Guy's Blog

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Watermelon is worse for me than Skittles.* Who’d have thought?

If you haven’t read my post on testing blood sugar response to foods, you’d better do that before proceeding. Just to recap briefly, here are the assumptions/opinions/beliefs I’m working from:

1) it is better to avoid spiking your blood sugar levels

2) your blood sugar response to specific foods is unique to you. What spikes mine may not spike yours.

And let me re-state for the gadgillionth time: I’m not a medical doctor. I’m not a biochemist or a nutritionist. I’m a martial arts teacher, documenting the results of some experiments I’m conducting on myself for my own reasons and following my own approach, and sharing for your entertainment and/or interest. It’s up to you what you do with your body. 

I have been testing my blood sugar levels before and after meals, to determine what foods I’m eating regularly that I should actually avoid, and in the hopes that there will be foods I avoid for health reasons that I could actually eat without causing damage. By far the best part of this has been testing things like Skittles, FOR SCIENCE.

Let’s start with the testing techniques and process:

First, the finger prick. They say it doesn’t hurt. They lie like bastards. It hurts exactly as much as you would expect jamming a steel spike into your finger would hurt. But it gets much less painful over time, and it is quite subjective. My wife started doing the blood sugar tests and it doesn’t hurt her at all. My younger daughter decided to try too, and it didn’t hurt her much either. And, it’s a skill like any other. Especially for my wife, getting enough blood out to take a reading took some practice, as her skin is apparently quite thick, and her capillaries quite far from the surface. Shaking the hand before testing, and doing some fist clenches, both helped.

I bought an iPhone-compatible GlucoRX HCT blood sugar monitor. But it had a headphone jack on it, and didn’t work through the dongle. There was nothing on the sales page to say that the lightning port version existed for those of us on jackless iPhones, which was very annoying.

So then I bought a lightning-port GlucoRX HCT monitor. And that barely worked either. I kept getting weird error messages, and my first round on the phone to GlucoRX support came to not much- I got told to hold the monitor vertically. When in fact it should be at about 45 degrees, and the problem was a defective monitor, which I found out when I rang them back at lunch time and got not a customer service person, but an actual engineer! He was super-helpful, diagnosed the problem (“that error message ought to be impossible on that monitor as it doesn’t have an internal battery”) and got a new monitor, plus one of the standalone (no-phone-required) monitors added in for free, into the post to me that very day.

If I was to start this all over again, I would go with a continuous blood glucose monitor. It’s more expensive for a diabetic taking maybe 5 readings a day, but it’s about the same price as using the measuring sticks 20+ times a day for a month, but without the damn finger pricking, and with (as the name suggests) actual continuous monitoring. Matching up that data to a food diary would give a very complete record, with much less fuss. 

So armed with a monitor that worked, and with a large supply of very expensive test strips (about 32p per test, plus a few pence for each new lancet, which when you’re doing 20+ tests a day adds up pretty fast), I started taking some readings and recording them. First on the GlucoRX app, which is ok, and then I tried to add them to the Personalized Nutrition app. Oh my goddess, that app is a disaster. 

Here are the functions that that app is supposed to have: 1) record blood sugar readings. 2) record food intake. Those are the two critical ones. 

But it gives you three options for things to record: Exercise, Sleep (which you have to select right before you sleep- you can’t record it after the fact, so it’s 100% useless), and Food. But the much-vaunted massive database of foods to choose from doesn’t include toast. Toast!! 

And can you tell what’s missing? Right. You have to dig through two sub-menus to find the option to record your blood sugar. Every single time you need to record it. That’s 20+ times per day if you’re tracking every meal.

Seriously, somebody at the app design agency needs a beating with a very big stick.

So if you’re going to try this protocol, stay TF away from the Personalized Nutrition app. It’s shit.

Here’s what I’m doing instead:

1) I’m not tracking every meal every day. I did that for a couple of days, and it’s a pain. So I focussed on breakfast as the place to start, and I have already made some changes.

2) I record the time and the blood sugar reading, with a note about what I’ve been eating, in an actual notebook with an actual pen. Old school, baby.

3) I use my phone to photograph each meal I’m tracking. This gives me a time-stamped visual record to flesh out the notes. That way I don’t have to measure anything, and can tell meal sizes and details from the photos. This is important because quantity matters, as does what else you’re eating at the same time.

