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  • RIP Batman. Heartsick and grieving. And a warning to EV drivers!

    Ken

    ·

    Digression.

    If you’re not a pet lover, or on the contrary, are easily distressed about the idea of pets suffering, then probably best not to read this post.

    For me, I couldn’t let this pass without writing about it, since it’s occupied almost my every waking thought over the last few days.

    In a horrifying and tragic twist of fate, last Wednesday, my cat Batman was killed.

    Batman would have been six years old this month – although I cannot say that with absolute certainty, because when I found him and his ginger brother, Minchin, they were abandoned kittens, living on the streets of a quiet little neighbourhood in Greece.

    As you can see, Batman was a “tuxedo cat” with distinctive black and white markings, and a very pronounced black “mask” over his eyes, so the name Batman was an easy one to conjure.

    I estimated their age to be around ten or twelve weeks old at that point. As you can see they were both quite tiny!

    If you’ve ever visited Greece you will know they have a serious problem with stray cats and dogs, in some regions you will find literally dozens of them running wild.

    We had probably about 8 or 10 cats who would visit the villa daily, but seeing these two tiny kittens surviving together against the odds touched my heart.

    I looked into the stray problem while I was there and saw the horrifying statistics that very few cats survive their first year in Greece. They are fed mainly by tourists during the peak summer months, but in winter, once the tourists go home, they are left to starve by locals.

    While I had a cat and a dog already at that time, I was so moved by these two little survivors that I was compelled to see if there was some way I could adopt them and bring them home.

    I found a local Greek charity that specialises in rescuing cats, getting them health-checked, vaccinated, and providing pet passports, and could then send them back to me in the UK.

    Never have two kittens been more spoiled. When they arrived, I took a week off work to look after them – what I called my “caternity leave”.

    I had a spare bedroom which I made as cat friendly as possible, to allow them to settle in without the stress of meeting my dog and other cat, Cocoa.

    I spent hours and hours each day with them, playing with them and giving them all the attention they could handle. Which was a lot! While they were naturally a bit skittish given their early struggles on the streets of Greece, and then the disruption of being taken to a vet, then the sanctuary where they lived for about five or six weeks, before being bundled into a cat carrier and sent on a plane to meet me.

    But within a day or two they both bonded with me and became very tactile and affectionate.

    They settled in quickly, Batman especially forming a bond with my white German shepherd, Willow. She adopted them as if they were her own puppies.

    Strange as it sounds, they both used to come out on walks with Willow and I. At that time, I lived very close to a nature reserve, and they would just follow us and walk with us.

    I have had many cats over the years, but none have felt as close to me or my heart as Batman. He was super affectionate to me. He would lick and nibble my fingers, but always very gently. And often he would greet me by licking my beard, as if I was just another fluffy animal in his extended family.

    Most nights he would sleep with me, snuggled right up to me.

    So it was in the context of this deeply bonded, mutually affectionate human/cat relationship that I got a call from my neighbour last Wednesday saying “I’ve hit your cat, Batman, with my car”.

    For context, my neighbour has my phone number because she and her daughter have been my cat sitters on many occasions since I relocated here to Cambridgeshire about 18 months ago.

    My initial thought was, “how much is this going to cost me?” As you know I am currently out of work due to redundancy and with little money for vet bills.

    Little did I know just how high the cost would be.

    When I stepped outside the back gate to the end of the quiet little cul de sac where my neighbour lives I was initially confused. I was expecting the incident to have occurred right outside their house in the parking spot where they charge their EV. Their car was not there.

    Walking out a bit further, I was shocked to see quite a gathering. Not just my neighbour, but a bunch of other neighbours all standing around what appeared to be a blanket on the tarmac in the middle of the road.

    Dumbstruck, I walked closer only to realise the blanket was covered in blood, and Batman’s instantly recognizable black and white fur was just poking out.

    As I approached the scene the amount of blood involved suddenly hit me like a punch in the gut.

    As you can imagine things are a bit of a blur. I remember yelling something like “What have you done!??” and “not my baby!” but I was in tears. Thick blood was flowing freely from underneath the blanket. My immediate thought was that Batman was dead – but then I saw one of his hind legs twitching.

    One of the other neighbours that I don’t know was kneeling next to him. She was saying something about there being nothing a vet could do. And “you really don’t want to see him like this”.

    My only thought was, if he was alive he needed to know I was there – that his person was there with him at the end. So I said I had to see him.

    I don’t regret that request because it was the right thing to do but what I saw nearly broke me. I won’t even describe it here as it’s so horrific, but his head was crushed and there was no sign of life in his poor little broken face. The movement I’d seen was likely just a last spasm. I petted and talked to him but he did not respond.

    The horror of what I saw that day, my sweet little baby, brutally crushed, will likely live with me for many years; it keeps coming back to my mind and keeps me awake at night. Seeing road kill is bad enough – but seeing your beloved cat like that is a totally different thing.

