@Ryan T you reminded me, I haven’t posted my latest set of labs. I can go over them in detail if you want, but they were essentially unchanged since last time (I looked at lipids, c reactive protein, A1c, and a metabolic panel). The only thing worth noting is that my A1c has creeped from 5.4 last time to 5.5, which are the highest two A1c’s I’ve had. Not quite pre-diabetic (5.7), but definitely enough to pique my interest and warrant some investigation. Given the possible explanations that I’ve discussed above, I’m not worried per se, but I’m
not comfortable with it either. It would actually be pretty simple to figure out what’s going on. I just need to wear a continuous glucose monitor for a few days, instead of looking at a surrogate marker like A1c. Then I could get my actual maximum and average blood sugars, and see how they’re affected by training.
The issue is that I need a doctor to order that for me. That’s currently second on my list of self-experiment priorities, though. First is getting a baseline CAC scan, so in a few years I can check it for changes to make sure I’m not clogging my arteries. I'm fairly confident that I'm not, but I'll take data over theory any day. I hope to get the CAC done sometime this spring, and then do the CGM testing before the end of the summer.
Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll mention that I started taking magnesium (125 mg Mag Citrate 1-2x/day). After starting carnivore I noticed that I was getting muscle cramps a little more often. It wasn’t an issue for 6 months or so, until I started BJJ. It turns out that wrapping people up and tightening your muscles in a contracted state is a good way to knot things up. After a couple months of BJJ I decided to see if playing around with my electrolytes would help, and the magnesium ended up doing the trick. Obviously, if the cramps were that bad, I wouldn’t have waited 8 months to do something about them, but it’s still worth noting that they were there, they were irritating, and I’m taking a daily supplement in order to prevent them.
I’ll also mention that, after 9 months of eating a lot of meat with me, but also eating other foods, my wife decided to give the carnivore thing a try. While I don’t think she’s been truly carnivore for more than 24 hours at a time during the last week and a half, she’s pretty dramatically cut back on all the “other stuff.” After the first few days I noticed a significant improvement in her mood/energy, which is pretty notable given her history of anxiety and depression. In fact, she had five “good days” in a row (as opposed to regular days and bad days), which hasn’t happened since our son was born over two and half years ago. It will be interesting to see how things progress, and where they end up.