Slice of Chaotic Life

I try to get my body back in normal shape before the stress test of my heart next week. Yesterday I walked about an hour, and the same the day before when I wore the portable EKG and a blood pressure monitor. Today I upped to 1 hour 20 minutes, which was around the normal range before I started getting the palpitations and the tachycardia episodes.

There were no irregularities this time either. But after around 45 minutes, my leg muscles must have run out of glycogen or something: My legs became heavy and my pulse went up. Not to alarming levels, but I kept a pulse of around 120 on flat terrain from then on, simply by walking without hurry. I don’t mean ambling, but walking as if you know you are not late for something. Usually I would need to walk unnaturally fast to get to 120, some days even run a few steps now and then.  On the other hand I was not winded at all, so the extra blood flow was presumably for sugar rather than for oxygen.

As I mentioned over in my less personal blog, even in the fat-burning zone you burn 40% sugar. When the muscles run out of their own sugar storage, they have to get it from the blood, so the heart works harder to bring more blood from the liver (where there is a large central glycogen storage) to the muscles.

I have an old blood sugar measurement device from 2005, but I don’t have the strips for it. This type has strips that expire in 75 days, and are ridiculously expensive. Since most people don’t pay them themselves, this is unlikely to change. But today I wish I could measure my blood sugar. You see, I have a hypothesis.

I am diagnosed with “pre-diabetes”, as my blood sugar level is higher than normal but not high enough to do organ damage (except possibly in the retina of the eye, but even then usually if the blood pressure is correspondingly high). Normally this develops into actual diabetes. What I wonder is whether this higher level has become “normal” for me and my heart reacts with palpitations when it falls to lower levels, which are normal levels for others. When normal people have their blood sugar fall to lower levels (for them), palpitations are normal. So I’d like to see whether my liver tries to keep my blood sugar at the higher level or whether it waits until normal human levels before adding more sugar to the blood.