    My neighbour offered to wrap him up in the blood-soaked blanket she had used and I numbly accepted. She covered his head and wrapped him as best she could. When she handed him to me, I turned and immediately saw, under another neighbour’s car, Minchin, Batman’s brother! He had been there the whole time, and likely witnessed the entire incident.

    It’s funny the things you do when in shock. Clearly, I wasn’t thinking straight, and my first thought was that he needed to understand what had happened to his brother – and so I tried to get him to come out and see Batman, but he remained under the car.

    I walked back home with the dead weight of my cat in my arms, crying uncontrollably at this stage.

    I’ve never lost a pet to an accident before. Never had to deal with the crushed and broken body, and think about what his last moments must have been like. In the past when pets have been ill, I’ve been involved in the process from the outset, actively engaged with a vet trying to treat them, until ultimately having to make the decision to end their suffering. That path is never easy, but at least there is some illusion of control, of agency.

    And when the end came, I was the one taking them to the vet- or, as in the case of my dog Willow, just a few years ago now, bringing a vet to the house so she was in familiar, comfortable surroundings. And I was of course, always holding them at the end, so they at least had the comfort of a familiar presence as they went peacefully to sleep for the last time.

    There is a sense of peace that comes from knowing, deep down, that you did the best you could for them, and that you were with them all the way.

    But this? Having my baby brutally taken from me in such a horrible way, without me there to help or comfort them, that’s been very hard to bear.

    The neighbour who ran over my cat insisted that she was driving slowly, and this was corroborated by another neighbour who said she was a witness. Apparently there is footage from a security camera but for obvious reasons I do not want to see this.

    She insisted that there was literally nothing she could do. He had just run straight out from behind a wall into the path of her car. At first I simply accepted that story although something didn’t feel right.

    She had been with her young daughter, who as I mentioned had also been helping out with feeding my cats at times, and her daughter had comforted Batman after the accident happened, apparently, so at least he had some familiar voice/touch at the end.

    Still, I stumbled through the practical steps of making final arrangements for Batman. Despite being out of work, I was keen to try and have him individually cremated, which is what I’ve done with previous pets who passed. My neighbour, after being pressed, was willing to send some money towards this which made it possible, and I drove him to the crematorium on Thursday afternoon.

    I cried a lot over those first few days, quite understandably – at least to a pet lover! I know some people find it odd that we treat these little furry babies as if they were our own family, but that is literally what they are to me.

    This is one of the last pictures I have of Batman, with his two brothers, Cocoa in the middle and Minchin on the cat bed in my home office. I got the cat bed because they often would disrupt my work by coming for attention…but of course there is only so much space for a cat bed, and when all three of them are craving attention it’s time to take a break from work, whether I like it or not!

    How and Why?

    Of course, as a loving cat parent, I really felt the need to understand how and why this could have happened. Something about the story just didn’t add up. Here are the facts that kept going through my mind, and which just didn’t make sense to me.

    Cats have amazing hearing. And amazing survival instincts. And incredible reflexes – among the very fastest reflexes of almost any animal alive.

    Batman in particular was very skittish around cars – he was rescued, along with his brother Minchin, from Greece. They were living near a villa that backed right onto the main coastal road, and it was clear he was bothered by the sound of cars. I can’t help wondering whether that is how he lost his mother. And for all I know, perhaps even other siblings.

    When I brought them home to the quiet little cul-de-sac I lived in back then, he was always super alert around cars.

    So how could he simply ignore his senses and run blindly into a car moving at low speed?

    It took a couple of days to piece things together, but eventually it clicked.

    My neighbour drives an electric vehicle. A big one. It’s a 2025 OMODA Noble E5, so an electric SUV, a solid 1.5 tons in weight. But despite that bulk, with no combustion engine, electric vehicles are virtually silent at low speeds. While in Europe they have been forced to introduce some kind of “low speed alerting” mechanism, this is not consistently applied, and often the alert sound is not something a cat might instantly recognize as a warning. I’ve often been there when my nieghbour arrives or leaves and I have never heard any kind of alert.

    For a cat like Batman, raised near a major road in Greece, a car sounds like a combustion engine and is easily avoided.

    With a silent EV he had no warning, and no chance. His life was snuffed out horribly because of a technical “enhancement”, and my neighbour’s choice to save a few pounds on petrol, perhaps while giving her the sense that she was doing her bit for the environment.

    Initially, I had been quite forgiving of my neighbour – it did sound at first like it was an unavoidable accident, and she did pay £50 towards cremation costs.

    But after I realised the cause was her silent electric SUV I sent her a simple message explaining this and just letting her know that this could happen again. She herself has two cats, and there are neighbours with young children on our street who could just as easily be caught out by a silent EV.

    it’s really been plaguing me how this could have happened given the situation. Batman has always been very skittish of cars, ever since I found him and his siblings as kittens near a main road in Greece.

    Given that this happened at such a slow speed, the only logical explanation is that it’s because it’s an electric car. Even though 2025 models like your OMODA are fitted by law with low-speed acoustic safety hums, those artificial, high-pitched sounds are notoriously flawed. They easily blend into background noise, get muffled by gravel, or get blocked entirely by things like a neighbour’s wall. To a cat’s survival instinct, it just doesn’t register as a multi-ton threat the way a traditional rumbling engine does.

