with half an hour, as recommended for Americans, and gradually expanded over the course of the first month.

Of course, the spare tires won’t magically disappear. They will just stop growing, and then very slowly shrink as the months turn into years. But that was how they appeared in the first place, wasn’t it? And anyway, once you get used to strolling, you may want to speed it up a bit, or go a bit longer, depending on how much time you have. Walking is a great way to unwind, after all. If the voices in your head are not friendly, you may want to drown them out with music, which can also be very motivating to move your body (thus the invention of “dance” by our ancestors). Anyway, the point is to keep it enjoyable, or at least not make yourself suffer. If you’re a masochist, save it for the bedroom. Your physical exercise should be pleasant, something you’d miss if you skipped it.

Like a stroll in the park. A long, fast stroll eventually, but still. If you have car tires around your middle, strolling is exactly where you should begin.

 

Literacies!

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Yes you should! Read them all, even if you have to jump to reach the ones at the top shelf! ^_^

If you read this journal, you are obviously not illiterate. But how literate are you? Well, if you read my previous entry about walking, it was worthy of 9th grade according to this handy readability calculator. Hopefully you graduated from there at some point and haven’t lost too much of your skills…

I am pleasantly surprised that my latest entries seem to be this readable. I suppose if I went into the really esoteric material, it would be harder to read. Certainly that seems to be the case with most of the books I have bought lately, mostly on topics of religion and value philosophies.  With the notable exception of Ryuho Okawa, it seems people feel the urge to use strange words when speaking about such topics, or else use common words in new ways. I guess this can be useful to keep things exact. The more clearly you understand something, the more exact you can be. And if something is very valuable to you, you want others to see it exactly as it is.

But if you see something in the distance, it is only natural that it is hazy. So if I try to explain something to people who are still far away from it, I should probably keep it simple. Should you really need college education to understand how the body works, or the mind, or the Heavenly Realm of Light? Perhaps, if you want to get all the details. But I don’t even have all the details myself. And in any case, I wouldn’t write for experts in a place like this.

***

Even so, there are many 9th graders who can’t read at a 9th grade level, as I am sure you have noticed. For that matter, there are many adults who can’t.  I guess it is more of an ideal than a requirement?

There are many reasons why people can’t read well. It could just be that they are stupid, as we used to say in an simpler age: They don’t have much processing power in their brain, compared to others. Whether we like it or not, this is a resource that is not given equally to all. And reading is not a function you need to survive in the wild, so it is not an instinct in humans. Perhaps if we were to live in civilization for millions of years, speech and reading and writing might become full instincts? If I write a science fiction story about such a species, I may consider it. But in the real world, reading is not the first thing your brain will devote itself to.

But even if you are smart, there could be specific problems with a small part of your mind, or your eyes, or even the muscles that control the small movements of your eyes; any of these could make it hard to read well, even if you are a fast thinker. For instance, I can read while standing up, or sitting in a bus on a bumpy road, or even while walking. This is not due to superior thinking but the tiny muscles that control my eyes. Of course it helps to be able to guess things from context so you don’t have to move your eyes so often, but without good control of those tiny muscles it gets much harder to read. Someone who is not blessed with good eye muscles will have a hard time reading unless he is sitting at a table or some such ideal place.

There are many people who can read well, if you ask them to read a text out loud. But if you ask them later to explain it in their own words, they cannot. They may be able to mention names or numbers from the text, but they cannot tell you what they learned and how it connects to other things they know. This could be because they learned to read as an outward skill, and were graded or praised based on whether they could read fluently, or remember names and numbers. They may not be stupid, but they never got into the habit of thinking about what they read while reading. Unless your mind is on the content, rather than the performance of the skill, you will have a hard time understanding and keeping what you have read. This is particularly important in textbooks and articles. The human mind is naturally good at stories, so it is easier to get something out of these even if you are not used to bind your text to you with thoughts or steadfast observation.

Reading tends to make you better at reading. It will not magically solve any medical conditions that make reading hard, of course. But within your potential, you can grow with practice. (As in all other things, I guess.) You may think that reading fantasy novels will do more harm than good to your future understanding of college textbooks, but that is not so (unless perhaps you are already an intellectual).

