Health, Lifestyle

Here’s How Monitoring Blood Markers Help Me Thrive.

Blood markers can create awareness and valuable knowledge to take critical actions for health.

This is a personal story.

Excessive sugar was killing me, but I found smart ways to beat it!

I want to share my awareness and personal learning, which encouraged me to take bold actions moving me from surviving to thriving mode.

Like any transformation in life, it was simple but not easy.

However, once the action is made a habit, then it becomes easy.

Let me share my old madness replaced by new wisdom.

I was uninformed and misinformed about human conditions in my younger years. Most of what I learned from traditional science or misinterpretation of science made me miserable, suffering in survival mode.

I didn’t know the existence of thriving in life, let alone that it was a natural human condition. When I heard the word occasionally thriving from my new-age friends in the 80s, it sounded like a pie in the sky for me.

I documented my dietary experience in an article.

I also shared my health transition and transformation it the attached stories.

What was I doing wrong?

For many years I was on a high-carb diet, eating lots of bread, rice, and potatoes and drinking excessive freshly squeezed fruit and vegetable juices. I thought fruit and vegetable juices were the healthiest drinks.

Half of my income was going to fruits and vegetables, ensuring that they were organic and had many colors, at least seven colors in each meal. Yes, I was that misinformed and adamant about fruit and vegetable juices!

After each meal, especially after drinking fruit juice, I always felt lethargic. It was worse in the afternoons. Drinking an abundance of kale, spinach, and celery juice was skyrocketing bloating and inflammation. I thought my diet was healthy.

I thought it was a reasonable human condition to be lethargic in the afternoons and have low back and neck pain as IT professionals because most of my colleagues were in the same situation, and we were consuming a lot of painkillers and inflammatory medication to suppress our symptoms.

However, every now and then, when I saw energetic people, those full of beans all time, around me, I thought that they were highly caffeinated or taking energizing drugs or genetically gifted. In hindsight, regrettably, this was misinformation and poor judgment of high-performing professionals.

My subconscious mind had a clandestine attraction toward those people, and when I grew up, I closely studied them and even modeled some of them. But this is another long story. Let me focus on simple blood sugar, which is the core message of this article.

I documented my three mistakes in a story.

I also wrote an article about common fat loss mistakes.

Learning about Blood Sugar

When I learned about the importance of blood sugar fluctuations on our moods, energy levels, and overall mental health, I wanted to check my blood sugar levels.

During that time, one enticing fact was that our bloodstream could only get around one teaspoon of sugar at a time, whereas I was getting many spoonfuls of sugar from multiple food sources and fruit juices, including sugared coffee and tea, which were my regular drinks on those days.

In hindsight, how ignorant and misinformed I was!

Ironically, my family doctors never pointed out that my blood sugar was the main source of my suffering. They were giving me unnecessary medication to suppress my symptoms. My body was crying due to poisonous sugar, but I was shutting its alarms with sedating medications.

With my curiosity, one day, I found an affordable blood glucose monitoring device on eBay and purchased glucose test strips from the pharmacy. The pharmacist was interrogating me about whether I was diabetic, as the cost of private purchases was very high.

It took a while to convince her that I might be prediabetic; therefore, I needed to check my blood sugar to ensure it was within acceptable ranges daily. She was insisting I should purchase it through the Medicare system due to its prohibitive cost. When it comes to my health, especially transforming myself safely, the cost is not an issue at all. I see it as an investment.

What did I discover?

It was astonishing to see my blood sugar going very high after the main meals. Fruit juices were skyrocketing it. I wondered how fruit juice was recommended to kids and adults, especially for breakfast. My elevated blood sugar took four hours to settle into a reasonably healthy range.

This simple test motivated me to reduce my carbs and increase my protein and fat intake. The main change is removing all fruit juice and foods with a high glycemic index.

Initially, in a week or so, I felt mild keto flu, but in the second week, my energy level boosted high. I suddenly started feeling fantastic.

I welcomed a new version of myself with a simple hack!

It was that simple: just reducing poisoning sugar amounts from my blood.

With this minor yet incredible improvement in my overall health, I started searching further to understand low-carb, high-fat diets.

I came across the Ketogenic diet, which was a fantastic transformation for my overall health, both physically and mentally. Even though I heard many negative aspects of the Ketogenic diet, with lots of scary speculations, they did not mean anything to me anymore because it worked for me.

Every negative aspect of the Ketogenic diet faded away in a few weeks, as none of those undesirable conditions happened to me. Ironically, everything was just the opposite of what was on the media.

I provide more information about my dietary background in this article. It is so unusual that, according to people around me, I was supposed to die by now. My new diet proves to me that my body does not need sugar and fiber. Both are unnecessary for me. Natural gluconeogenesis was my magical and optimal thriving mechanism.

With this enthusiasm, I started testing my blood sugar and ketone levels every day, a few times a day, keeping a record of them in a spreadsheet and creating data sets including my weight, belly size, fat percentage, muscle quality, sleep time, calorie intake, blood pressure, amount of salts, and many more daily measures. I practiced my data management skills in monitoring my health in detail.

