Biohacking: What & why I'm monitoring + personal findings
If you’ve been following me on Instagram and watching my stories, you know that for fun, I’ve been monitoring daily my:
Blood sugar
Ketones
Glucose Ketone Index (GKI)
Sleep data
Why you may ask?
I set out on this experiment to answer a few questions:
Am I always in nutritional ketosis or not with my diet (and I’m not a classic ketogenic, AIP, or Paleo diet) and exercise (I move every day, in some way, sometimes intense sometimes nothing more than a walk)?
How does fasting 24 hours once a week and intermittent fasting 12-20 hours daily impact my health and my autophagy?
Can I achieve and maintain a GKI under 9 every day, and once a week at least <3, do I feel even healthier?
How does making a subtle change impact my quality of sleep, recovery from exercise, overall energy and health?
(NOTE: I’ll provide all my results at the end of this blog)
First off, let’s begin by defining the following 3 parameters I measure and why it’s important to monitor them. And then jump into my personal findings.
PARAMETERS
Blood sugar
Blood sugar or glucose is the sugar we carry in the bloodstream to supply energy to our cells.
The body naturally attempts to keep the blood sugar within a tight range by releasing insulin to bind the sugar and to prevent damage to the body.
If the blood sugar is chronically elevated it will lead to the pancreas losing its ability to produce insulin, insulin resistance, aka type 2 diabetes.
Blood sugar monitoring measures the amount of sugar being transported in the blood at that single instant, so it’s a great way to see how the body responds to the ingestion of a food.
Generally when we have our blood sugar tested in the lab we are collected a fasted blood sugar, so it’s the very best we can expect it to ever look on paper!
The problem with just testing blood sugar when fasting, is it tells us nothing about how your body responds to food, and if you are able to produce enough insulin to bind the “sugars” in the blood and keep the blood glucose relatively level.
The problem with only testing the fasting blood sugar or at best this and a HgA1C (this is like the receipt for how your body has been handling sugar for the last 3 months) is we are missing millions of Americans who have dysglycemia, a dysregulation of the blood sugar throughout the day.
We now know that dysglycemia is the 1st step toward insulin resistance, and diabetes.
Dysglycemia is any gap in your blood sugar reading whether it prior to or after eating greater than 20 points. Dysglycemia or poor glucose handling, can be evident with a glucose challenge test or insulin test a good decade or longer prior to developing prediabetes or diabetes.
I don’t know about you, but I want to intervene well before my pancreas has lost function. So in a lab we could do a glucose challenge test and see how well the pancreas is able to keep up insulin production in the presence of sugar, however the real life experiment for this is to use a glucometer.
*I have an affiliate link to save 15% on your kit if you’re interested in the glucose & ketone monitor I use personally: http://bit.ly/2Io5F1z
You can test yourself very easy at home prior to a meal, then afterwards at various intervals to see how your body reacts to various foods. It’s empowering to say the least to know exactly how your body responds to a specific food and then have the opportunity to make changes.
Fun fact about the pancreas: The pancreas is who’s responsible for releasing our digestive enzymes to breakdown carbs, protein, and fat, it also is the organ that produces and releases insulin.
Insulin, if your not familiar with its function, is a hormone produced in the pancreas by the islets of Langerhans cells, which regulates the amount of glucose in the blood.
When protein is digested it forms amino acids once oxidized (with glutamate dehydrogenase) produces energy, ATP which triggers insulin secretion.
So, if you are over-consuming protein, it’s actually still possible to be thwarting your efforts to reduce insulin resistance/reverse diabetes even when you’ve gone carnivore low carb or keto.
When one has impaired blood sugar handling the body has a hard to pairing the release of glucagon with insulin in the presence of digested protein, aka amino acids.
This impaired insulin response can cause our blood sugar to rise precipitously several hours after a meal high in protein (without carbohydrates)! I know, you’re thinking WHAT the H!!!
So, if you’ve gone carnivore, low carb or keto and are not seeing improvements in your blood sugar numbers this may be the cause.
So, How to fix it?
Count your protein intake, if it’s greater than .8 grams per pound of body weight you may need to consider reducing your intake for a period of timessional.
