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I'm still alive, really I am! I wrote a great and extensive blog entry here some time ago, but my computer crashed before I could post it. I don't really remember the exact details of that lost brilliance! I'm about to go to bed, so I'll make this fairly brief.
That experiment with a ketogenic diet I tried a couple of summers ago only lasted for that summer. Now I'm trying intermittent fasting on weekends. I'm still, knock on wood, fairly healthy.
One peak of the time I haven't reported on is a visit to India about a year ago. That's where some of my favorite supplements (ashwagandha in particular) come from. The college that hosted me had some research groups that were studying particular ayurvedic herbal remedies.
Though they fed me a little too well there! I was mostly successful in working off that delicious Indian food at the gym. Through practicing some "reverse pyramidal training" (lifting more and more repetitions of lighter and lighter weights each "set") I'm pretty muscular. I've started to add in deadlifts to my routine. Sometimes I'll do a long cardio workout too, or a short and intense one. With a heavy teaching load and research projects (tenured professor) I think I approach the gym without much discipline (or at least the discipline of a fitness athlete), because it's an area of life where I'm not required to meet external deadlines and goals. Still, for 48 years old, I'm in pretty good shape.
No further problems with bipolar disorder. Sometimes I take a miniscule amount of lithium (it has general health benefits), but ashwagandha is my usual bulwark against mood problems. The CPAP helps too with sleep. I don't use it all the time, but that's better than nothing. I'll usually use it about 4 hours a night. Fewer hours of sleep with the CPAP are worth a greater number of hours with poor sleep without the CPAP.
Recent supplement experiments:
*Krill oil, reputed to be better in some ways (warding off depression, various blood markers) than regular fish oil, also contains astaxanthin, the red antioxidant pigment that gives salmon their color. I tried two month-supply bottles but haven't replenished since then.
*Apple cider vinegar. This is my current tinkering. Diluted with water, it's supposed to have multiple health benefits.
*Lemon balm. Supposed to be a calming nootropic.
*L-Citruline. Supposed to be a good supplement for athletic training.
*I have a bag of a pine bark extract I ordered from Amazon, much cheaper than certified pycnogenol. I'm not noticing as clear effects from the second bag (usually shinier hair that goes along with blocking response to dihydrotestosterone or DHT). Perhaps the quality has been reduced.
*Black seed and black seed oil. Apparently this remedy has been popular in the middle east for more than a thousand years. I was intrigued that it had some efficacy against toxoplasmosis, the parasite spread, among other pathways, by cats. I grew up with cats, though I don't know whether I have the parasite.