    Batman simply didn’t hear a vehicle coming, so he had zero warning before stepping out. I just wanted to share this because it’s a known, horrific loophole with modern EVs—at low speeds in a quiet cul-de-sac, they are still functionally silent to an animal or a young child playing out on the street. It’s just an awful situation for everyone, but I wanted you to be aware of how easily it can happen when a car doesn’t make a real engine sound.

    I did not say it in a mean way, just being genuinely factual, but at that point she became very defensive, saying electric vehicles are increasingly popular, and that it’s just the price you pay for having outdoor cats!

    She said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She was more concerned about the trauma that she and her daughter had “suffered”. It suddenly seemed like she was only willing to take responsibility for her actions when she could write it off as entirely accidental, something she had no control over whatsoever.

    The Real-World Failure of EV Safety Mechanics

    I say this really for the benefit of other EV drivers who are also pet lovers or owners. Please be aware: even if your car has a built-in low-speed “alert,” it is likely insufficient to warn an animal or a distracted pedestrian, especially a child.

    While many drivers assume that newer models meet all safety checklists, the technology itself has a well-documented blind spot. Real-world data and safety studies show that these systems have fundamentally failed to completely close the safety gap, for several clear reasons:

    • Incongruous Frequencies: The mandated sounds are rarely designed to sound like real car engines. Instead, they are usually high-pitched, futuristic electronic hums or whirs. To a human or an animal’s natural survival instincts, these synthetic sounds do not register as a vehicle or hazard that they might be familiar with avoiding; they simply blend into the ambient background noise of wind or air conditioning.
    • Low Decibel Thresholds: Under current regulations, the minimum volume requirement for these hums at low speeds is only 56 decibels – which is quieter than a normal conversational voice. When an EV is creeping forward at a literal crawl, this faint sound is completely masked by environmental factors, such as the tire noise of rolling over gravel.
    • Acoustic Dead Zones: High-frequency sounds are directional, meaning they are easily blocked or deflected by solid objects like brick walls or hedges. Unlike the deep, bass-heavy rumble of a traditional petrol or diesel engine – which vibrates through the ground and bends around corners – the high-pitched hum of an EV will not reach an animal or a child standing in a physical blind spot until the vehicle is directly upon them.

    A Warning to Drivers

    The statistics regarding quiet vehicles and low-speed maneuvers are a matter of public record. Studies have long shown that hybrid and electric vehicles are significantly more likely to be involved in collisions with pedestrians and animals during low-speed maneuvers – such as pulling away, turning, or reversing in residential zones – than traditional internal combustion engines.

    If you drive an electric vehicle, please do not rely on your car’s artificial safety hum to act as a warning system. In a quiet cul-de-sac, at a slow speed, a quiet EV remains functionally silent and unrecognizable as a threat to a pet or a playing child.

    The responsibility to check blind spots, look under the chassis, and assume that living things cannot hear you coming lies entirely with the person behind the wheel.

    I share this not out of malice, but in the hope that understanding this technological loophole will force other drivers to be hyper-vigilant, preventing another family from experiencing a completely avoidable tragedy.

    The aftermath

    To say it’s been tough would be an understatement. To lose a pet at any time is hard, but, well, it’s hard to imagine a worse situation.

    Both of my other cats have noticed the loss. Minchin is often walking around the house pining and whining. He has rarely been as affectionate as Batman, but has become quite clingy and cuddly.

    Obviously, that has been a great comfort for me in these last few days, and I hope for him too.

    He is now often found in what was Batman’s favourite spot, by the patio door, perhaps where his scent is strongest.

    Cocoa has also been more likely to curl up in my lap. While he has often been a little outnumbered and occasionally bullied by my younger cats, who are both bigger than he, they would all mutually groom, which means they recognized each other as part of the pack.

    We will all have to deal with this tragedy as best we can. Sadly, it is part of owning a pet. They rarely outlive us, and we are the ones left to cope with their passing.

    RIP Batman, you truly were a very special cat, and I will never see another like you. I was very lucky to find you and I hope you felt the same about me. Hopefully, the 6 years you had here were a much better life than you would have faced in Greece. I miss your cuddles.

  • The Diabetes Industry: Profiteers of human suffering

    Ken

    ·

    There is a constant friction/tension I see in online daibetes communities between those who believe in “moderation” and “long-term management” of diabetes, and those of us who believe a strict lifestyle approach is required to achieve remission and optimal health.

    This tension occurs because standard medical advice is constantly telling diabetics that they can eat “everything in moderation”.

    The reality is this approach will see our health steadily decline. This is a simple fact, backed by plenty of evidence, starting with Dr Richard Bernstein’s excellent book The Diabetes Solution.

    The heartbreaking reality is that modern diabetes care is not designed to cure us. It is designed to us into a subscription model.