Seeing optimal blood sugar and elevated ketone levels motivated me to keep these records religiously for several months.

After a while, I entirely became fat-adapted, and my terrible hunger feelings disappeared. My energy level was similar to when I was a teenager.

My thinking patterns became more explicit. I was thinking clearer. My mood was on the positive and optimistic side. My family members, friends, and colleagues were teasing me about whether I undertook anti-aging therapies like Botox or other body improvement methods. The world around me looked brighter.

First time in my life, I understood the true meaning of thriving.

With this energy and enthusiasm, I increased my exercise times, both aerobic and anaerobic (cardio and weight training formats).

Exercise helped even further optimize my blood sugar levels and increase my ketone levels. Being in high ketosis at most times made me feel almost euphoric. Despite all warnings, frankly, I did not lose any muscles when I was in deep ketosis.

As keeping lean muscle has been very important to me, I got it checked with Dexa scans which surprisingly showed an increase in lean muscles and a decrease in fat percentage. This was one of the most joyful news for me.

Unlearning the cluttered and harmful knowledge was working on my transformation journey.

My problem-solving, attention, memory, mental flexibility, and agility skills also improved. As long term subscribed user of Lumosity and Elevate, I measured my mental skills such as memory, attention, problem-solving, flexibility, and agility. My daily practice of mind games dramatically showed improvement.

A simple blood-monitoring curiosity opened new ways for my diet, physical exercise regimen, and mental efforts. I still test my blood glucose and ketone levels, but not as frequently as I used to in the first year. My body is so attuned that I even can guess my blood glucose and ketone levels by observing my daily behavior.

Other Valuable Tests

Then I also learned that there are many other blood tests monitoring other aspects of our health. Our family doctors conduct only minimal blood tests, and like any average citizen, I thought they were adequate to learn about our health profile.

It was another mistake to believe mainstream claims about unnecessary blood tests. They were unsubstantiated. They don’t seem to care as long as you survive. With all due respect, thriving does not seem to be the concern of traditional medicine. This self-discovery was invaluable for me.

The next level for me was to take the specialist-level tests. I was pleased to know that a specialist — for example, an endocrinologist — could conduct many hormonal tests to create a profile of the hormonal situation.

As Medicare in my country did not support hormonal tests, I paid specialist medical professionals to provide me with insights through multiple essential blood tests.

In my opinion, this was a good investment for my health. If I had left my condition in the hands of traditional medicine and Medicare, I could have suffered in pain or died by now.

In addition, I learned that there are many other special blood tests that we can get done through online pathologies with no prescription. Some are sophisticated and expensive tests. They can provide useful insights into our health situation.

Here’s Why Using Health Tests Can Keep Us Stay Young and Fit.

Conclusions

Monitoring my blood markers, especially blood sugar, informed me about my health conditions.

In addition to blood tests, I also got my DNA tested privately.

DNA tests provided insightful findings. My family doctor said it was a waste of money. But it was worth the investment, as a few simple pointers really provided valuable lessons for me and validated a few suspicious situations about my genetic predisposition.

By considering the insights from genetic tests, I adjusted my diet and fitness goals.

In addition, I also learned to improve my sleep by monitoring it via a simple smartwatch. Yes, my beloved Fitbit device because it is always with me. Details are in the attached article.

So what is my core message in this article?

As I monitor systems at work, learning to monitor my health made an invaluable impact on my health and performance.

I learned that thriving in life is not a luxury.

This joyful state is what nature gave us as a gift.

Each of us is unique. Even though I am a data-driven professional, I learned that statistics are dangerous to understanding health conditions. They can give indications in broad categories, but they can also misinform us.

It may surprise some, but I do not trust the broad statistics for my health anymore, especially if they are reported in epidemiological studies.

I still consider them only after full validation from empirical studies. When empirical studies were not possible or available in an area, I attempted safe self-experimentation using reliable knowledge — well documented in the body of knowledge. As a triangulation, I also compare and validate my findings with well-formed experiences from trusted, brave, and informed people in my circles.

Later I learned the importance of mitochondria and adjusted my lifestyle to increase density and improve the health of my mitochondria. You can review my views on the importance of mitochondria for our energy levels.

What measures do you take to thrive?

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

If this story resonated with you, you might check these recent and relevant stories titled Three Tips to a Defined Body and Sharp Brain, Five Tips to Melt Visceral Fat and Have a Defined Belly, and Six Lifestyle Habits to Skyrocket Fat Loss.

If you are a new reader and find this article valuable, you might check my holistic health and well-being stories reflecting on my reviews, observations, and decades of sensible experiments.

I write about various hormones and neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, GABA, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, adrenaline, glutamate, and histamine.

One of my goals as a writer is to raise awareness about the causes and risk factors of prevalent diseases that can lead to suffering and death for a large portion of the population.

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