Progress Report on the T2D Hobby

I am grateful for all of the people in my life, who ask me how I'm doing, how this odd hobby / experiment is going, if I'm hungry. You are all very kind, and I'm pleased to tell all. About this, anyway.

Fasting is a way of eating that causes your body to act differently. When you eat, the body acts on digestion and energy storage. When you fast, the body acts on repair and construction, and energy withdrawal.

The body adapts to any feeding / fasting pattern that it can recognize (how, I have no idea), so in order for fasting to be effective, in convincing your body it has no idea when the next feeding will show up, the fast / feed pattern needs to be inconsistent. If the body adapts to the calorie restricted pattern recognized, it will respond by lowering the body's total energy expenditure (TEE, for you TLA types).

My definition of "inconsistent" is a fasting time standard deviation, measured for a week, that is greater than "the usual" durations between breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Call it 4 hours or so. Hey, yeah, there's a chart ...

Demonstration of inconsistent fasting timing

The high points on the chart are fast durations that included no-dinner, courtesy of the volleyball factory job. The last bar is real time.

Given that the mechanics of fasting are in place, what results are demonstrated to date?

My "4x per day" BG measures started August 28, 2018. The results I care about are a reduction in insulin (Lantus) use, and a lowering of my daily average BG measure.

Prior to this phase of the hobby, I was injecting 80 units per day, before bedtime. Since then ...

Lantus units, use, regression against series, 5 day SMA

The subject of how I titrate my dose is for another blog post. What this chart shows is that I'm currently using about 40 units daily, and that my need for the drug is maddeningly inconsistent. That's positive progress (regression line has a negative slope, meaning I'm reducing the dose by .4372 units per day, crudely targeting 100 days to no use at all) , and yet more evidence, and another reminder, that modifying my behaviour is not a happy thing for me. To quote my spirit guide “Arrogance and ignorance go hand in hand.” The short 5 day SMA is a visual nudge for my motivation.

Last, my daily average BG measure, which is the simple average of all of the readings for a single day.

SMA of a day's BG measures

There's good and less good news here. The good news: My combination of fasting and decreasing Lantus has resulted in my BG average staying flat. The approximate value of the flat regression line (131) translates into an HbA1c of 6.19, which is lower than my last blood labs work (7.3) and lower than I've ever seen. The less good news: The regression line is flat, and I'm still using varying quantities of Lantus to control it. 131 is good, for me, but my preference is 100 or less (HbA1c equivalent of 5.11). At that number, I'm out of the T2D pool, and will need another hobby. I suspect, but haven't done the work) that the simple average of the daily readings under counts the real measure. The work to do is to compensate for the time elapsed between readings. That'll keep.

This is getting TL;DR sized. Thanks for following my unusual journey.