Count your protein intake, if it’s greater than .8 grams per pound of body weight you may need to consider reducing your intake for a period of time.
Get 7.5 hours of quality sleep per night.
Consider resistance training to increase insulin sensitivity
Consider fasted cardiovascular exercise to increase insulin sensitivity
Consider intermittent or extended fasting
Consider supplements to increase insulin sensitivity such as Berberine HCl, alpha lipoic acid, resveratrol, magnesium, chromium, cinnamon, or myo-inositol.
*before changing your diet or using any supplements always consult your healthcare professional.
Ketones
Ketones are chemicals made in the liver. When stored glucose, glycogen is low, but the body needs energy, ATP the body will mobilize stored fat to use as fuel for your body to function.
The liver will release these ketone bodies into the bloodstream to be used as fuel.
This process is downregulated with the standard American diet due to the consumption of on average 200-300 grams of carbohydrates daily.
As a result of a diet high in carbohydrates and or a decrease in insulin sensitivity the body will lose its ability to use stored fat as fuel, this is known as losing metabolic flexibility.
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make with a ketogenic diet is eat 70-90% of their calories from fat in efforts to get their ketones up on their monitor (urine, blood, breath).
However, just having an elevated level of ketones does not mean your body is using them for energy.
Becoming “fat” adapted, metabolically flexible takes time, it can take upwards of 6 months depending on your state of health and diet prior to attempting a low carb or ketogenic style diet.
This is why I prefer to teach people how to eat for a lifetime rather than achieve some ketosis goal transiently.
This is also why I prefer to utilize the GKI to identify just how much the individual is able to utilize the ketones present in their body.
Glucose Ketone Index (GKI)
The GKI is a measure that better predicts ketosis when low (under 9).
Ketosis is the process by which the body can mobilize stored fat for energy. The GKI when under 9 is thought to correlate with the current rate of autophagy.
Autophagy is the “self eating” process within the cell, it’s when cells are told to breakdown, remove or recycle their parts.
It is also postulated this process stimulates biogenesis, the making of new cells and their cellular components.To date, we have no direct measurements of autophagy, however this is a means to estimate this process.
A level of 6-9 is thought to mean mild ketosis and is a good place to for achieving weight loss and health maintenance.
A GKI 3-6 is thought to correlate to a degree of moderate ketosis; this is ideal for those with type 2 diabetes, obesity, insulin resistance, metabolic disease or endocrine dysfunction including thyroid disease and adrenal and sex hormone imbalances.
A GKI of 1-3 is considered a high therapeutic ketogenic state, this is optimal for those using a ketosis for the treatment of diseases such as cancer, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, traumatic brain injury, and chronic inflammatory diseases such as autoimmune diseases and metabolic syndrome.
Personal Findings
As I previously stated, I set out on this experiment to answer a few questions.
Here are the answers I got so far.
Am I always in ketosis or not with my diet (and I’m not a classic ketogenic, AIP, or Paleo diet) and exercise (I move every day, in some way, sometimes intense sometimes nothing more than a walk)?
So far YES, turns out eating lots of vegetables (predominately low in starchy veg), a moderate amount of healthy fat, and moderate amount of protein when paired with movement, for me correlates to always being in a small amount of ketosis!
I wake each day with a blood glucose of 72-80 and a ketone measurement of 0.6-1.1. Thats a GKI of 3.63 to 7.4. There are outlier days when the overnight fast is longer, or when I had dessert while away on vacation, but this is the trend.
Generally when I take this measurement in the morning I have generally been intermittent fasting for 10-11 hours. Generally despite eating a breakfast or lunch, by late afternoon I’ve been fasting for 4-8 hours again, and my blood sugar is generally lower than the morning and my ketones higher.
I suspect that my morning BS is often a little more elevated due to the cortisol awakening response, as cortisol will increase blood glucose upon waking daily.
Depending on when I end the intermittent fast the GKI will continue to decline as the day progresses, the times this changes is when I’ve eaten, when I’ve exercised, or when I’m stressed with work! However thankfully I have seen that very few things increase my blood sugar greater than 20 points 1 hour after having eaten it.
