Pain, Pain, Go Away!

I'm an incorrigible night owl. Never in my life have I wanted to get out of bed; none of the tips and tricks I've tried to go to bed and get up early have worked long-term. This hack will hopefully prevent me from staying up really late, since I'm usually on my laptop when I'm up past midnight.  Hat tip to Coach April at Dr. Davis's Inner Circle site from prompting me to find a solution for staying up too late.  It can't be morning already. Photo from Pixabay . There are two ways to schedule your Mac to automatically shut down depending on your operating system (OS). To find your OS, click on the apple in the upper left, About This Mac, Overview. Full instructions here .  Monterey OS and Earlier Open System Preferences Go to Energy Saver on a Mac, or Battery on a Mac laptop. Find Schedule (In older versions of macOS, the Schedule button was at the bottom of the Energy Saver tab.) Choose your start up time. Choose your sleep time. Source:  https://www.macworld.co...

Super-bacteria L. plantarum might be as close as your garden. Zucchini is a good source of the bacteria, and by fermenting it, you can up the benefits like slightly lower blood sugar, improved insulin, improved exercise capacity, improved sleep and mood, and many others. Don't give away that zucchini--ferment it! This recipe has a milder flavor than most fermented foods--it's only slightly tart. And of course it's an alternative to yogurt.  Equipment needed 1 quart jar (or 2 pint jars) with lid(s) Canning funnel (optional) Fermentation device (I use an insulated grocery bag, plastic grocery bag and a heating pad)  Ingredients 2 apples, peeled and cored 1 medium zucchini, unpeeled 4 dates, chopped 1 T cinnamon 1/2 T ground ginger 1 t salt 1/4 t ground cloves 1/4 t nutmeg Filtered water 2 capsules or equivalent of your favorite probiotic that ferments at ~95F (I used Biotiquest Antibiotic Antidote) Shred the apples and zucchini and put them in a large bowl. Add the spices, s...

A few months ago, I joined Dr. Davis's Inner Circle to resolve some health problems. He recommends making "yogurt" with L. reuteri bacteria for its unique health benefits. Users reported vivid dreams after eating the yogurt. Having suffered from sleep paralysis long ago, I worried that it would return if I ate this yogurt. Sleep paralysis feels like a weight on you while you're somewhere between being asleep and being awake. You're paralyzed while it happens, and since humans tend to assume that things have agency when in doubt, it seems like it's a creature that's sitting on top of you. It's terrifying. It happened to me during the Satanic Panic , which added to my own panic. Decades later, I slept like the dead on a low-carb diet. No dreams, no sleep paralysis, just a very deep, black sleep. Wonderful. I took L. reuteri tablets as supplements for a few months. I dreamed, but nothing remarkable happened. I whipped up a batch of yogurt and ate s...

The new method of getting to bed earlier is working. Last week I had the idea to see going to bed on time as punctuality. (Punctuality is a virtue to me because I so dislike covering for an employee who often shows up very late or waiting on people who are late just because they're diddling around.) I've generally been getting to bed between 10:45 and 11:00. I had a lapse last night because I lost track of time taking pictures to enter a contest for a kitchen makeover. But I haven't been staying up until midnight. I've not only been less tired, but less hungry. I even got up early one morning and worked out. It's been wonderful not to drag bleary-eyed through the day. ***** I had to find an new dentist since the last one quit taking my insurance. After searching reviews on the internet, and trying to decide which ones could be trusted, I settled on a dentist off East Colfax. In Denver, the character of a neighborhood can vary from block to block. There are pla...

The habit of getting to bed on time, at 10:30, has eluded me. I know it's important to get enough sleep, but I'm never tired at 10 PM. I've been inspired to look at this a different way, though: I've begun to see going to bed on time as punctuality. Having waited for hours--no exaggeration--on Thanksgiving dinners at relatives' houses, having waited on my ex-jerk to show up to pretty much anything, having carried a coworker who'd often get to work 20 minutes late and then spend ten minutes making her breakfast, I've had enough. I admit that I often run a few minutes late. (I'm usually on time for work, but I do take PTO or a short lunch if I'm more than a few minutes late.) But now I'm inspired to change. The Art of Manliness site ran an article a few years ago called The Importance of Punctuality . Being on time, it says, shows integrity, dependability, builds self-confidence, and assures you're at your best.  George Washington was a s...

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...

Answer: because probably, nobody else will. Awhile back, my mother's new primary care doctor saw her for a checkup. According to Mom, the doctor took her blood sugar and wrote "diabetes out of control" on her chart and prescribed Metformin and Lantus (insulin). The doctor didn't look at the blood sugar records Mom brought. Maybe it's the new medication, maybe because an infection cleared up, or maybe Mom has gotten more insulin sensitive, but she's been getting hypos in the morning. It's dangerous to have blood sugar get too low during the night. The doctor is hard to reach, and who knows how good she is at dosing insulin. Mom had been fiddling around with her evening insulin dose, but without checking her blood sugar first. So today, after she got her blood sugar up from this morning's level of 55 (70-100 is normal), I suggested she check her blood sugar before taking her evening insulin. When she checked it tonight, it was 70. After doing some...