In fact, the example is taken from my own life. English is my third language. I learned the basics in school, but it was reading paperbacks that gave me a larger active vocabulary than most Americans. In particular authors who loved the English language, such as Piers Anthony, Stephen Donaldson and later Edgar Rice Burroughs.  They extended, expanded and enhanced my vocabulary and grammar. Now when I meet a rare word or an old-fashioned turn of phrase, I don’t need to break my concentration to figure it out.

Be that as it may, I am still not the grandmaster of literacy. Reading English more than a century old or so, for instance, slows me down. And there are people who write such flowery and convoluted language, it gives even me pause. Sometimes it is beautiful, sometimes it is necessary. Sometimes, I suspect, it is just their way of thinking.

But as for my own writing, I do not aim it at the barely literate. I may write for them if asked to, but I have no faith that they would find my journal in the forest of blinking and colorful advertising that the Internet has now become. So I write for those who read, enjoy reading, and keep reading. And for them, I hope my words shall be readable enough. For some of the things of which I write are not so simple to believe, since we have been taught otherwise from an early age.  But that is not for today. For now, let this be enough.

 

 

Recharging muscles?

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Still not sure about the muscles and energy thing. After I came home on Saturday, my pulse remained 10-15 beats above normal for at least a couple hours. I was also warmer than normal. According to the “muscles store energy” theory, this probably came from my leg muscles recharging, drawing energy from elsewhere in the body. But as I said, Wikipedia and a couple more pages of highly respected websites don’t believe that muscles can store energy like a battery, just a substance known as glycogen, basically very densely packed glucose (the simplest form of sugar).

If that is the case, then presumably my leg muscles were storing up glycogen by drawing glucose from the blood (where there seems to be no shortage of it, based on recent blood tests – I am not diabetic, but the blood sugar is at or just over the upper boundary of normal). There must have been rather a shortage of glycogen if the mucles had to increase the flow of blood to get enough sugar. You’d think since the heart is beating anyway, the muscles could just pick up sugar as it passed.

Yesterday it rained like a bathroom shower, and my jogging shoes soon became soaked all the way through. They are not going to last long if I use them for wading, so I returned home after only about half an hour. That put an end to my plan to check whether the energy reserves had regenerated fully.

Today I took a 1.25 hour walk. I carried my umbrella, even though I only needed it for a short while. I am not sure if carrying something had an effect, but my heart rate was somewhat higher and I burned more calories than on the first trip Saturday, although less than the second. I guess it may count that I also jogged down the other side of the hill and a few other places where my pulse started getting too low to count as training. Burned about 800 calories (kcal), which is pretty decent for that length.

However, I did not trigger a forced recharge this time. There must have been some reserves left, because my pulse almost immediately fell back to normal range. So evidently if I don’t discharge past a certain point, recharge will happen entirely in the background. That is what I thought, since I normally don’t experience any disruption of heart rate or breathing after I took up the habit of walking briskly for an hour.

Then again, according to what I learned before, the body should be burning mostly fat during so moderate exercise. OK, I guess climbing those hills might need some faster energy, but still. In theory the body should use mostly fat, and I have enough of that to walk for weeks.

I wish I had meters in my body so I can see what it is doing. It would be cool to be able to monitor my blood sugar, blood fat, remaining sugar storage and fat storage. Clearly the body does know these things, because it adjusts to them on the fly. But unless I take things to extremes, I cannot actually feel the variations. Then again, thanks to the glucose syrup tests, I seem to have achieved the ability to feel my blood sugar being higher than necessary. It is a kind of acute “fed” feeling, if that makes sense. It is different from the long-term “fed” feeling that comes from having my fat stores reasonably filled. (I am still not fat, thanks for asking, but I have more than I realistically need in peacetime.) So perhaps with the right experience, I may become able to feel other statuses in my body too. If I live that long… Just to be safe, I don’t think I will be running any marathons anytime soon!

