ex150ish-6: Second Week and Recarb

Visions of the Dance, Interrupted

31/05/24 93.6 36.68 0 0.5

30/05/24 93.2 36.68 0 0.5

29/05/24 93.4 36.5 0.5 0.5

28/05/24 94 36.87 0.5 0.5

27/05/24 93.5 36.78 0 0.5

26/05/24 93.3 36.8 0.5 0.5

25/05/24 93.5 36.75 0 0

My notes for this week were all things like fine, lively, bouncy, amazing clarity, ace. I've been energetic, but no trace of mania or tachycardia. At one point I got the two-fuels problem after I did far too much thinking.

I also remember being too hot at various times, but for some reason I haven't written that down and I'm not going to fake my own records. Certainly I have been dropping thyroid doses.

On the thirtieth, a nice lady with an allotment showed up in the pub with an armful of rhubarb and asked if anyone wanted some. Remembering my idyllic childhood under the mighty rhubarbs of South Yorkshire, I accepted an armful.

Turns out it's not as nice as I remember, unless you eat it as I remember, which is to say dipped in sugar. At which point it's amazing.

Since demerara sugar is not necessarily the most ketogenic of foods, let's say that 30th May was the end of ex150ish-6.

The following day involved further sins, including even more rhubarb and a particularly devilish packet of chocolate biscuits which bizarrely didn't appear to have anything nasty in them at all, which some swine left lying around, all unprotected in a place that contained me.

So I kind of stuck to the plan to recarb gently and not knock myself flat, as well as a rhubarb-crazed drunk person can.

The next couple of days I got a very characteristic headache, so I reckon demerara sugar might have sulphites in it too. I keep it for visitors and don't eat it myself, so I don't think I've opened the jar for at least a year.

Weight-loss wise, I think this has been a bit of a wash. I'm about 1.5kg lower than I was, and that's likely all water weight. That's actually weird, I've never failed to drop a kilo or so on ex150ish before.

Thyroid-wise, definite fall in dose. I've been overheating like a bitch and was frankly thyrotoxic at some points.

---

And now I don't feel so good.

For the last few days I've been reading excitedly about fat and sugar chemistry, and the small and large scale structure of metabolism, thinking and writing and making anki cards.

Nothing could have seemed more interesting. The chess puzzles that I'd normally while away spare time with seemed a bit pedestrian and pointless so I haven't done any.

Today I am brain fogged. Tired and depressed and just slow somehow. I totally can't face any chemistry textbooks, even the one I was busy constructing. Chess puzzles just look like far too much intellectual effort, and frankly writing this post is not as much fun as it should be. A bit of a chore.

Even my eyes don't seem to be working that well. Everything is a bit grey and blurry.

And I am aware that I am probably seeing what I want to see, and I am reminding myself that confirmation bias is a thing.

But I can't help thinking. PUFAs block glycolysis. PUFAs block glycolysis. PUFAs block glycolysis.

It can't be true. We'd know if it was true. PUFAs would make you feel dreadful. Experimental animals would just die. There'd be an LD50 for PUFA.

Every time I've broken ketosis I've crashed. I've always put it down to the mysterious recarbing effect that keto people talk about.

But why? Why would adding carbs to a carb-starved metabolism cause it to go south? I was careful, I did it slowly. I took electrolytes.

And so I am thinking.....

You were running on ketones. Lots of ketones.

Now you are running on glucose. Or trying to run on glucose.

But glycolysis is blocked.

---

Fuck this. I want my mind back.

The old mind. The one that worked. Back when people thought that I was sharp. The one I've had back the last couple of weeks.

I want my mad visions of glycogen and starch and sugar and fat. Carbohydrate metabolism. Cells like cities, the spiralling dance of flux and charge and catalyst. Mitochondria, signalling to the nucleus for repair and getting repaired.

Just not so sodding tired all the time.

The black rings and the red dots and the little white bits dancing. Doing the equations in my head with pictures, not having to work things out slowly and painfully on bits of paper.

I want to be me again. I'm not me now. I haven't been for years. Except for a few weeks here and there in ketosis.