If You Can't Measure...

I've heard this quote that goes, "If you don't measure it, you can't improve it." It was said by...oh wait, apparently the quote is, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it." I guess that basically means the same thing. Internet says it was said by Peter Drucker.

Then again, it also says that it was said by William Thomson, known as Lord Kelvin.

I don't care who said it now. It's already become one of those memes that people make to freak out obsessive sci-fi fans attributing quotes to the character from the wrong property. I might as well just make this:

Anyway, you gotta measure stuff if you want to be able to improve it. When it comes to getting healthy and losing weight, people usually measure that by stepping on the scale and seeing if the number went down from the last time that they did that.

That's not always the best way to measure, however. In fact, it's usually not the best way to measure health. There's any number of reasons why your scale would go down, and there's any number of reasons why it wouldn't. You could be losing a bunch of fat and replacing it with muscle, but because the scale doesn't show you any weight loss, you might get depressed because of lack of progress. That would be a travesty if you quit because you were using the wrong measurement to judge your progress.

Well, there's somebody I sometimes listen to called Dr. Boz. I mentioned her in yesterday's post about the sardine fast, that is her thing. Another thing she does is quote Dumbledore's expression, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."

She wants people to know if they're actually in ketosis or not, because if you're not, then any weight loss you have will come at the expense of muscle tissue, but more likely, you just won't be having weight loss.

She has something called the Dr. Boz Ratio, or DBR. That is when you take the measure of your ketones and divide it by your glucose. I believe she says that if it is under 100 then you are in ketosis at least a little bit. Ideally, you want to get your ratio under 40. If you're not there yet, then you might need to give your system a jolt or two to get it there, such as a sardine fast or even just a regular fast.

I've been having issues with eating according to the carnivore diet for a while, yet not getting much in the way of results. So, after hearing the good doctor talk about this several times, I finally broke down and got me a ketone monitor.

I got it off Amazon, and they offered me same day delivery. I ordered it at noon, and they said it could be there between 5:00 PM and 10:00 PM. I didn't believe it, but it actually arrived at that time. Did they deliver it by drone? Has that crap come to pass? I was sure that it had died off and been given up on.

Anyway, since I already had it this morning, I busted it out and measured my ketones and my blood sugar. I should have a pretty good number, because we just finished that sardine fast, which is supposed to really spike your ketones by the third day.

My ketones measured at 1.8, fairly good. I wonder what they were on the third day of that sardine fast. I didn't have the monitor yet, so I can't know. My blood sugar, which is usually sky high...like somewhere around 250...measured in at 116. It's much improved, but still has a lot of room for further progress. It should be somewhere closer to 80.

Doing the math, that means that my DBR is:

That's pretty darn good. It's not where it needs to be in the end, but it's headed in the right direction.

I haven't stepped on the scale in at least a month, but during that sardine fast I decided that I would, and for the first time in a long time, I saw that number budge downward. With both my blood sugar and weight headed downward, I'm not surprised that my DBR is in a decent place. I feel like I'm actually getting somewhere here.

I suppose I have that sardine fast to thank, no matter how unpleasant eating all those sardines was for me. I'm planning on including a can of sardines with my food at least once a week, but I'll probably have to do sardine fasts again in the future. It really was a good way to get my cravings under control. It might work even better than a regular fast, because you don't have to be hungry while conquering your craving if you do a sardine fast versus a standard fast.

So, that's where I'm at these day. I did a regular fast back on May 2nd and it helped me turn a corner and stop eating candy when I got cravings. Then I did the sardine fast and it helped me stop eating tons of cheese, which is technically carnivore, but tends to keep you from losing weight. For the forseeable future, I will be doing beef, butter, bacon, and eggs, or BBBE, with fasts thrown in on regular intervals,

And I will be checking my DBR to make sure it gets to and stays where it should be. I mean to have as much weight loss as I had in 2019 and then some before I make it to 50 years old.