Blood Pressure improving slowly but surely

Inspired by this Hacker's Diet tactic of taking a running 10 day average of weight, I did the same thing with my blood pressure readings.  I think this one speaks for itself.

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I think a couple of interesting notes come from this

• Other than Vitamin C, there was no magic bullet that had an obvious immediate impact.  There is no dramatic drop at any point, but I think the trend is pretty clear.  I can only conclude that reduction in carbs, increase in potassium, addtion of Vitamin C, and regular emWaving has had a cumulative effect.
• I think this 10 day average technique is good for things that have a lot of noise.  There are a lot of variables that make tracking blood pressure difficult. The smoothing that a 10 day average gives makes the trend clearer than a simple graph of every data point
• From a motivational perspective, this is invaluable.  I can now stop freaking out over a single bad morning measurement and have faith that I am on the right track in one fell swoop.

December Lab Results

I went and got some lab work done.  For the most part...Pretty good.  I have kept a solid paleo/bulletproof diet for about a month.  No real cheating to speak of.  The few times I drank, it was even vodka and soda.

Lets start with the high sensitivity C Reactive Protein test.  A test for inflammation where low is good and anything below 1 is low.  I came in at .2  High Five.  Awesome.  I probably won't be testing this again any time soon.

Similarly, Vitamin D is looking good too.  I switched to gelcaps, made sure that I ate before I took it (It is only absorbed with fat).  When I tested in March I was at 44.  Today....89.3.  Again, awesome.  The blogger types say anything over 50 is good (over 100 is excessive and 150 is toxic).  I may actually even skip a day or two on this one.  Although apparently taking Vitamin D in the morning can improve sleep.

Lets go to cholesterol. HDL not where it needs to be but going in the right direction.  Same with triglycerides - basically a 50% reduction.  LDL has gone up.  Some of that might just be testing variance, but for right now just going to take the good and not worry about the bad unless it still looks like that a month or two from now.

Original                                       New
HDL - 29                                    HDL - 37
Triglycerides - 276                      Triglycerides - 148
LDL - 93                                    LDL - 118
VLDL - Not tested before           VLDL - 30


ORIGINAL ENDING BEFORE I GOT FIRST RESULTS BACK

I don't have my old tests handy, when I get them I will update.  The numbers weren't great but hopefully they are at least trending in the right direction.

In the future, I'll probably start exercising again.  There is also a theory that Triglycerides may go up because your liver starts releasing all of it excess fats. Again, I'll be smarter after I get my old tests, but right now I am assuming they are trending correctly and that they will get better after I have been doing it for more than a month. 

If LDL stays high...may follow the advice in this post as an excuse to go get fancy micronutrient testing done that Tim Ferris talks about.  Or I may just start eating liver. 

Updates when I get old tests back

I think Blood Pressure responds to Potassium

So I knew when I started that Blood Pressure can be tough to measure.  That is why I decided to measure first thing in the morning to avoid as much of that fickleness as possible.  I think that is still a good idea but there can still be a lot of variability. 

I have noticed that going to the bathroom or yawning can cause noticeable changes in BP.  I suspect waking up from a dream could even be different than waking up from a light sleep.  In an extreme example, my blood pressure was lower after a day at work than it was that morning.

Point is...these numbers are approximate.

When I first got off medicine, BP goes to around 140/90. As a comparison, when I was on medicine I averaged 108/71.  When I started taking potassium the average is 126/83. So top number is OK, but bottom number just barely changes.  This is just at wake up so I would imagine that it probably increase throughout the day.

I will continue to go high potassium and see what happens.  I will also start with the emWave2.  The theory being that stress reduction will cause improvements.

Magnesium helps me sleep (Potassium may help even more)

After 20 days of taking a bath in Epsom Salts (MgSO4), I definitely went into deeper sleep than I have.  This has been one of the more clear results.

Column1	nothing	mask/earplugs/magnesium pills	magnesium bath	magnesium bath And Potassium
z score	75.6	71	67.2	69.3
deep	37.4	32.5	30.2	32
awake	17.4	20	13.5	10.8
awoken	3.6	4	2.8	2.5

Clear reductions in # of times awoken and time awake.  It includes a recent night that had 0 wake ups.  Unprecendented.