    Why would the medical community lie to us? I’m genuinely not one for conspiracy theories, but I’m afraid this one is pretty much indisputable. As always – to answer questions like ths, you need to follow the money.

    Here are the cold, hard facts about the multi-billion-dollar closed loop of “lifelong diabetes management”:

    The “Big Three” Monopoly

    Over 90% of the global insulin market is controlled by just three pharmaceutical giants: Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi. They operate a virtual duopoly/triopoly, and their financial scale is staggering.

    To give you an idea of their power, by mid-2024, Novo Nordisk’s market value actually exceeded the entire annual GDP of its home country of Denmark.

    Right now, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are locked in a massive battle over the Type 2 and obesity market, with drug sales expected to surpass $120 BILLION by 2030.

    These companies do not survive on healthy people; they survive on chronic, lifelong compliance.

    The ADA Connection

    How do you ensure that guidelines never encourage actual disease reversal? You fund the organizations that write the guidelines.

    The American Diabetes Association (ADA) accepts millions of dollars annually from Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi. In fact, Eli Lilly’s relationship with the ADA goes back to its very foundation, which was kickstarted by a corporate gift from Lilly in 1940. These three companies are the largest source of funding of the ADA. Industry disclosures show these companies regularly dump millions into other national patient advocacy groups.

    When a non-profit relies on pharma cash to keep the lights on, they will never aggressively promote a low-carb, dietary protocol that renders their donors’ products obsolete.

    The History of “Moving the Goalposts”

    This isn’t a theory; it’s documented medical history. Take the 7% HbA1c target that mainstream doctors tell you is “perfectly fine” for a diabetic. An investigation by the Lown Institute revealed that Sanofi (then Aventis) spent millions directly funding direct-to-consumer ad campaigns and paying off endocrinologist “thought leaders” to push the 7% HbA1c target.

    Through their ADA contacts, they successfully pressured medical quality assurance boards to judge doctors based on hitting that 7% target.

    Why 7%? Because at a 7% HbA1c, you are just healthy enough to stay alive, but just sick enough to require a lifelong cocktail of insulin, blood pressure meds, cholesterol drugs, and neuropathy treatments. True normalization (an HbA1c in the 4s, which Dr. Richard Bernstein advocates for) requires no pharmaceuticals (for T2s). And zero pharmaceuticals means zero profit.

    The Bottom Line

    When you adopt a strict low-carbohydrate lifestyle, like the one outlined in The Diabetes Solution, and which worked incredibly well for me – getting me to my initial remission target in just 100 days – you break the loop and cut the medical industry out almost entirely.

    Type 1s drastically cut their insulin needs – by between 50% to 80%, wiping out massive revenue streams for the Big Three.

    The majority of Type 2s reverse their glucose toxicity entirely and throw away their injected insulin. They also see massive weight loss, removing the need for GLP-1-based medications – also monopolized by the same three companies.

    True health normalization is a direct threat to the pharmaceutical bottom line. They want you “managed.” They want you dependent. Stop letting them capitalize on your suffering. Your health belongs to you, not their shareholders!

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  • Put on 4lbs this week – my pizza challenge disaster continues!

    Ken

    ·

    I wrote recently about my “pizza challenge” – an experiment to see how badly one of my former favourite foods, a mainstay in my diet, would impact my blood sugar. It was a disaster. And the disaster kept on going, as it raised my blood sugar levels for four days!

    Today’s weigh-in demonstrated just how bad it was – I put on 4.3 lbs (1.95 kg)this week!

    Of course, this isn’t all from just half of one pizza – it’s a mix of things.

    Firstly, increased glucose in the blood triggers the pancreas to release insulin – the fat storage hormone. Once you’re in “fat storage mode” you cannot also burn stored fat – they are opposed and incompatible physiological processes.

    But there is also a limit to how much fat you can store in such a short space of time, and one half a pizza wouldn’t account for 4.3lbs, so the good news is that most of that is in fact water. Insulin also causes fluid retention by signaling your body to hold onto salt and water, and because water binds to replenished glycogen stores.

    Despite getting back into my usual eating / fasting / exercise habits I’m still not fully back to normal, with my blood sugar once again elevated this morning – around 7.5 mmol/L (135 mg/dL) compared to my usual fasted morning blood sugar of around 6.5 (117)- but I’m sure over the next few days things will settle back down and I’ll lose all of that weight again in no time.

    But seeing how badly this one meal affected me makes me absolutely shocked about how badly I was treating my body before. For this experiment, I ate just HALF of the normal pizza I would normally eat. And this was my homemade pizza, with “just” 38 grams of carbohydrates. I would normally have eaten the whole thing – around 76g of carbs!

    And this was by no means the worst of my former “favourite meals” – my staple food from the local Chinese restaurant – crispy duck with pancakes and hoisin sauce – would be around 50-60g of carbs. But I wouldn’t eat that on it’s own, I’d often get some crispy seaweed (~10g carbs), bbq ribs (12-20g depending on the specific spices /rub used), chicken satay (10-15g) and the piece de la resistance – sweet and sour chicken balls (90-120g of carbs!)