4) I’m only tracking meals I eat often. There would have been no point (other than curiosity) in tracking my mum’s killer chocolate cake that we ate last weekend, as it was a one-off.

5) I put the numbers into a spreadsheet (I’m on a Mac so using Numbers), and use that to create graphs to show blood glucose levels over time. 

7) I keep track of which meals don’t spike my blood sugar, and which ones do, and the overall shape of the spikes.

8) For the ones that do spike me, I try the meal again but removing the most likely culprit, and test again. Sadly, my breakfast oranges have to go 🙁

9) I put those graphs into a Pages file with the photos and notes, so I can see, for example, the effects of:

  • my usual breakfast; 
  • the same meal minus the orange; 
  • the same meal minus the toast but with the orange 
  • the same meal minus the orange and minus the toast; 
  • and so on.

The critical thing is to change only one thing at a time, so I can be sure what is having the effect.

Here are three breakfasts, and their results:

Breakfast 1: toast with smoked salmon; toast with peanut butter and blueberries; orange; coffee; crossword.

Breakfast 2: toast with smoked salmon; toast with peanut butter and blueberries; no orange; coffee; crossword.

Breakfast 3: smoked salmon with lettuce, peanut butter and blueberries, coffee, crossword.

And the results from those three versions:

In general, I can predict the effects of most foods. Eating Skittles after dinner sent my blood sugar predictably up to 10.7 mmol/L (about 194 mg/dL for my American friends). There was no immediate crash though, it took about two hours to get gently back to baseline. I don’t usually eat Skittles at all, but I love them, so had to try…. Bye bye Skittles 🙁

But eating watermelon after a vegetarian chilli with sweet potato… that got me over 11.1mmol/L 202 mg/dL, and I was back to baseline in an hour. My poor pancreas. What a trooper. (This one result is my entire basis for the somewhat misleading blog post title.)

The chilli by itself put me up over 8mmol/L (145 mg/dL), the springboard from which the watermelon leapt into action, but salmon with white rice and vegetables (which preceded the Skittles) got me only up to 6.9 (125 mg/dL). White rice! I was amazed- I was very much expecting it to be a metabolic hand-grenade.

Some meals push me up to over 8mmol/L, and keep me there for over two hours (such as my daughter’s favourite gluten-free pumpkin pasta). With others I stay under 7, and get back to baseline in an hour. Incidentally, it’s very clear that I’m in no way diabetic or pre-diabetic (I wasn’t concerned, but it’s nice to know anyway).

I am not planning to share my data here because it would take me hours and hours to make it presentable, and indeed most of it is still in the notebook. I can read the numbers just fine off the page- the handy graph visualisations are unnecessary for me at this point. Besides, spreadsheets and I do not get along well. Also, while this protocol may be useful to you, my data is not: the whole point of this exercise is that your blood sugar response is unique. Knowing what’s bad for me doesn’t help you.

Now that I’m familiar with the system and the effects of some foods, I can cut some corners and am taking fewer readings (which further reduces the usefulness of the data to an actual scientist). Having established the ranges of my sugar spikes, I have a general goal of keeping my level at 30 minutes after eating (timed from the beginning of the meal) to below 7.0. This is quite easy to accomplish. I would also like to drop my fasting blood glucose level to the middle of the normal range. At the moment, it’s hovering a safe margin below the top of the normal range. I’m already seeing it trend in the right direction, now that I’m able to predict and therefore avoid sugar spikes.

And of course, I have a lot of foods left to try. Including Nutella. I couldn’t quite bring myself to face the awful truth… 

*I am well aware that blood glucose response is not the only measure of a food’s healthiness, and that watermelon may have components that are helpful, and Skittles may have components that are actually harmful, beyond the sugar issue. Adding cyanide to food completely prevents a blood sugar spike- because you’re dead before the sugar hits your system! Also, I massively overstated the difference between watermelon and skittles, and haven't taken the pre-existing rise from the dinner into account, and not discussed the time taken to recover back to baseline into account. So it's not objectively true, I am taking massive licence for rhetorical effect. But this is not a scientific paper, it’s a blog post. M’kay?