***

Edit to add: Found it! The answer from nycgirl here is loaded with useful facts about glycogen.  Evidently even a walker like me has several hundred grams of the stuff, and it is always used in the beginning of any exercise (thus the low pulse during the first quarter, I guess). With slow and steady exercise, fat is burned but together with glycogen. This is probably which happens after I am fully warmed up.  I still don’t know what the trigger threshold is that causes my pulse to rise to the next level (after an hour or so, in my case). I also don’t know where the trigger is for the forced “recharge” after exercise.  Saturday I spent 1300 calories, and did get the recharge effect. Today 800 and nothing.  So more studies are in order.

 

Muscles store energy now?

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“I wanted to talk on the subject of science with you.”

OK, this is kind of weird. I just took a walk and this time walked up two long, steep hills, one atop the other. My pulse stayed around 120 for much of it and only reached 130 near the top of each hill.

I know this is not really international news, but there are reasons for my surprise. Only a couple weeks ago I crossed the first of these hills and slowed down to an amble because my pulse reached 135. That is around the upper limit before I trigger my lifelong exercise asthma. Also because of that asthma, I never did sports as a kid, and my lung capacity never developed fully. A couple years ago it was around 2/3 of normal for a man my age (50 years old at that time). And back in 2005, before the illness that changed me, I would stop twice in a hill shorter and less steep than this. I felt like my heart just couldn’t take the strain of climbing it all in one go.

I am so old that I have to warm up before my warm-ups. And yet for each passing month – if not week – my pulse seems to get lower and lower. That is a bit bizarre, I think.

***

Or perhaps not. After an hour’s walk, I came home and wrote the previous part, then set off again. This time my pulse was normal, and went all the way to 135 before I rounded the first hill. So it is not my heart. Somehow my muscles seem to store energy for the expected challenge, but when I then throw an unexpected challenge at them, they need the help of the rest of the body.

I wonder how the muscles can store up energy like that. There are probably books about it, but I don’t even know what to look for. I know all energy in the human body comes from burning the four food groups: Sugar, fat, protein and alcohol. But I was under the impression that they have to be burned within seconds of the actual energy use, not used to “charge up” muscles in advance.

I guess this explains why I have to walk longer and longer to burn the same number of calories. My body charges up the muscles beforehand (perhaps while I sleep?) and then releases this energy during the first hour of walking. I wonder how they do that. Actually, I wondered so much that I asked Google: How do muscles store energy? It provided links to sites about ATP and glycogen, but they were pretty random. I don’t think Google really understood the question…

My best guess would be glycogen, since ATP only lasts for a few seconds at best. I know glycogen (“animal starch”) is stored in muscles and broken down to glucose during exercise. But that does not really explain it to me: Glucose still needs oxygen to burn, and that oxygen must come through the blood. But the blood already contains glucose. That is what my doctor is worried about, the 6.1 mmol of glucose that is always in my blood, even 12 hours after eating.  Why then would the muscles need to store energy in the form of something that becomes glucose?

I mean, if glucose is a scarce resource in muscles,  if it is the bottleneck and not oxygen, then diabetics should be world champions in sports. There is no sign of that, to put it mildly.

I suppose it would make sense if muscles have some bottleneck in how fast they can absorb glucose from outside. Sugar molecules are not all that big, but they are a lot bigger than oxygen, so it may be that absorbing glucose is slower. So while the supply of glycogen lasts, the muscles need only import oxygen, but afterwards they need to import both oxygen (fast) and glucose (slow). But there is no mention of that in any of the articles I have read, this time or before when I read about physiology. It is as if no one has ever asked themselves why the pulse is low during the first part of exercise. That just cannot be: Humans are too curious for their own good, much of the time. So that leaves me with the notion that the answer is totally obvious to anyone except me.

Please tell me, since Google won’t.

Opposite of starvation

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Which of these represent the opposite of starvation? Sim-Magnus or the imaginary sim-Tuva? The answer may surprise you.

I first wanted to call this entry “anti-starvation”, but that sounds like a humanitarian organization.