    The burger and sweet potato fries I’d often order at a restaurant had more like 80-120g of carbs!

    It’s really no surprise my HbA1c eventually went up to 79 (9.4%) in December last year.

    Anyway – lesson learned – and I’ll be sticking strictly to my whole foods keto diet from here on out! No more experiments for me – they are just way too costly to my progress towards my weight loss target and reversing my type 2 diabetes!

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  • The pizza challenge! 🍕

    Ken

    ·

    As you know I’ve recently begun to experiment with my blood sugar using my Continuous Glucose Montior – trying out foods to see how badly (if at all) they spike my blood sugar.

    So far I’ve seen that popcorn is perfectly safe. Today was an experiment that I knew would fail, but I wanted to see how badly. Today was homemade pizza day.

    My home made pizza has been a mainstay of my diet frankly for decades. It has evolved over the years, but the fundamentals of what makes it mine – and quite different to “regular” pizzas – haven’t changed much.

    Instead of using a pizza dough base of any kind I use tortilla wraps. I’ve experimented with many over the years and what held together best after cooking, as well as offering a great taste, were brioche wraps.

    My pizzas are also very cheesy! I take two wraps, and put pizza sauce and grated cheese (cheddar is fine, but I often use once of those “chilli cheese” mixes with jalapenos for some extra bite.

    Then I add the second wrap on top and another layer of pizza sauce and then the toppings. Obviously toppings may vary but tonight’s pizza was a fair example.

    I must confess I’ve never looked at the nutritional values on my brioche wraps and was utterly shocked to see they contain 33.7g of carbs each, which is insane! For two thin wraps it’s over 67g of carbs! My normal daily carb allowance is 30g!

    Ken’s home made NOT keto friendly pizza!

    • Two brioche tortilla wraps
    • Approx 75g of Tesco tomato and herb pizza sauce.
    • 150g of grated cheddar cheese
    • 60g of grated mozzarella
    • 20g of grated parmesan
    • 120g of ground beef
    • 60g of pepperoni (12 slices)
    • 25g of diced red onion
    • 15g of diced mushrooms
    • 10g of black olives
    • 10g of jalapenos. 

    The total carb count for this monstrosity is somewhere around 75 grams!

    Now, I’m not entirely stupid! So for the sake of my experiment, I decided to just have half of the pizza – there was no way I was going to shove more than two days worth of carbs into my system in one meal, no matter how much I used to “love” pizza!

    Even half of this pizza comes to 37.7g of carbs!

    But the important point was to measure my response – and I watched with some trepidation as I saw the single biggest spike I’ve seen on my CGM (bear in mind I’ve only had it 9 days! 😊).

    I sat down to eat just around 8pm, with a baseline blood sugar of 6.3mmol/L (113mg/dL) – so a little higher than I might have liked as a staring point.

    You can see there is a drop before the spike – this is not unusual, apparently – this is due to insulin release in anticipation of food which brings my blood sugar down initially to 5.8 (104), but then the spike begins from around 8.10pm to 8.50pm there’s a steady rise that gets sharper and sharper, taking me all the way to a peak of 8.4 (151)! This is by far the highest reading I’ve seen on my CGM, and of course, the sharpest spike.

    But the good news is I actually manage to deal with it quite quickly – clearly my insulin sensitivity is pretty good, because immediately after the peak it begins to drop sharply. There’s another spike, and then another drop, and then another little spike, before we then see a steady drop off.

    So let’s look at the point at which my blood sugar raises above the baseline, which is actually not straight away – there is an initial dip which is almost certainly from what is generally referred to as the “phase 1 insulin response” which can be an anticipatory release as your senses tell your body food is coming! You will see it drops from 6.3 to 5.8 before climbing.

    It only goes above 6.3 around 8.28pm, before peaking around 9pm, roughly 1hr after eating.

    It then comes back down to the 6.3 at around 9.45 pm.

    So in fact, I only spent about 1 hour and 17 minutes above the baseline.

    As you can see, I actually shoot past the baseline to level out around 5.8 (104), so lower than my baseline starting point.

    So, it wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting, or as bad as it might have been. In fact in there’s a lot to be positive about – the return to baseline was really fast!

    But it’s also well worth noting – I have never in the past eaten just half of one of my pizzas! Not ever! This was a first. In the past, my carb load would have been double! It’s no wonder I wound up not just with diabetes but significant complications!

    Weirdly enough, after eating that half pizza, I still felt hungry! And I don’t think it’s just because it’s half of what I used to eat, the fact is I haven’t had pizza since November last year, and I eat a lot less these days. But I think it’s because refined carbs disrupt our satiety signals – that rapid insulin spike blocks the signals that should trigger the release of “fullness hormones” which respond when we eat fats and proteins. Even though there was a lot of protein and fat on that pizza to fill me up, it wasn’t enough to offset the impact of the sugar roller coaster.

