Examples of self-awareness

Since I started my biohacking experiments, I've become aware of the effect that everyday activities has on my performance, mood, energy levels etc. The problem is that the result of a particular activity may not manifest immediately but only after a period of time. I'll give you a couple of recent examples of where I'm starting to correlate things which in the past may have passed me by. It's very interesting!

The post-sushi energy crash

A few weeks ago I needed a quick lunch. I normally have some kind of salad but didn't have time to prepare one, so I grabbed a pack of sushi instead. About 45 minutes later I was in a meeting and noticed that I was having trouble focussing, that my energy and concentration had dipped. If I have a salad for lunch I don't get that. This is the post-carb crash we've all heard about.

I used to have a lot more carbs in my diet and most evenings I would nod off on the sofa after dinner. Now I no longer think this is 'just what happens' but is directly related to what I had to eat before.

29-July-2014: Spring water and wifi

A few months ago I switched to drinking only spring water after listening to Dr Jack Kruze. One of his top recommendations for higher performance is to install a Reverse Osmosis water filter to get rid of fluoride and chlorine from the water supply. These are alleged to impact the structure of water in the body, impacting performance and wellness. And fluoride in the water is alleged to impact thyroid healthy by competing for absorption with iodine.
Before investing in a RO water filter I wanted to see if I could tell any difference, so for 3 or 4 weeks we drank only spring water at home and at work. After a while I noticed that I could feel tingling in my fingers while I was using my iphone - I could feel the wifi and cellular signals. That was about 3 months ago.
Since then we've gone back to plain old 'council pop' out of the tap and I no longer can feel the EMF from the phone.
I'll switch back to using spring water and see if I notice the effect again. I'll report back.

29-July-2014: A night with the boys

At the weekend I played poker with the boys. On Sunday night I noticed that my arthritis was bad and that my hips were stiff and still were the next morning. During the card evening we ate some crappy food like Doritos and chips with artificial flavourings and additives. I drank a bunch of wine. The following morning I felt OK because I'm taking lots of anti-oxidant supplements so I wasn't hung over; my liver was able to deal with the immediate aftermath. But the other stuff has taken a couple of days to work through my system and I think it's that which has led to a flair up in my symptoms.
Saturday night: bender
Sunday morning: not bad
Sunday night: stiff, tired.
Monday: stiff. Took a sauna at lunchtime which helped. Very tired in the evening.
Tuesday: 84% sleep quality. Early morning phone call. Average energy.
I'll see if I notice any similar correlation next time things get bad.

19-August-2014: Feel the wifi

I've been drinking primarily non-tap water for the past couple of weeks, either bottled spring water or filtered rain water. I still have a couple of cups of tea with mains water at work but that's about it. Once again, I can feel the tingle of EMF - wifi and cellular signal - in my fingers from my phone! 

I now have my phone in 'airplane' mode with just the wifi enabled for most of the day. I turn the wifi off if I need to put the phone in my pocket.

In fairness, I've also been sleeping 'grounded' for the past couple of weeks too. I'll write a separate post about that, however it's worth noting that the first few nights I couldn't sleep through the night due to tingling and numbness, then I would wake up feeling 'buzzed', but the past few nights I've slept very soundly. Has this also increased my ability to sense EMF?

Technology that works

My wife runs a small retail / hospitality business called The Deli Platter, located in the wonderful Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne. Go visit. They've got beautiful food and it's a great day out.
To help us run that business, and having a partner who's a techno-geek (i.e. me), of course we use technology. I've done a lot of work to try to come up with cost-effective and robust solutions for various day-to-day tasks, so I thought it would be useful to share some of the tools that we use. Since cost control is important, many of these tools are free. There are, of course, any number of paid services so being able to set up a whole bunch of IT solutions that don't have a heavy price tag attached is great. There are also some things that I've got no problem paying for.
The IT and software world is going more and more towards paying by the month for subscription services. The problem with this from a consumer point of view is, of course, that these costs start to mount up and they're on-going. So finding cheap or free alternatives that offer the functionality and robustness necessary to base business processes on them has been an interesting challenge.
OK, here goes...