I have a few times mentioned my own brush with starvation in 2005. It was certainly not in the developing country manner, but rather a medical situation that led me to steadily lose weight until my body started to adapt to the lack of food in several ways. The most obvious was perhaps the way it influenced my mind, with a kind of chronic hunger, which continued even after eating. There were other changes as well, and one of them may ironically have resulted in its opposite, which is the topic of today.

The opposite of starvation is probably the complex state of health often called “metabolic syndrome”. Actually the professional usage of this phrase may be a bit more precise. But as I am now in a state of pre-diabetes, a still mostly harmless form of the syndrome, I cannot help but notice the parallels.

When starving, my brain stem was hungry even when my stomach was full. I wanted to just keep eating, even though reason convinced me that I would just get sick. Now, it is the other way around: My stomach is bullying me to eat by the unpleasant gnawing feeling, but my brain stem would rather that I didn’t. I feel fed even when I wake up in the morning.  And rightly so.

***

Yesterday a couple hours after lunch I took a fairly long walk that burned 800 calories.  OK, I would probably have burned 100 of them even if I stayed at home, but anyway. I didn’t eat anything when I came home, because I had a doctor appointment next day and was told to fast the night before. So I went to bed, and woke up the next morning feeling completely restored. I could have taken another walk till my legs grew stiff, and probably another and another if I rested a while in between. I was not hungry at all, until my stomach began gnawing.  And my brain stem was right, while my stomach was wrong: My fasting blood sugar was 6.1 mmol. Not sure what that is in American measures, but the recommended upper limit is 6 mmol, and in some publications 5.8. So despite being physically active, I am still pre-diabetic. In fact, it seems that my body has decided 6.1 is the new standard (it was the same last time too), which it returns to after exercise.

This is in theory good news.  Not having to eat is money saved, right? Unfortunately the stomach disagrees. I am still experimenting to find ways to keep it from pestering me. I guess the best I can do is to just keep stopping before I am full, and hope that it will gradually learn to expect smaller and smaller portions.

Feeling over-fed by a small meal is certainly less unplesant than feeling hungry after a big one, so I can see why people just keep forging ahead until they get diabetes, hypertension and atherosclerosis. After all, we are programmed by our instincts to avoid starvation if possible. The safeguards on the opposite side are not nearly as formidable. But they are there, if you pay attention. And if you have tried both, you may recognize the opposite of starvation simply by listening to your own body, even before you hear it from your doctor.

***

I mentioned that the near-starvation may have somehow triggered its opposite. The body is known to do unusual things when facing unusual situations. And this is unusual indeed: Before the illness began at Easter 2005, I used to weigh close to 95 kg. (One kg is roughly 2 pounds, but not exactly.) This seemed to be a practical upper limit, as I stayed close to it for a decade or more perhaps. Occasionally I would dip down to 93, but usually I was in the 94-95 interval.

Now the limit seems to be at 88. That is good, right? No, actually, it is not that simple. When I was 95, the fat was distributed differently. I had a larger paunch (gut bulge), true, but I also had permanent fat deposits on my backside and thighs. Not enough to compete with your average housewife, of course, but plenty for a man and pretty obvious when looking back at some of the pictures from around the turn of the century. This kind of fat is harmless, possibly even healthy. It is only released in case of starvation.

And of course that was what happened, even if it went no further than that. No matchstick arms and protruding ribs and all that. But my body fat was gone. And when it returned, it did not return to where it had been. Now it is almost completely concentrated around my kidneys and thereabout. This type of fat, which is more common in men than in women, can be released very quickly to the bloodstream. It does not even take hunger, just stress.  Get angry or afraid, and delicious fat pours into the blood, ready to fuel your battle.

I consider this a poor exchange for my built-in sitting pillow. But this is the kind of thing that could happen if you are successful with your dieting. Luckily, most people give up after losing about 5% of their body mass in fat, so the effect on their body is quite limited. I will probably be one of them if I decide to lose weight at all. The doctor recommends it, although he is satisfied as long as I don’t gain weight, and stay physically active.  The irony is that I am not visibly “fat” at all. I don’t have the other symptoms of metabolic syndrome either, but if I had not convinced my body that it was starving, I might have been fatter and still healthier.