ex150ish Redux : Headache City

And I'm now fairly confident this works

28/06/23 94.2

27/06/23 95.1

26/06/23 95.1

25/06/23 94.4

24/06/23 96.2

23/06/23 96.2

22/06/23 96.2

21/06/23 97

20/06/23 96.8

19/06/23 97

18/06/23 97.3

17/06/23 97.5

16/06/23 97.7

So on the evening of the seventeenth of June, I went back on ex150. Actually I ate no carbs that day, but I had a steak and salad outside the Fort St George (might have been a few PUFAs in the sauce, but nothing major).

I refilled the fridge with cream and beef and various tomato-related products.

I felt a bit sluggish that day, but suddenly perked up in the evening. I don't think that was ketosis, my energy levels go up and down at random occasionally.

And I found some packets of lamb's liver in Sainsbury's, and since sheep are ruminants (No PUFAs!) and my sources inform me that liver is a nutritionally complete food, I thought "That'll be nice."

And I was carefully keeping my salt intake up, remembering the headaches last time.

On Monday 19th I did actually get a headache anyway on waking up, and felt a bit sluggish, but later I felt fine, and I fried a load of lamb's liver and a load of ground beef up in butter and added it to the stew. Quite a lot of the nicely browned butter-fried liver got eaten in the process. Really good! Not at all like the tube-filled rubbery rubbish that was the curse of English schoolboys in the bad old days of glorious memory.

And I decided to leave town.

There's a noisy and crime-associated "Midsummer Fair" in Cambridge every Summer, and us boat pikeys are well-advised to get the hell out for a week and go and enjoy the wilderness for a bit.

So I laid in wilderness supplies (mostly cigars, since I already had everything I'm allowing myself to eat on board), and headed up to Waterbeach, feeling pretty happy about things.

And I woke up the next morning feeling terrible.

Far too hot (dropped another dose of T4).

But the real problem was the worst headache I can ever remember. Saltwater did nothing to fix this baby. And I'm not taking painkillers to fix something I've done to myself, and that is probably a warning, so I just went to bed and suffered.

I spent pretty much the whole day in bed, far too hot, thinking sadly of the big packet of keto-electrolytes that I'd ordered off of Amazon, that were currently sitting in the post room in my office about six miles away.

My multivitamin pills contain most of the relevant, so I took four of them.

Maybe that helped, I felt ok the next day. I took four more for luck.

Some fellow exiles turned up the following day, and one does not turn down a barbecue invitation on a wilderness mooring from neighbours whom one barely knows.

The Barbeque was amazing. Turkish food, beautiful kebabs on skewers and raspberries and whipped cream and grappa for pudding. (Thank you Luke and Duygu!)

I discreetly didn't eat any of the equally gorgeous-looking home-made bread, so it was surprisingly ex150ish friendly.

The rest of the 'keto flu' wasn't that bad. I'd barely noticed it the first time round, but this time it was quite unpleasant.

I had one huge terrible headache, a few days of mild headaches and fatigue, and I was usually feeling far too hot, and wanting to sleep but not being able to (Very rare for me. Sleep is a core skill).

I couldn't face the five mile bike ride over rough ground to go to choir on Thursday, so I sent apologies.

Once I recovered a bit, I started swimming, which helped control the "too hot", but I really wasn't enjoying myself that week, despite being in one of my favourite spots at midsummer.

I kept dropping thyroid doses every other day, which is as fast as I dared go.

And then I ran out of water.

Fucking hell, I thought I had loads. All those cold showers.

But by that time I was actually feeling ok, so I headed downriver in search of a water point.

The closest is just outside the Wicken Fen nature reserve, a beautiful spot where with a bit of effort you can actually moor a boat, if you love mosquitos and their ways.

So once Katy had a full water tank, I thought, "Why not?"

And that's where I've been for the last week or so.

Even there it's not possible to escape the call of friends, and Sunday Lunch on the 25th in the Maid's Head in Wicken Village may have involved a certain number of roast potatoes. But although they produced an immediate 0.7kg weight bounce, they didn't seem to make any difference apart from another couple of mild headaches, presumably as all that water weight and associated electrolytes went away again over the next couple of days.

Anyway, my weight this morning was 94.2, I feel fine, and unless there's a truly scary amount of weight regaining to do when I stop this bout, or unless I put about 4 kilos on quickly once I start eating properly again, I feel that ex150ish has now unambiguously worked for me as a weight loss technique, as well as producing much food for thought in terms of general health.

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So here I am, happy as Larry, cycling around, swimming, walking, and finally with enough energy and time to write it all down from my notes.

Because a lot of interesting things have been going on recently, and I feel like I should start thinking properly about it all now, and as Paul Graham taught us, if you need to think, start writing essays.

I can't imagine anyone except me (and maybe u/ex150. Hi and thanks!!) will ever slog through this lot, and that’s not even the point of writing it all out, but maybe fellow travellers will one day be able to use my notes as a guide on their own adventures.

Today is the 28th, so the data above is up to date, and I'm probably written out for a bit now.

Back to Cambridge to resume my lifelong project of finding fun things to do while waiting for the end of the world.

Farewell from Paradise,

John Lawrence Aspden

Wicken Fen, 28/06/2023

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Footnote

The terrible headaches may not have been keto-related! My mother phoned me and she said that both she and my father also suffered from disabling headaches after they got back from Cambridge. So maybe it was just some virus and nothing to do with keto at all.

Hella coincidence....