You can also see that when I started adding potassium to my diet the time awake and times woken were even better.  I have been high potassium for 13 of the 20 bath taking days.  I don't know if the addition of Potassium was truly a help or whether that was just a result of taking the bath consistently.  I am planning on doing both for the time being.  I figure pretty soon there will be a time where I can't do both and I can see then if the effect is synergistic or not.  Not going to do an experiment just for this.

What is also interesting is the lack of improvement in deep sleep.  The two (awake time and deep time) are clearly not perfectly correllated.  A subjective analysis shows that sometimes I would go into deep more than once (Something I rarely did before) and rarely woke up in the middle of the big initial deep sleep (Something I did often before).

This makes some sense since deep sleep is the physical recuperation portion of sleep and I haven't really increased my physical exertions.  Perhaps it would increase if I exercised more.  Staying asleep certainly isn't enough.

I plan to continue with Magnesium and Potassium.  The next big sleep thing will be using the emWave2 that arrived today.  I am skeptical on this one for sleep.  I generally have no problem falling asleep.  If my theory on deep sleep is correct it seems like it wouldn't affect that either.

I may expand to starting Dual N-Back training as well,  I have enough cognitive performance data now and there are reports it increases REM sleep.  Starting emWave and N-Back Training at the same time may be a bit too much right now.

Quick Blood Pressure Update - magnesium and more vitamin D

I ran out of prescription so I am going to go awhile before refilling it and see what happens.

Relevant items include going from 4000IU of Vitamin D tablets to 5000IU of gelcaps a day.  Its more and I am told that gelcaps lead to more reliable absorption.  I am pretty good about taking the tablets after food so in theory only the increase in IU's will change.

Also, magnesium apparently can affect blood pressure so we shall see.

I am still taking Vitamin C.

Back to the Drawing Board on sleep experiments

Upon the collection of further data, I have basically made no progress on improving my sleep.  In fact, in general, I am worse than I was during the control week.  Check it out.

Column1	nothing	just mask	any mask	mask/ear plugs	mask/earplugs/magnesium
z score	75.6	72.2	74.4	74	71
deep	37.4	36.8	35	34	32.5
awake	17.4	22.8	17.8	17	20
awoken	3.6	3.2	3.4	3.4	4

Its not the proudest I have ever been of a table, but the results are pretty clear if you take a second.

Lets talk about the magnesium a second.  I noticed one thing....I pooped more.  Turns out the poop part is very common and means it isn't really getting into your system.

In follow on research, I have become convinced that I still am not getting enough magnesium (most people aren't).  And if you are deficient, in a cruel twist of fate, it can be hard to get it orally (thus the squirts). 

So now the next step...ditch the sleep mask, earplugs and take epsom salt baths to get magnesium topically. 

Sleep updates - Sleep Mask/Earplugs = good, caffeine = bad

So wearing a sleep mask and earplugs definitely reduces the number of times I wake up (3.6 to 2.5) and the amount of time awake (17.4 to 12.8).  However, it didn't seem to do much for the amount of deep sleep I got (37.4 to 38.3).  I rarely felt tired during this time (didn't really want to take a nap), but I also didn't feel particularly energetic.  I don't have a better way of describing it.  There was also no real increase in productivity during the time of this improved sleep.

These results are confounded a bit by the fact that I also cut out caffeine for all but one day of this trial.  I don't think the results are largely due to that though.  One day, I intentionally drank an above average amount of caffeine and that was the night I only woke up once for two minutes and had the second highest amount of deep sleep ever.


I did notice that I had a headache for three days after quitting.  Which seems like withdrawal...that isn't cool.  I also noticed I didn't have the afternoon dip after I got through the headaches.  So I probably will continue to avoid caffeine even though it doesn't appear to directly affect sleep.

Bottom line....a lot of waking/wake time is bad for deep sleep, but there is clearly more to increasing deep sleep than just sleeping through the night.

I am going to try experimenting with 800mg of Magnesium now.  There is a lot of anecdotal evidence in forums and from Tim Ferriss that it improves sleep.