The few things I found that were too much for my body to handle were a large Yuzu fruit, ½ cup of sorbet with a meringue cookie, and gluten free bread followed by chocolate mousse.
I see that sometimes with those high carbohydrates meals, even when it’s root vegetables I’ll transiently fall out of ketosis, however within hours those ketones will generally reimerge. I mention this because I’ve had clients tell me they develop a fear of eating these healthy carbohydrate rich foods, plantains, yams, berries, watermelon, whatever, simply because they worked so hard to achieve ketosis, they fear it will never come back again.
The reality is once you are metabolically flexible your body can easily switch between fuel sources. Not only that, but in my opinion it makes sense to challenge the system in this way.
If you think about our ancestors, they would not have eaten 3 meals a day and a few snacks. There would have been times of feast and times of famine. Foods would have been eaten seasonally, meaning times where the diet was higher carbohydrate (summer when all the fruit and greens were available) and then higher in protein and fat (winter when only stored root vegetables were available, meat, nuts/seeds and fats were available.)
The body thrives on variety, variety in the foods we eaten, the times we eat and when we let it rest.
I’ve been counting my macros to see where I was and then see what happens when I slightly change things, and what I found is when I float my carbohydrate intake toward 100-125 grams in a day, my blood sugar will run higher and my ketones lower.
Those lower blood sugar readings require intake of carbs of approximately 50 grams a day or a bout of fasted exercise the previous day. As a cycling woman, I personally believe it is in my best interest to eat higher carbohydrate the 7-9 days before my next cycle so I can support my body’s production of progesterone.
So, this is what I do, approximately 50 grams of carbohydrates on cycle days 1-21, then 75-125 on days 22-28, focusing on foods that feed progesterone production such as pumpkin/squash, yam, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, beans, broccoli,brussel sprouts, cabbage and cauliflower.
I have to note this is just for me. Everyone is different in what their body needs to have healthy happy hormone production throughout her cycle. Some women eat 20-50 grams of carbohydrates a day and it clears their cycle related symptoms (this is common in cases of estrogen dominance) and other women will feel worse than ever doing the same thing, (this is more common with low progesterone.)
How does fasting 24 hours once a week and intermittent fasting 12-20 hours daily impact my health and my autophagy?
I’m 4.5 months into doing a weekly 24 hour fast at this point in time. I did 2 36 hour fasts in this time frame as well as a few times my intermittent fast was 20-22 hours long.
I can honestly say, the 4 things I have found to be the biggest helpers in sticking with a longer intermittent fast:
#1 Being busy, Monday’s are always my busiest day of the week, and getting hungry is a lot easier to deal with when you have stuff to do.
#2 Lean on hot tea, in the first weeks I definitely leaned on drinking a lot of hot tea to keep me going and keep me from feeling like I was freezing. I drink mostly early grey, green tea or matcha personally as these may potentially increase autophagy, and I really like green tea for the l-theanine it contains that helps support the adrenals.
#3 Electrolytes, sometimes you just feel off when you start intermittent fasting, I remember years ago when I just moved my feeding window to be 12 hours from 14, it felt horrible, I feared my dysautonomia was returning, so I reached for the salt! Each gram of glycogen stores 3-4 grams of water. As you deplete your glycogen stores you will lose water and you will lose some minerals. Well, I took this knowledge going into the 24 hour fasts and leaned in! Every glass of water I drank had a big pinch of pink salt, I took electrolyte supplements with sauna and all exercise, and more when I felt “off”, my blood sugar or heart rate elevated or when I had any fatigue or lightheadedness, and I took magnesium at night and some adrenal adaptogens and a multimineral during the day. Now, I recognize this is an excessive amount of supplementation for most people, I admit I was overly cautious due to my history of adrenal dysfunction and dysautonomia.4.5 months into this lifestyle I don’t currently use most of these regularly now, but have them on hand for when my body says it needs a little extra support.
#4 The knowledge that in time it will get easier. You will get hungry. PERIOD. But it will also pass. In time you will feel the benefits of your body tapping into ketosis and mental clarity and focus will sky rocket, energy will improve and you will feel like it is easy to continue.
Can I achieve and maintain a GKI under 9 every day, and once a week at least <3, do I feel even healthier?