    Because I was hungry, after my blood sugar went down to 5.8 I ended up having another snack – entirely keto this time of course! Just 3 slices of cheese, a few pork scratchings, and four slices of pepperoni. Just that small snack was more filling than half a pizza! But also – a lot of calories when you combine the two, and since the insulin would have locked my fat cells in “fat storage” mode, it’s likely I’ll see a bit of weight gain this week.

    So the summary is – there was good news and bad news. The good news is my insulin response was actually pretty fantastic for someone who was in the “severe danger zone” for diabetes just five months ago! Clearing a very high-carb meal like that in 1 hour 45 minutes is a great achievement.

    The bad news is the size of that spike. Given my history with nerve damage, I simply cannot afford to allow myself spikes like that. I’ve seen the terrifying climb my blood sugar went through, and also felt the side effects – still feeling hungry, but also feeling fatigued, a natural side-effect of carb-spikes. That “afternoon slump” we often feel – which btw has otherwise disappeared for me entirely since switching to keto.

    So there’s an important lesson for me, which is to avoid eating pizza! I may at some point try another experiment, maybe if I am recommended a particularly good, very low-carb keto base. But those brioche wraps I’m done with – I honestly can’t believe such skinny little wraps have such a high carb count!

    I only have a few more days left with the CGM and I think I’m done with experiments. I get the general gist – I’m still going to spike badly if I have large amounts of carbs. I’ve become very comfortable with my eating habits and sticking to less than 30g per day.

    I guess it should really come as no great surprise that suddenly injecting nearly 40g of carbs in one sitting will cause a problem!

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  • CGM results seem to be settling nicely

    Ken

    ·

    As you’ve no doubt read, I was getting a little concerned about my blood sugar levels as revealed by my Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM). But after 9 or 10 days of use now the numbers seem to be settling down nicely.

    My average over the last week shows I’m very much in the green overnight and early morning, then I get a climb to just over the green by lunchtime – sparked usually by the “dawn phenomenon” where my body releases glucose to provide energy through the day, and then peaks – on average – after midday.

    This seems to happen not just on eating days but on my 36hr fast days as well, demonstrating that it’s not carbs or sugar, it’s just my own body fuelling myself through the peak of the day.

    It then typically starts to drop back down to just above the healthy range for the afternoon and evening.

    Today as an experiment I tried eating home made popcorn – since this is one of the few (only!?) “grains” I still eat I was keen to see how bad it is for my blood sugar.

    I only have a smallish portion, cooked in coconut oil, and then I melt some butter and dark chocolate (100% cacao nibs so the REALLY dark stuff!), and then once melted I mix in just a few drops of my sucralose coffee syrup. I watched my blood sugar after eating and it went up literally 3 points (6.1 to 6.3) over two hours which is nothing. Barely a blip!

    This second graph on the left shows the average of the nice steady, relaxed curves I see throughout the day – no sharp, jagged spikes which signal dangerous levels of glucose!

    And the “estimated A1c”, which I mentioned previously, and which is calculated based on my daily figures, is now down to a blissfully low 5.2% blood sugar (33 mmol/mol)!

    I’m getting very close to the 20 range, which is “optimum health” for a non-diabetic, let alone a diabetic! Obviously, the “real” A1c blood test is a snapshot of a much longer period – 90-120 days – so will unlikely be quite that low, but I definitely hope to be in the mid-30’s the next time I have a blood test.

    I’m genuinely feeling super positive about the whole thing. My initial concerns based on my CGM were completely unfounded and having seen how steady things are I’m ready for a few last tests this weekend before the sensor runs out – the big one is my own home made pizza!

    I make pizzas a bit differently but they’ve always been a huge hit with friends and family – even some with Italian roots! But I’ll tell you all about it when I make it!

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  • Estimated A1c from my CGM

    Ken

    ·

    One of the other features of my Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), which tracks my blood sugar throughout the day, is the ability to extrapolate from those readings to estimate my HbA1c.

    My HbA1c was 40mmol/mol (5.8%) when last I had it measured, on May 5th, just under two weeks ago, but down from the danger zone I was at in December – 79mmol/mol (9.6%). You may recall I was kind of hoping for a better result – something more like the mid or even early 30’s.

    Well, today my CGM finally had enough data to give me my first estimated A1c. I do need to bear in mind that it really is just an estimate, and until it gets a full 14 days of date even that will be very rough at best.

    But at the moment, as you can see, it’s reading as 34 mmol/mol (5.3%)! At this stage, getting down from 40 to the early to mid-30’s would feel absolutely fantastic!

    I’m honestly a bit surprised to see it’s so low given the readings I’ve been getting, but then I remember that I’ve set my blood sugar boundaries very strictly.

    Either way, I’ll take the estimate as a solid indicator that I’m actually doing the right things! 😊

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  • More blood sugar readings while fasting!

    Ken

    ·

    I once again have been looking at my blood sugar readings, and notably on a fasting

    day since this really is my “baseline” – ie what my body does naturally when there is no food to “artificially” raise my blood sugar.

