Pain, Pain, Go Away!

I've run into a problem with Atkins induction: my brand new shorts are now so loose on me that I can get them on without unbuttoning them. Truly, two days ago, nothing in my usual size fit. Cue the sappy violin music. Having to have your clothes taken in isn't the worst problem. What about dental surgery, though? Back in my Body for Life days, I ate a lot of carbohydrate and ended up with a bunch of cavities, a few of them at the gumline of my bottom front teeth. As much as I brushed and flossed, I constantly had plaque on my teeth back then. Even though I haven't had any tooth decay since starting LC, the gumline there (where my old dentist had to remove gum tissue to put in a filling) has receded and I've had bone loss. Gum tissue doesn't stick to fillings, so it just keeps receding. To avoid any further bone loss, my oral surgeon (the one who gave me my dental implant a few years ago after an accident) grafted some tissue from the roof of my mouth to the gum. ...

I think of my twenties as the years I spent working my butt off and my thirties as the years I spent dancing. I don't want to think of my forties as the years I spent playing video games. To that end, I took one of the video games (Atlantis Pearls) off my computer a week ago. I still have a few others on it; I'll explain why that's OK in a minute. Since I took the game off, I've been doing more of the things I wanted to do--karate, playing  fold.it (a game that helps scientists) , and playing the recorder. And even though I haven't been getting any more sleep, I've slept better and felt a lot more rested. It's not because I'm off the computer earlier, or getting less light exposure; I think it's because I'm less stimulated when I go to bed. To me, this makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. We've had fire for 300,000 to 400,000 years , and our ancestors may have regularly slept in front of a campfire. For at least tens of thousa...

If I haven't posted much lately, it's because I've been resuming a normal life after a month spent getting well and getting by. I've weeded the yard, filed all my papers and amended my state tax return. I took my computer in for repairs and having lost all my data, reloaded my music and found a free home accounting program (mint.com) to replace Microsoft Money. My lindy partners have given my right arm some exercise (dance partners in lindy use one another's weight), my favorite stock screener brought up a promising company to research (Global Payments Network), and fold.it came out with a streptococcus puzzle and a "quick frozen" puzzle that have kept me busy.  My best effort at the new quick frozen puzzle folding proteins. I'm sheerbliss at #17, and my team is Go Science.  Something that seemed to help push me back into feeling well was resuming my GNC Hair, Skin & Nails vitamins. I always felt good taking those, but got nervous about ...

As much as people complain about stress, they go out of their way to create it. They over-schedule, overspend, under-sleep, and under-nourish themselves. I'm still working on getting enough sleep, but I've found some ways to reduce other sources of stress. Poor diet will affect your mood. Contrary to what's written by a lot of self-help authors, your mood isn't just a matter of attitude. Your brain is mostly made of fat and cholesterol and requires various nutrients to run properly. It needs glucose, but the glucose needs to be in your bloodstream, not your stomach in the form of carbohydrates. (Your liver can make glucose out of protein.) Drs. Phinney and Volek describe how low-calorie, high-carb diets can affect the brain in The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living. (The short answer: depending on how much you exercise, you can mentally and physically hit the wall.) If for example you decide to eat 1200 kcal per day, composed of 25% protein (75 grams), 25...