It’s generally accepted that it’s a healthy idea to avoid spiking your blood sugar. Spiking your blood sugar regularly can cause insulin resistance, obesity, cancer, heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and so on. Some years ago I came across a study from Drs. Segal and Erinav of the Weizmann Institute which proved to my satisfaction that different people may have different glycaemic responses to the same foods. In other words, a croissant may spike my blood sugar but not yours. And I may be able to get away with eating chocolate that would send your blood glucose through the roof.

Why does this matter?

Well, there is no field of human health more riven with disagreement (in the scientific literature and in popular culture) than what we should eat. It’s massively affected by culture, family tradition, and contradictory studies demonising this way of eating or praising that. You can see my approach so far here. Leaving aside the ethics of what you eat (such as animal welfare, climate change, and so on) and looking purely at health outcomes, it is impossible to determine one diet that works for everyone. The Weizmann study went a long way towards explaining why this is the case: we all respond differently to the foods we eat.

Consider some of the variables in play when a specific food (such as that delicious croissant) hits your digestive system:

1. Human genetic variation, which affects digestion, enzyme production, etc. etc.

2. Gut biome variation, which also affects everything from mental health to nutrient absorption.

3. Environmental factors (such as the historic availability of certain foods to your immediate ancestors, your exposure to various chemicals, the list is endless).

4. Exercise, which affects blood sugar levels- intense exercise causes the breakdown of glycogen, for instance, raising blood sugar levels, if only briefly. It also affects blood distribution (away from the gut and into the muscles, for instance).

5. Time of day: bodies operate on a circadian rhythm, and will respond differently to different stimuli and different times. 

6. What else is ingested with the croissant: marmalade? Ham? A glass of orange juice? Lots of artificial additives?

7. We’re talking about human beings here, so psychological factors such as the placebo and nocebo effects are probably also significant.

8. People change over time, so what happened last month may not happen today.

This makes it effectively impossible to predict safely what effect a particular food will have on a particular person. Sure, broccoli is less likely to spike blood sugar than ice-cream, but that ice-cream may actually be fine for you, but not for your friend sitting next to you on the couch holding a spoon. And a virtuously lo-carb steak may act on your pancreas like a boxful of doughnuts does on mine.

It would be easy and natural to throw your hands up in despair and cry “it’s too damn complicated, I’ll eat what I like!” But if you accept the idea that once you are getting sufficient nutrition the most important issue of diet is to avoid blood sugar spikes, then there is an Alexandrian Sword at hand to sever this Gordian Knot.

Enter the blood glucose monitor. Familiar to every diabetic, and costing considerably less than a night out in a decent restaurant, it promises to separate truth from falsehood. I’ve bought one, and am about to start measuring my blood sugar on waking (to establish my baseline), before every meal, and at intervals after every meal. With that data and a food diary, after perhaps a week or two I should have a good idea of what foods I’m commonly eating that I should avoid, and what foods I’m commonly avoiding that I could be eating (I am praying that Nutella on toast will leave my blood sugar remarkably unchanged…). If a particular meal spikes my blood sugar, I’ll try eliminating the most likely culprit within the meal (such as switching out rice for more vegetables), and see what that does. 

There is no sense in testing individual foods individually; it would take forever, and as the food combinations are also a factor, it would produce false positives and false negatives. Nutella out of the jar with a spoon is not the same as Nutella on a banana (oh my goddess that is delicious). 

In this way I should be able to get a handle on what works for me. As I’ve been saying for years, the key to success in any field, including diet, is find out what works for you then do that. So you may be wondering why I haven’t gone the glucose monitoring route before now. I think its a combination of being basically happy with my diet, weight, etc., so I’ve got no feeling of urgency about this, and I fucking hate needles. Literally my entire job is finding out ways of not getting stabbed. I’m not fussed about blood; as a woodworker I bleed regularly- I once counted 13 separate scabs on my left hand alone. I just don’t like needles. Fortunately, a modern blood testing kit uses a special lancing device, so you don’t actually see the needle. And, not being diabetic, I won’t have to inject myself at any point.