• Domain name: every business these days needs it's own place on the 'net. I registered thedeliplatter.com.au using Cheaper Domains. At $35 for 2 years including DNS hosting, I haven't found anywhere cheaper for Australian domain names.
• Email: none other than Google for Business. Free, custom domain, mobile integration, plenty of storage. Just what you want. Oh, and calendars, contact lists etc.
• Web hosting. I spent a bunch of times trying to figure how to do this cheaply by creating a website from static files and serving them from an Amazon S3 bucket. But the better solution turned out to be much easier, and cheaper too. We use weebly.com to host www.thedeliplatter.com.au and it's been great so far. Nice templates, easy setup, fast. We don't do much eCommerce, so their free service is perfectly adequate for us. I've got no problem that the weebly logo is displayed at the bottom of the page.
• Social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Obvious really. And the Pages ipad app to keep these multiple locations fed and watered.
• Document management: Dropbox. Takes care of backups, version management, availability etc.
• Business processes: Zoho Creator. Rather than trying to juggle spreadsheets, Creator lets you create simple database apps through the browser with a drag-and-drop interface. And because it's all online, it can be accessed from PCs and mobile devices alike, again without the worry of managing backups, versions etc. Great, and free up to 1000 records (which is actually quite a lot).
• Monitoring the premises. Of course we have cloud-connected cameras monitoring the premises, in our case DLink day/night cameras were a good, inexpensive option. I did try sensr.net for image storage and playback but at $15 a month this seemed pretty steep for what it does.
  The other great development has been using Ninja Blocks. These cool devices from a Sydney-based start-up let you monitor and control devices wirelessly. In our case we have wireless thermometers in each main fridge. They send temperature and humidity records to the NinjaBlock website where rules run. If they detect that the temperature is too high during the evening or at night, I get an SMS, because it usually means that the fridge is playing up. Much better than finding ruined stock the next morning. Cheap to buy and easy to set up. 

Do you use other services that really tick the 'bang for buck' box? If so, leave a comment.

Thoughts on obesity

Obesity is a very serious issue and one that will impact all of us. Australia is one of the fattest countries in the world. Being overweight or obese is a key marker to being pre-diabetic, and diabetes rates are going through the roof. That's a real worry for all of us, not just because of the huge personal impact that diabetes has on the sufferer but because of the enormous cost it imposes on the health system. In the US between 2007 and 2012, the estimated costs (direct medical and indirect costs) have increased 41% to $245bn per annum.
The cost of diabetes will drown all other medical and healthcare costs and could present a threat to national stability unless something changes.

The increased number of overweight and obese people is clear for us all to see. A walk round the local shopping mall just goes to show how unhealthy and overweight the general population has become. But I started to think about what I was seeing and thought that people - particularly fat and overweight young girls - looks more like swelling than just being fat. It looks like someone has been overinflated. You can practically see the individual fat cells being over-filled and becoming swollen.

I had become very concerned how our lifestyle expectations drove us to sugar and carbs. Kids birthdays are a sugar free-for-all, and they come round regularly. 'Have a glass of juice' as the healthy option. Cereal and toast for breakfast, sandwich for lunch. We literally walk around flooded with insulin all day long. What effect does that have on the body?

I then came across the Bulletproof Exec and the Bulletproof Diet recommendations, written by Dave Asprey. This made total sense to me because Dave puts foods under a microscope to look at the inflammatory response they provoke in the body. Grains and sugar score poorly because of the insulin response they generate, although you can argue that wheat and other gluten-containing foods also cause gut inflammation. Dave's recommendations are aligned with the Paleo lifestyle movement in general but provide further fine-tuning.

Once I saw that, there was no going back. I looked at myself in the mirror, the insidious weight that had crept on year after year, the feeling of fuzzy-brain and lethargy. I knew Dave's recommendations made sense given my own reflections

Since then I've become a Paleo convert. I receive Mark's Daily Apple posts every day (sign up - it's free!). I've listened to about 100 hours of Robb Wolf's Paleo Solution podcast so far. I think Gary Taubes is really onto something. I've immersed myself up to my eyes in Chris Kresser's work to understand what my blood-test cholesterol results mean for my health and should I be worried. I've visited a number of doctors until I found one who 'gets it'. I've started working with a personal trainer. I've converted my wife and (mostly) my kids. I've lost 16kg and feel better than I have for years. My BMI is now within 'normal' range.

I really feel like I've turned things around and avoided descending into the diabesity trap that the majority of the population appear to be disappearing into. I feel like I got out just in time. It is possible and it's not that hard when you're able to frame things correctly. But you have to be prepared to go against all the 'official guidelines', throw out your ingrained understanding of what's 'healthy', try things, tweak and tune, and do a lot of thinking. But things can be different, and turning things around takes us to make a change one person at a time.


Image from The Great Cholesterol Myth - Bowden, Sinartra