    I’m back to my regular 36 hour fasting schedule today, and at over 12 hours into my fast, I took the screenshot on the right from the Libre Link app that receives my blood sugar reading from my Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), the sensor plugged into my arm..

    As you can see at that point I was sitting at around 6.2 mmol/L (~112 mg/dL in US units).

    The “safe” or “healthy” target range, represented by the light green band, is 4.6 – 5.5 mmol/L (83 – 100 mg/dL).

    As I mentioned previously, my body seems to be producing glucose by itself – which is “as designed” – it’s how we evolved to survive long famines. There is no other rational explanation. My readings were a little higher than I might like at that point, but it seems like it’s nothing to worry about.

    I posted about this on Facebook recently and someone had a similar experience, suggesting that their fasting numbers gradually lowered over a period of a few years of switching to a ketogenic diet. As he said “we spent decades beating up our body, so we have to give it time to adjust!”

    This afternoon I went for my swim, and once again you can see there was a rise in glucose – it doesn’t show smoothly since I was in the pool, away from my phone – hence the broken line. By the time I was back in range of my phone, you can see right after the broken line it was already starting to drop, and then it levelled out again but steadily sinking lower through the evening.

    At 11:30 pm, over 24 hours into my extended fast, my CGM said I had settled back down at a very healthy 4.5 mmol/L, as you can see below.

    The following morning, now about 34 hours into my 36 hour fast, I was very pleased to see I’d had a really good night.

    My glucose on waking was 4.6 mmol/L (83 mg/dL), just a fraction of a point up from when I went to bed, and as you can see from the graph to the left, it was flat all night except for one dip.

    As I’ve discussed before, these sudden dips overnight are invariably (for me!) not real blood sugar dips, they are what are referred to as “compression dips”. I often lie on my left side, cradling my head on my left arm, which is where the CGM sensor attaches. The pressure of my weight against my arm pushes some interstitial fluid away from the area, preventing the sensor from detecting all the glucose as it should, resulting in a false low reading.

    While Type 1 diabetics, or Type 2s taking insulin, might see sudden drops (hypoglycaemia) due to genuine blood sugar issues or over medicating with insulin, for a Type 2 like myself, especially one highly fat adapted, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’d see a genuine “hypo” as they are colloquially called.

    So ignoring my compression dip, as you can see my blood sugar overnight was practically perfect!

    This morning it began to climb as I awoke, but at a much slower, steadier pace than I’ve seen on some mornings; as I’ve spoken about before this is the “dawn phenomenon” where your body prepares itself for the day by releasing cortisol and adrenaline to wake you up, resulting in the liver releasing glucose to provide energy.

    But today it was really very slow and gentle, rising from 4.6 to 5.4 but then levelled off at 5.2 as you can see from the screenshot to the right.

    I must confess I’m still struggling a little to interpret my results, as sometimes, like yesterday and overnight, it does exactly what I might expect, but at other times it completely surprises me.

    Clearly, it’s not quite as straightforward as I hoped it might be.

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  • Getting close to the big swimming milestone!

    Ken

    ·

    I had another great swim today – as you’ve seen I’ve been gradually building up to longer intervals, starting out from 4 x 250m, then 2 x 500m, then 750m before finally hitting 1km in my set on Monday, finishing up that set with another 500m to make it a full mile.

    Today I did another full mile but this time the first set was 1.2km! I then finished up with another 300m to keep to a mile.

    I’m so close now to a full mile of swimming (1.5km is a “swimmers’ mile”!). A few more weeks and I’ll get there. I’m really not planning to swim any further than that, due to my history of shoulder issues.

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  • The ups and downs of a CGM

    Ken

    ·

    I finally got my free trial CGM (continuous glucose monitor) this week, after weeks of waiting. I’ve been very excited to get into the details of my blood sugar, but now that it’s here it’s been a bit of a mixed bag.

    The sensor attaches to the rear of your arm, by the tricep muscle, and is designed to simply stay there for 15 days. After initially pairing with my phone via it’s NFC sensor it then provided updates automatically via Bluetooth.

    There’s an initial settling period of an hour, after which it looked like I was in the strict

    blood sugar “safe” range recommended by Dr Richard Bernstein – which is between 4.6 and 5.5 mmol/L or 83 to 100 mg/dL.

    To the right you can see my settled number from last night, 4.6mmol/L (83 mg/dl) which is right at the bottom end of Bernstein’s target, which came as no surprise to me given that I was about 22 hrs into a 36hr fast at that stage!

    Worrying blips

    The morning gave me my first worrying blip as I woke up to find my blood sugar apparently dangerously low at 2.9 mmol/L!

    In fact, this is a very common phenomenon often seen during sleep, and it certainly can be slightly worrying at first, as it looks like a low sugar hypoglycaemia event, when in fact it’s nothing of the sort.

    As you can see from the graph to the right, illustrating the progress to this false low, my blood sugar seemed to drop alarmingly rapidly after a very steady and stable period overnight, but in reality, what had happened was I had woken up with my head lying on my left arm, the arm that has the sensor in.