After my blood glucose monitor arrived last week I thought to re-check the study that set me off on this… and wouldn’t you know, Drs Segal and Erinav have a book out: The Personalized Diet (affiliate link). I read it straight away, and it goes into the background of their research, the argument for using blood sugar monitoring as a way to measure whether a food is good for you or not, the gut biome and why it’s important, and even a detailed description of when and how to go about measuring your blood sugar, how to record your findings, and so on. If you don’t want to take my word for this blood sugar thing (and why the hell should you? I’m a swordsman, not a medical doctor or nutritionist) then buy the book or get it from your local library. How I missed this when it came out in 2017 I’ve no idea- except perhaps I was already sold on the idea from the study, and so stopped looking.

I should also note that blood sugar spiking is not the only measure of a food’s effect. Allergies and sensitivities are also important. Nutritional content is obviously key: just because Nutella on toast doesn’t spike my blood sugar doesn’t mean it’s actually good for me, or constitutes a complete and healthy diet. If I find there are nutritionally important foods that I shouldn’t eat, I’ll have to find substitutes for them. Maybe cabbage replacing cauliflower. And, let’s face facts. Unless a food is directly and immediately fatal, if I love it I won’t eliminate it completely, metabolic consequences be damned. My daughter baked this Pride cake recently: see the rainbow?

No way in hell I’m not having a slice, regardless of what it does to my blood sugar. But it would be helpful to know for sure what foods are bad for me in this respect.

If I was a proper modern person I’d no doubt do a daily vlog sharing my blood sugar data, details of my diet, etc., etc. But I’m not. The very notion of telling the world what I had for breakfast is just weird. What I will do though is report back with my experience of doing this, and my findings, whatever they may be. Wish me luck with the Nutella thing…

Surf Clam, photo © Allen Hemberger

I can't imagine how this passed me by all these many years. Have you heard of Allen Hemberger's Alinea Project? It's a thing of glory. He ate at Alinea, one of the top restaurants in the world, the sort of place where food is magic, theatre, and gastronomic bliss, all rolled into one. (I've not been, but if any of my friends in Chicago want to take me there next time I'm over, I won't resist.) The experience set him off on an extraordinary adventure.

I don't normally get on the blog to babble about cookery though. Even though cooks get the best knives. So why now?

Simply put, Mr. Hemberger went through the entirety of Alinea's cookbook, 107 recipes (with 400 mini-recipe component parts), and blogged the whole thing. Then produced a book about it. This is so very much like finding the world of historical woodworkers I blogged about a while ago.

His blog is a tour-de-force in recreating a physical practice (and what is more physical than cookery?) from a book. The parallels with recreating historical martial arts from historical sources are in-your-face obvious.

The magic moment comes when he realises that the book is not perfect, that there are errors. He even includes a list of those errors (which makes me feel much better about the occasional typos or outright mistakes in mine). And the presentation is simply breathtaking. Even the search function on his website is beautiful and interesting. Go and search for something, I dare you!

This leapt out at me:

I’m finding that I’ve slowed down on the haphazard jumping around through this book, and am trying to pay more regard to the seasons.  At first I wanted to just attack the recipes that seemed most interesting (and doable), but slowing down a little is encouraging me to look more deeply into these things. This dish is the first one in the Alinea cookbook, and I think I’ve overlooked it specifically because I had no idea what “nasturtium” (which I pronounced in my head “nas-tur-TEE-um”) was, much less what it tasted like.

That is what happened to me around 2003, with Fiore.

Plus, the dude can write:

The one service Cloudy Bay doesn’t offer is shucking the clams. I’ll be honest, this part scared me. I had visions of shell residue scattered everywhere in the kitchen, nicked butter knife blades sitting in the sink, me crying softly in the corner, a sad half-mauled clam limping sadly across the floor like some sort of tongue creature, licking the floor and tasting my inadequacy.

I don't have the book (but I'm on the waiting list for the next printing), because the parallels are just too juicy to ignore. He has one gigantic advantage over us historical sword people though: his maestro, Chef Grant Achatz, is still alive, and so Mr Hemberger has been able to literally eat the master's original versions of the dishes he has so laboriously re-created. That must be like being thrown to the floor (vewwy woughly) by Fiore himself.

Clearly, Mr Hemberger is our sort of crazy. I couldn't pass this by without flagging it up in case you'd missed it. I have a feeling I might write more deeply on this in the future, but couldn't keep it to myself meanwhile.

