Fresh Lady Meat: Introducing Myself, Wow Much Experiment!

[Emily_Porter]

Hi, my name is Emily, 34, single and looking ;). I live in central Arizona, near Sedona, but looking to move;). My interest in tracking comes from a 15+ year struggle with chronic fatigue, so you could say I specialize in health and labs, bloodwork, functional medicine, herbs and supplements etc. I’ve learned so much about it, I’m writing a small e-book to help others with choosing, acquiring, and interpreting tests, including costs.

Influences include Ben Greenfield, Joe Cohen, Jack Kruse, Dave Asprey…

I am NOT a huge tech person. I don’t record anything with my phone (gasp!) I still do most of my data with pen and paper and like it that way, but when the technology gets more advanced for compiling and correlating data to look for trends that we may miss, and when I can put in anything from anywhere, not just a few select devices or apps, I will be interested. For example if the computer can flag that most every time I eat beets I don’t sleep 2 nights afterward or other obscure patterns. I am also interested in up and coming consumer testing services and gadgets, like pills you swallow to look in your guts and machines to scan your blood/ urine/ saliva for pathogens at home.

Also interested in PEMF devices, vibrational medicine, light and energy medicine. I spent some time using a Biowell GDV camera if you have any questions about that. I ultimately sent it back because the tech support was bad and it was hard to get my questions answered about it, but it was fun while it lasted.

I AM a huge experiment person.
Some of the parameters I track daily:

-use Rescue Time to track total screen time. Not for activity reasons but for EMF exposure.

-use Cronometer to track food. Have particular interest in nutrient density, fiber, and macronutrient ratios. Currently eating only 15 foods due to food allergies, so I watch for reactions to foods. Tracking has helped me nail down a safe baseline diet that allows me to go through every day headache 100% free.

Currently investigating fat/carbs and anxiety relationship. Tracking helped me understand that low carb/high fat ketogenic causes greater insomnia and anxiety for me. Slowly working my way higher carb while lowering fat and somewhat protein.

-Use labs to track health. Have multiple CBC, CMP, vitamin D, lipid, thyroid. Currently obtaining Quicksilver blood metals, DUTCH hormones, LRA food allergy, Doctor’s Data stool, 23 & me genetics. May repeat some in future depending on results. Arizona is a direct access state, no requisition needed for anything, and basic bloodwork is cheap, which is awesome. Tracking has allowed me to see that most of my off bio-markers have been off for many years, the same ones, but I have yet to improve them or really try to target specific ones. I have some resources for functional lab ranges for conventional blood work those who are interested.

By hand I use a combination of a paper journal with spaces for notes on specific subjects daily and a paper calendar where i make my own daily bar graphs with colored pencils to see trends at a glance. It could be easily converted to numbers and transferred online if I just gave the height of the bar a number, but I also write notes all over my calendar and there is no exact software mimic for the whole layout that I am aware of . And besides, I am wary of wireless and screens. Add that to the list of tech that DOES interest me: non-toxic/low EMF/healing EMF tech.

On the calendar I track 9 main things with colored bars, including
1)computer hours
2)if i ate a suspicious food, like a known or suspected sensitivity or just something unusual
3) chemical exposure and severity and triggering because i have mild multiple chemical sensitivity.
4) daily symptoms and total symptom severity, headaches, pain, etc.
5) mood. i basically track the extent and brand of the negativity, as I am rarely in an exceptionally good mood. But hopefully some of my supplement and diet tracking and labwork will be able to turn that around.
6 and 7) good and bad synchronicities, luck, flow. I probably differ from everyone else on here in that this is one of my most important parameters. I believe strongly that consciousness/vibrations influences the events around us like the power going out, or getting surprise money. Both can happen in one day, hence separate bars.
8 and 9) good and bad dreams. I track the general tone of my dreams as I feel they add a bit of extra insight into my waking day and further underscore trends in mood, diet, flow, etc. For example last night i dreamed of snakes. That always means something is not okay in my waking life. I would give any snake dream, say, 8/10 on the bad dream scale. I also have a symbol for if I did not sleep through the night. If I start using one phone app again it will probably be a sleep motion tracker.