Dark chocolate and sweet potato fries are taking up too much of my diet--so much that I probably got up to about 70g of carb a day. That's probably too much carb to make ketones and too little glucose to feel energetic. Walk down the middle of the road, Margaret Thatcher said, and you get hit by the traffic from both sides. This might be the reason I've been tired and my stomach is upset so often these days. (Upper GI problems were the original reason I started a low-carb diet.) I overslept by an hour this morning after forgetting to reset my alarm, even after nine hours' sleep and my dog trying to get me up. My dog is going on a stricter diet, too, since she's up to 70 pounds. She eats low-carb home cooking, but needs to eat less of it. Bye-bye, balanced diet. I'm going to use pork rinds and emulsion sauce* instead of sweet potato fries as a vehicle for fat and salt. And no more denial about my chocolate habit. I was good today--I had about 30g of carb--and ...

The Daily Mail has a story (1) about research (2) showing that a high-fat diet makes you sleepy. (See abstract 0977 in the research link.) This flies in the face of my experience and a whole lot of anecdotal experience, too (see the comments to the article). Since starting a low-carb, high fat diet, I haven't needed four-hour naps on the weekend. (See this , this , this , and this .)  I'm not exhausted come 7 p.m. on a Friday night. I have the energy at 44 that I should have had in my twenties. Are we low-carbers violating some law of physics or biology? No--the research and Mail article are magic tricks. The article is called "Why the Atkins Diet will make you sleepy but a packet of crisps will wake you up." Atkins is a specific diet: 20 grams of carbohydrate per day during induction with adequate protein and fat; most of Dr. Atkins' patients couldn't go over 40 grams of carbohydrate per day without gaining weight. Yet the research article that it refers ...

Four More Weeks My orthodontist wants to wait four more weeks to take my braces off so that I can get a new crown. Meantime, my insurance is actually considering paying for some of this expensive dental work. Hot dog. Acid reflux, acne, and upset stomach down to flavored coffee I just tried to expand my food horizons and once again, ended up with problems. It took a few months to figure out it was flavored coffee. It's not the caffeine or the acid, since regular coffee and tea doesn't bother me, or anything I put in it (I take it black). It's not any natural flavors, since nuts, vanilla and cocoa don't bother me. It's the chemicals. According to enotes.com , Flavoring oils are combinations of natural and synthetic flavor chemicals which are compounded by professional flavor chemists. Natural oils used in flavored coffees are extracted from a variety of sources, such as vanilla beans, cocoa beans, and various nuts and berries. Cinnamon, clove, and chicory...

They say everyone has a limit, a point where they sink so low that they can't go on denying they have a problem. I hit bottom last week when (you'd better sit down for this) I was too tired to go salsa dancing two Fridays in a row. My problem is that I always go to bed too late, and have to get up at 6:40 to go to work. Previously, going out on Sunday nights, I could catch up on sleep over the weekend, feel fine Monday morning, and tell myself I could get by on six hours' sleep. But having to cancel plans made me face up to reality. The usual suggestions for getting enough sleep don't work for me. Reading? Part of job is proofreading financial statements and valuation report: if reading those doesn't put you to sleep, nothing will. Going to bed the same time every night? That's fine if you want to party with senior citizens; for the rest of us, things are just getting going and everyone's loose and in the flow at 10:00. Carbs to make me sleepy? That...

An article on the Mental Floss magazine website blamed the stupor people usually feel after a Thanksgiving meal on (what else besides turkey?) the fat--229 grams of it in an "average Thanksgiving meal," according to the article. The urge to snooze is more the fault of the average Thanksgiving meal and all the food and booze that go with it. Here are a few things that play into the nap factor: Fats — That turkey skin is delicious, but fats take a lot of energy to digest, so the body redirects blood to the digestive system. Reduced blood flow in the rest of the body means reduced energy.  My response: Say what? First of all, even if you ate all the skin from half a turkey plus a whole stick of butter, that would be only 190 g of fat. (source: nutritiondata.com ) Thanksgiving is mostly a carbohydrate fest: potatoes, yams, desserts and most snack foods are mainly sugar and starch. Second, I'd like to see the evidence that a high-fat meal "reduces blood flow ...

Clear skin. When I ate some cheese last week, though, I had a crop of pimples that night. (They weren't hormonal.) Less frequent appetite. I spent an uncomfortable week adjusting to bigger, less frequent meals. It was nothing I tried to do--I just went by my appetite.I've been skipping lunch half the time, which I rarely did before. (I've been extremely busy at work, though, so this might have something to do with it.) Fewer and lighter nosebleeds.  I need less sleep. (My stress level from work and everything else might have something to do with that, again.)

I have a bad habit I've been trying to break for years: going to bed late. Even though I know I'll feel lousy as the week goes on, and give myself every good reason to go to bed, I don't do it. I don't have much excuse except that I'm wide awake at 10, 11, and midnight, and later if I stay up. I wonder how I could have been so tired six hours earlier and tell myself I'm not sleep deprived if I feel fine. Twelve hours later, I'm telling myself I've got to get to bed sooner. It started in basic training, where you supposedly go to bed at nine and get up at five, but in reality it took until eleven o'clock to get everything done. In college, there weren't enough hours in the day to go to class, go to work, finish homework and get eight hours' sleep. Now, I stay out late one or two nights a week dancing. At 10 pm, everybody's warmed up, loose, and in the flow. Since I'm not willing to cut back on dancing, the reasonable thing to do is ...