Blood Glucose Sex Magick
May. 18th, 2019 09:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pshaw_raven 1. Topping the Random Notes list this weekend, a guide to self-managed abortion. This is a fairly detailed read but a good one, which hopefully none of us will need, but it's always good to have the information available.
2. In much less important news, my treadmill died. Not entirely - it's erroring out when Fox runs, so effectively HE doesn't have a treadmill. Since all of our other efforts at repair have failed, we're going out shortly to look at buying a new one. The motor will be salvaged - it's fine and hey, how often do you come across 2.5 hp electric motors? We think the circuit board is bad, but everything testable by a couple of reasonably electronic-literate people is testing normal.
It seems like a combination of weight and speed. When I weighed the same as Fox, I was not able to run nearly as fast as he can, so I was not pushing it too much. I'd maybe make it up to five mph for a few minutes but that was taxing my heart and lungs more than it was taxing the treadmill.
3. Recently we both became interested in testing our blood sugar levels. Fox sometimes bonks hard, and a blood glucose meter seemed like a good tool to have for tailoring his fueling needs, pre-run, post-run, and during. We have an assortment of gels, jelly beans, and chewy blocks, along with whatever homemade energy bars I'm making. I feel pretty confident in my own eating and fueling habits, or I did. Because my fasting sugars consistently test in the "diabetic" range. There is little I can do to bring them down, either, so I'm always getting these 120s in the morning, 140s or 50s after eating, and it's stressing me the hell out because the usual advice for bringing glucose down is "lose weight, exercise, and stop drinking sugary sodas." If I lose ten percent of my body weight, I'll end up in the hospital - this is a patently Bad Idea. Exercise more? I mean, I was considering training for a fifty-miler so I guess that counts. And I haven't routinely consumed sodas since the mid-1990s. I don't put sugar in my coffee or tea, I stopped drinking wine, and I normally operate on an "earn my treats" mentality that allows me to have dark chocolate or nice cream if I worked out that day.
On the other hand, these meters can also have a margin of error that throws readings off by as much as twenty points.
I started checking on the hour for a while after eating, and rather than spiking, my sugars dip within an hour, then slowly climb back up to fasting levels. This happens pretty consistently. I rarely test out of a sixty point range, even though according to this meter, that range is high. I've decided for my own sanity to stop doing this unless I feel unusually bad and need a reading, because I suspect the meter is way off, and the "high" readings are stressing me out badly. As in panic-attack bad. Fox thinks this is a good idea.
He knows a lot more about diabetes than I do because he attended classes and such along with Kitty. He says since I'm not experiencing rollercoaster highs and lows, spiking into hyperactivity and then crashing out, only to do it again, I'm not diabetic. He thinks the meter is wrong as far as that goes, and it's mainly useful for seeing swings up and down, and that I should ignore the base number and just look at the range of the highs and lows. So, in the interest of not spending any more days losing my shit over this and swinging between trying to find out how to further improve my diet and shopping for prosthetic legs (because that's how bad my Anxiety Brain has been getting with this) I'm going to just drop it for now.
4. This one-shot comic I did. Just FYI, the ravens are mechanical AI constructs. Ruby was programmed (badly) to believe she is a real, living bird. Whirr is a longer-running one that has been "interactively programmed" by watching and responding to the behavior of humans around him, and one of the traits he's picked up, for better or worse, is sarcasm. Partially inspired by Google Home, Alexa, and this.
5. So Delicious makes a no-sugar-added vanilla frozen dessert from coconut milk that is amazing. It tastes like vanilla and coconuts. That's it. I am all about this stuff right now.
2. In much less important news, my treadmill died. Not entirely - it's erroring out when Fox runs, so effectively HE doesn't have a treadmill. Since all of our other efforts at repair have failed, we're going out shortly to look at buying a new one. The motor will be salvaged - it's fine and hey, how often do you come across 2.5 hp electric motors? We think the circuit board is bad, but everything testable by a couple of reasonably electronic-literate people is testing normal.
It seems like a combination of weight and speed. When I weighed the same as Fox, I was not able to run nearly as fast as he can, so I was not pushing it too much. I'd maybe make it up to five mph for a few minutes but that was taxing my heart and lungs more than it was taxing the treadmill.
3. Recently we both became interested in testing our blood sugar levels. Fox sometimes bonks hard, and a blood glucose meter seemed like a good tool to have for tailoring his fueling needs, pre-run, post-run, and during. We have an assortment of gels, jelly beans, and chewy blocks, along with whatever homemade energy bars I'm making. I feel pretty confident in my own eating and fueling habits, or I did. Because my fasting sugars consistently test in the "diabetic" range. There is little I can do to bring them down, either, so I'm always getting these 120s in the morning, 140s or 50s after eating, and it's stressing me the hell out because the usual advice for bringing glucose down is "lose weight, exercise, and stop drinking sugary sodas." If I lose ten percent of my body weight, I'll end up in the hospital - this is a patently Bad Idea. Exercise more? I mean, I was considering training for a fifty-miler so I guess that counts. And I haven't routinely consumed sodas since the mid-1990s. I don't put sugar in my coffee or tea, I stopped drinking wine, and I normally operate on an "earn my treats" mentality that allows me to have dark chocolate or nice cream if I worked out that day.
On the other hand, these meters can also have a margin of error that throws readings off by as much as twenty points.
I started checking on the hour for a while after eating, and rather than spiking, my sugars dip within an hour, then slowly climb back up to fasting levels. This happens pretty consistently. I rarely test out of a sixty point range, even though according to this meter, that range is high. I've decided for my own sanity to stop doing this unless I feel unusually bad and need a reading, because I suspect the meter is way off, and the "high" readings are stressing me out badly. As in panic-attack bad. Fox thinks this is a good idea.
He knows a lot more about diabetes than I do because he attended classes and such along with Kitty. He says since I'm not experiencing rollercoaster highs and lows, spiking into hyperactivity and then crashing out, only to do it again, I'm not diabetic. He thinks the meter is wrong as far as that goes, and it's mainly useful for seeing swings up and down, and that I should ignore the base number and just look at the range of the highs and lows. So, in the interest of not spending any more days losing my shit over this and swinging between trying to find out how to further improve my diet and shopping for prosthetic legs (because that's how bad my Anxiety Brain has been getting with this) I'm going to just drop it for now.
4. This one-shot comic I did. Just FYI, the ravens are mechanical AI constructs. Ruby was programmed (badly) to believe she is a real, living bird. Whirr is a longer-running one that has been "interactively programmed" by watching and responding to the behavior of humans around him, and one of the traits he's picked up, for better or worse, is sarcasm. Partially inspired by Google Home, Alexa, and this.
5. So Delicious makes a no-sugar-added vanilla frozen dessert from coconut milk that is amazing. It tastes like vanilla and coconuts. That's it. I am all about this stuff right now.