Other things I note on the calendar are exercise. I only hike/walk for exercise and usually in a different place each time, so each day is labelled by where I went so I can pull the whole day up in my memory easily. If I didn’t go anywhere the day is labelled by something else notable that day like today might be “Quantified Self” if I spend a lot of time researching QS stuff.

-I note if I took a bath in epsom salts with a "B’. For awhile I thought this was giving me better dreams, but not so sure anymore.

-I note ovulation and menses with a blackened or empty moon symbol. Menses and they day or two before has obvious effects on everything else, ovulation or other times of cycle not so much. But good for not getting pregnant (If I wasn’t single).

-I note if changed diet or supplements.

Sounds like a lot of stuff but it only takes 5 or 10 minutes to fill in. The calendar is my “at a glance” shorthand collator of the data from my two apps plus my journal. In my journal take notes throughout the day and I keep the more extensive observations, ruminations, to-do lists. I do write down foods in each meal on here as well as cronometer because I can’t flip through cronometer easily and see my meals on the same page as everything else that day, like…

-…bowel movements. frequency, texture. I have a lot of gut issues and do a lot of poop tracking, including bowel transit time.

CURRENT EXPERIMENTS
-watching effects of hydrocholoric acid supplementation on digestion (mostly looking at poop texture). will add enzymes when I have a good idea of what acid does or doesn’t do. The enzymes in turn were added to oxbile which didn’t do much, which in turn were added to sauerkraut which does A LOT to firm up loose stools for me (various brands work the same, probiotics on the other hand do not make a difference).
-soon starting medicinal mushrooms to see if they raise sub-optimal white blood cells on CBC.
-body temperature. Pretty much established it is optimal, but now checking into the circadian rhythm pattern.

Lots More to Come when I get my latest labwork back. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

[Emily_Porter]

This is what I mean by doing things the old-fashioned way. Yellow for example is symptoms. The symptoms are high all January because of a stomach issue. The pros of putting this data on the computer would be that it wouldn’t be lost or destroyed, and that you could switch views, turn the bars into lines and whatnot to look at monthly and weekly trends. The cons are I’d need specialized software to recreate the exact same view and capabilities of my paper exactly and that I would spend more of my life looking at a screen.

But if anyone wants to invent me this program where I can add any parameter I want rated on a scale of 1/10, assign it a color, and put notes on top of it, and add symbols and titles to each day, and drop sticky notes with lines to specific days on the side, and be able to see it all at once without having to hover over anything or zoom in, go right ahead! I’d give it a whirl.

[danwich]

If you end up repeating the Quicksilver testing, I’d be really curious whether the epsom salt baths seem to influence your magnesium levels. I’d been considering testing that myself just to have some independent confirmation of the only study I’m aware of.

[Emily_Porter]

Yeah, same study I’ve seen. I’ll let you know, although honestly if mag comes out low, I’ll probably just take oral mag since i have that around, and it will be getting hotter soon and I won’t be interested in baths anymore.

[Emily_Porter]

What I will be able to see right away is if I have still have low blood magnesium despite taking epsom salt baths with x lbs of salt x number of days per week all winter and consuming x mg of magnesium in my diet daily. If so, it could be an indicator that for a chronically ill person, more aggressive magnesium measures could be in order, or something else needs to be fixed to retain magnesium. I could also just run an RBC mag. Last time I tested last summer (no baths) it was 5.5 on a 4.2-6.8 range which is perhaps sub-optimal but totally reasonable. Dr. Caroyln Dean the magnesium maven/junkie suggests aiming for 6.0-6.5mg/dL, but I think on a wellnessFX panel it would be in the green.

[Agaricus (Gary Isaac Wolf)]

Welcome Emily. Thank you for writing this intro, and thank you also for including a picture of this notebook. At the conference in Amsterdam somebody gave a talk, with photos, about his late father’s diabetes notebook, made long before there were pocket phones, never mind pocket computers. Those images had some of the same seriousness and visual power as your photo. I think these documents are very important, they say a lot. My intuition is that some of the most important qualities in a handcrafted journal like this remain unrealizable on screens.