In other news, the new podcast reached 1000 downloads today! Which is unlikely to impress the Joe Rogans and Tim Ferriss's of the podcasting world, but I'm very pleased that it's finding its niche (there will be another episode out on Friday morning; and I have another ten in the bag, so it looks like this project has legs).

Meditation is a crucially important practice for martial artists. It enables you to gain control over your state of mind, your level of arousal, and above all teaches you to be able to direct your attention. I have been teaching meditation in one form or another for many years, but never before over the internet. I began by running a live class over Zoom for six weeks, then took the insights from that and created a complete online course. Interested?

In this course I will teach you four different types of meditation, beginning with a simple awareness of breathing, then the body scan, using mantras, and moving meditation. This will enable you to make informed choices about what kind of meditation you want to include into your daily life.

Awareness of breathing meditation is the foundation practice, in which you learn to pay non-judgemental attention to your breathing, and to return your attention to the breath when it wanders. This improves your ability to direct your attention.

Body Scan meditation is the practice of paying attention to one part of the body at a time, moving through the whole body, noticing what is going on without interference. This is helpful for many reasons, not least it can make you more aware of the side-effects of our other training.

Mantra meditation is the practice of using a short phrase, repeated over and over. This can be a way to enter a meditative state, and also serve as positive self-talk leading to better outcomes.

Moving meditation is the practice of moving mindfully. It can be extremely helpful for learning new techniques, as well as for smoothing out and improving any kind of movement. The class includes moving meditation while seated, for students who are unable to stand.

The course includes some very short meditations (the shortest takes only six breaths), which are useful on their own and can plant a seed that may grow into a solid practice habit.

The course is organised into six weeks of practice (which may take longer- there is no rush- but should not be compressed into a shorter timeframe unless you are already quite experienced). Week 1 is for Awareness of Breathing; week 2 for Body Scan, week 3 is for consolidating our practice so far; week 4 is for introducing mantras, week 5 for introducing movement, and week 6 for consolidation and revision. At the end of the six weeks you will have an informed base from which to create your own meditation practice, suited to your mind, your body, and your needs. Once you have bought the course you own it outright, so you can keep using the content forever: six weeks is just the minimum normal time to work through the whole course. All of the content is available straight away, so you can survey it all before you begin, if you like.

Meditation is a very subjective practice, and its effectiveness can only be judged by the practitioner. If you practice for at least ten minutes a session, five sessions a week, for two weeks, you should experience an improvement in your state of mind. If you have done the practice and are getting no results, then I invite you to apply for a refund, no questions asked, and no offence taken. I do not expect this course to work for every mind, but there is good reason to believe it will be helpful to many minds.

You can find the course here: https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/meditation

This raises the thorny problem of what and how to charge for it. On the one hand, meditation is too useful, especially to people in stressful situations (such as, oh I don’t know, a global pandemic), to keep it behind a paywall. On the other hand, I have to feed and clothe my children, so I need people to actually pay for the things I produce. Here’s my current solution:

1)  I have put the first section of the course in the free Body Maintenance course. This way everyone can get started, regardless of income. Go, meditate, it’s good for you.

2) I will also be adding the complete meditation course to the Solo Training course curriculum in a month or so. Anyone who has bought the Solo Training course (which can still be had at a 95% discount (look for the Corona price), or free if you email me and ask for the code) will get full access to the meditation course then. 

3) It will also be added to the Mastering the Art of Arms subscription plan (which gives access to every course I have, for a monthly fee) in due course.

4) In the meantime, if you’d like to buy the course, and have the funds to do so, please do! It’s only $129 (plus tax if applicable) payable as one lump or as 6 monthly payments of $21.50 (plus tax), and comes with the usual 30 days money-back guarantee. You can find the course here: https://swordschool.teachable.com/p/meditation

See you on the course!

In From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice I took the innovative step of using redirect links to video clips instead of photographs to illustrate my interpretation. This is much better in terms of representing movement, but it can be tedious to type out the links in a browser. Given that you need a web browsing device to see the videos, I thought a pdf with all the links embedded would be helpful. That way, whatever device you're reading the book on, or especially if you're old-school and have a printed copy, you can load this pdf onto your video-browsing device and easily find whatever video link you want.