    The “compression” caused by the weight of my head on my arm caused the blood in the region to get “stuck,” fooling the sensor into thinking there is low blood sugar. Within a minute of changing position to take the weight off my arm, the numbers recovered to a very healthy 3.9 mmol/L.

    Dawn phenomenon

    The “compression low” was then followed very shortly after what I took to be just a minor second blip. The inevitable “dawn phenomenon”. This took me up to 6.4 mmol/L (115.2 for the US readers).

    This is another standard morning phenomenon, which is part of the body’s normal preparation to wake up – cortisol and glucose are released into the bloodstream to help us wake up and function.

    However, this “blip” persisted for most of the day, peaking at over 7!

    Now, that being said, I was told to ignore the first day of readings as the sensor stabilises and settles, but also while my body gets used to having what amounts to a permanent foreign object in my arm.

    Today has been my second day with the CGM, and is my second full 36hr fast day of the week. This morning the “dawn phenomenon” was much weaker, although I was still surprised to see my levels rise to above the “safe” range for much of the morning – albeit, just hovering above 5.5 mmol/L / 100mg/dL.

    While it seems odd that someone fasting could have such high blood sugar, from what I understand, this is not uncommon. Having been aggressilely fasting for many months now alongside eating a strict ketogenic diet while also fuelling regular, intense exercise my body has become “fat adapted”.

    What that means is that I am naturally converting my body fat to energy to make up for the loss in dietary carbohydrates. Because my body is very efficient at fuelling me it is keeping me well stocked up to ensure I have enough glucose to deal with any sudden call made for energy by my exercise regime.

    This afternoon it has dropped back down to the safety zone – currently around 4.6mmol/L or 83 mg/dL. Hopefully, it will stay that way overnight and tomorrow I’ll get a clearer picture of my “feeding day” baseline.

    The plan for my CGM

    Now that I have it the plan is to monitor for the two weeks the sensor lasts, first of all getting a clear view of how my regular scheduled activities affect my blood sugar – sleep, exercise, fasting, and eating. And of course, with a special focus on any particular foods that might be spiking my blood sugar more than I might expect.

    More updates over the coming days.

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  • Winning and losing at the same time!

    Ken

    ·

    Yesterday was my regular 36-hour fast and all went well. Then, in the afternoon, I went for my Monday swim. It’s always much quieter at the pool in the afternoon, and there was only one other person in the “fast lane” (which is effectively two lanes combined), so we each had our own space, which was brilliant.

    I was planning to repeat the same 1.5km set as last week: $1 x 750m, 1 x 500m, 1 x 250m. However, I got into the zone quickly and felt so strong at the 30-length mark (750m) that I decided to push it straight to 40 lengths – a full 1km. I finished strong, took 1.5 minutes to rest and stretch, and then banged out the remaining 500m to finish the entire 1.5km in just two sets.

    Then came Tuesday.

    To be honest, I wasn’t feeling great most of the day. I was dealing with some frustrating issues with my new Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) – more on that in a later post—and I kept procrastinating my run until it was past 7:00 PM. The great thing about this time of year is the brighter evenings, with sunset not until 8:45 PM, so it turned out to be a beautiful evening: still sunny and not too breezy.

    But right before I headed out the door, a devastating email landed. It was a rejection from the company I considered my best, most promising post-redundancy job opportunity. I genuinely felt the role was a perfect match for my skills and experience, and the first two interviews had gone incredibly well. I was fully expecting to move to the next rounds, so it was a massive kick in the nuts to be told they had already chosen another candidate.

    It was under the shadow of that news that I laced up my running shoes. I’ll be honest: I was mad.

    Instead of letting that anger simmer, I pushed it directly into my legs and decided it was time to level up. I bypassed my planned 2.5-minute intervals and programmed the watch for the next milestone: 3-minute runs with 1-minute recovery walks.

    The run went brilliantly. The 3-minute sets felt entirely manageable. I had to extend a couple of the 1-minute walk recoveries, but not because I was struggling – it was purely logistical due to gates and footbridges on my riverside route forcing a temporary pause. On each of the five running sets, I felt significantly stronger than expected, right up to the final second.

    Chuffed with the run, I came home and kept the momentum moving straight into my GMB Fitness Mobility session. I’ve been gradually introducing two of these 15–20 minute sessions each week to build up my joint strength. Today’s lineup was the ultimate locomotor trio: The Monkey, The Bear, and The Frogger.

    On paper, these animal movements look straightforward, but moving through them has always been a challenge. Today’s prescription was one-minute intervals of each exercise, back-to-back, for three full rounds. In the past, I’ve always had to stop-start these sets or cut them short. Today, for the first time, I locked down three full minutes for each movement and felt strong throughout the entire circuit.

    Life seems determined to throw obstacles in my way right now, and truth be told, they are highly anxiety-inducing. But my response to that is simple: fuck that shit. I am determined to remain consistent no matter what the universe throws at me, and the data speaks for itself. I may be redundant and temporarily unemployed, but I am a darned sight fitter, stronger, and more resilient this week than I have been in a very long time.

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