On electromagnetic radiation, Bob Trioa has been doing some interesting work on this. I don’t think he’s posted about it yet but here’s a video of a talk he gave at a New York meeting: http://quantifiedself.com/projects/821

[QuantifiedBob (Bob T)]

Thanks, Gary - actually, I have written about electromagnetic radiation:

EMF and Radiation – Measuring My Indoor Environment

[donaldstahl]

This is a very impressive introduction. Can you comment on your BioWell experience? I was not favorably impressed by the information that it relied on Chinese meridians.

Best wishes.

[Emily_Porter]

Supposedly the inventors of the biowell tested and corrected the traditional meridian meanings by taking thousands of scans of sick people with specific diseases and correlating their finger readings to their diagnoses. So they do ascribe specific fingers and regions of the fingers to specific parts of the body but it isn’t exactly the same as TCM. If you are into the idea of GDV and the electron transport chain and all that but not into auras and chakras and meridians, you can just look at the joules of energy of all the fingers as your biomarker. And there are some basic patterns in the display relating to health, apparent health (where most people are, normal but not healthy), and disease.

The biowell did often seem to reflect my impressions of what weakens and strengthens me. I had VERY good readings after going to my chiropractor/applied kinesiologist and getting manipulated, and also after getting nutrient IVs. I had very bad readings after strenuous exercise, and hot baths, or cold water immersion, which because I have adrenal fatigue issues does indeed tucker me out. So you could say it was a confirmation, but made me more inclined to just listen to my body, actually seeing how many hours afterward it made my energy go down, and not try and force myself into doing cold immersion or whatever just because it’s supposed to be good.

Similarly you can do all the healthy stuff you want, get acupuncture or a massage, but if you are getting hungry and hypoglycemic because you left the house and didn’t bring any food, it isn’t going to help. You’d be better off staying at home. Again, common sense, but seeing the display helps.

Unfortunately the only other person I tested it on was my roommate. But this was interesting because I always had better readings than him even though I have much worse health problems. But I also live a much cleaner lifestyle. So perhaps my lifestyle is helping me.

I heard about this device from one of my professors, Beverly Rubik. She is a biophysicist who got into energy medicine. One of those IONS people. She is very grounded, and uses the biowell as an adjunct in most of her research, so I trust that there is some merit to it. I hope that such devices do become more common, cheaper, better accepted. I think there is something to it.

I just didn’t like that it was Russian and hard to get information and answers to my technical questions. And then my mild electrohypersensitivity thing where I’m not so sure using electronic devices to track my health is better for my health than just avoiding devices.

[QuantifiedBob (Bob T)]

I also own/use a Biowell unit and have found it super insightful. It has correctly detected several things that matched up with my physical well-being as well as lab tests (organs/systems).

Something to keep in mind is that the human body is constantly changing, so if you were to take 2 different readings 10 minutes from each other, overall you will probably see some different results. So the trick is you need to take a ton of readings over time, so you can establish some baselines and see which things hold constant/stick out (i.e., lower back or liver) and determine a course of action. Think about how athletes use HRV as a measure of readiness/recovery each day - they must first establish a baseline.

Did you go through all of their training? I’ve literally spent 20+ hours going through training videos and “practicing” by taking hundreds of scans, and I am still only scratching the surface. It’s fascinating stuff!

[Emily_Porter]

Nice Aura Bob! Very solid. My energy was usually higher than 47 but much choppier :). I did watch some of the training videos. Didn’t do any workshop training. I only had it for a month, but did do hundreds of scans in that month to get an idea for the baseline. So the observations I mentioned above were the most extreme ones. I didn’t really look too hard for things that were always off, since I have so many multisystemic health issues nearly everything is always off.

[Emily_Porter]

Indeed, magnesium is not looking good on this test despite epsom salt baths several times weekly (say 2-4 times) in the winter months leading up to the test. Say 2 cups or so per bath. I wouldn’t rely on it for magnesium repletion. May be useful for other reasons. Magnesium chloride might work better. I’m just going to take oral magnesium for awhile. 870mg /day divided. It won’t be a clean experiment because I’m on adrenal supplements that could prevent magnesium wasting, even in absence of additional intake, but we’ll see what that does.