You can find the PDF here:

Free Handout: From Medieval Manuscript to Modern Practice video links pdf

I hope you find it useful!

Hello.

I’m having trouble making sure I hit all the pain points in my own training. I have a simply enormous variety of exercises and practices that I should be keeping up with. Such as:

Meditation: Awareness of Breathing, Body Scan, Mantra, Movement.

Breathing exercises: Wim Hof method, standing qigong, the Crane, 9 breaths, the Health QiGong form.

Bodyweight exercises: push-ups (many kinds), pull-ups, plank/killer plank, squats (many kinds), quadruped movement.

Leg technique: kicks (front, round, side, back, hook, stomp, crescent inside, crescent outside), leg swings. Footwork drills (accressere discrescere, 4 guards, rapier footwork form, smallsword footwork and lunges etc. etc.) 7-way hips.

Weights: Kettlebells: overhead press, Turkish Get-Up. Small dumbbells: turns, rolls, wings. Clubs: figure 8s, cutty-cutty, krump-schiel-zwerch, squats. Long stick: figure 8s, static catch, twisting catch, feed-through, prima-quarta extensions, play. Short stick: shoulder mobilisation routine, shoulder stretches.

Stretches/ flexibility training: Hamstrings, single leg extension, back arch, forward bend, side bend, twists left and right, four-way wrists, shoulders.

Skills practice:

Pell: sword and buckler, longsword, rapier, sabre, sidesword

Point control: sword and buckler, longsword, rapier, sabre, sidesword, smallsword

Handling drills: sword and buckler, longsword, rapier, sabre, sidesword, smallsword, long stick/spear.

Forms: Longsword, Rapier, Sword and Buckler, T’ai Chi, Health qg.

Massage: knees-feet; elbows-hands

(All of these except the meditation are included in depth on the Solo Training Course. I’m currently working on a standalone meditation course based on a six-week series of classes that is just finishing up.)

There are lots of ways to categorise these activities. Some are very much therapeutic (such as the forearm turns, rolls, and wings with small weights, which are part of my tendonitis prevention routines), others are more about developing or maintaining overall strength and fitness. Massage is only remedial, some skills training is also conditioning (such as kicks), some don’t seem to fit in a simple box. This makes organising them into a clear system hard.

My usual approach is to simply do what my body feels is necessary. My body is very good at telling me what it needs now, but not so good at predicting what it will wish it had done in five years’ time. I need to take a more deliberate approach. This may mean dropping some training altogether- as a deliberate choice, rather than an accidental ‘oh, I haven’t done that in two years’ realisation, and doubling down on the things that work. 

The overall goal is to be fit enough and skilled enough to do my job properly now, and sensible enough to be still able to do my job properly when I’m 70 or 80 (because why retire? From swords? Really?). Most of my exercises are either sword-skill specific, or establishing the necessary ranges of motion under load (so, strength/flexibility combinations), or about creating a state of mind, or deliberately adjusting my metabolism.

I probably could develop a simplified routine that hits all the bases, but I’d get bored of it quite quickly, and it would inevitably become less effective as my body adapted to it. And I’d lose a lot of the fun stuff. As it stands, a normal session will include some breathing, some conditioning, some skills, and some remedial work. I usually do the meditation separately, and the flexibility stretches also separately, at night.

I control my weight through diet (following the principle that you can’t outrun your mouth), so weight loss/gain/control is not a consideration.

I know from experience that writing out a training program for a weekly or monthly routine will be an excellent theoretical exercise but I won’t stick to it for more than maybe a couple of days unless I’m doing it with a group of people. So one option would be to lay out say a month’s worth of training sessions and publish it as a class program, recruit students onto the course, and then I’d have to stick to it.

Another option would be to just keep all my toys handy, and play with the ones I feel like every day. That’s pretty much what I’ve done in the past, and especially with the help of the regular Monday, Wednesday, and Friday exercise sessions, it works quite well but not perfectly. If you'd like to join in you can find the sessions here.

The Zoom recordings (when I remember to hit the button) are uploaded on the Solo Course. You can see today's session on my vimeo channel here:

Friends, readers, and students, lend me your brains. What should I do to bring order to this galaxy?

And while you're here, let me invite you to the best party this weekend: my AMA video hangout with Jess Finley on Sunday. Join us!

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