Craig Wilcox

  • Keto for One Week – No Signs of Ketosis Yet

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    Craig

    I started my keto diet on January 9, so I’ve been doing it for just over a week.

    Here are some notes on it so far.

    1. I don’t get as hungry as I thought I would, and I’m not craving carbs really at all.
    2. Digestion seems to be better with less pain from bloating.
    3. From what I can tell, I’m not yet producing ketones in any measurable way. I’m using test strips for that. More on my impressions about this below.
    4. I think I’m at about 25 net carbs per day, but I think my protein intake may be too high still.
    5. I exercise almost every day. I knew there would be a cost to my endurance and strength. From what I can tell, I’m able to comfortably exercise at about 85-90% of my normal rates. My incline treadmill feels best at 18% incline instead of 21%. When riding a stationary bike, I’m generating around 170 watts instead of 200.
    6. I haven’t had any “keto flu” symptoms…probably because I’m not generating ketones yet. I’ve had a mild headache and some very low energy during parts of the day.
    7. I do still have a “low blood sugar” feeling occasionally, but I’d think I’d have a much worse reaction if I’m truly not in ketosis yet.

    From my understanding, being in ketosis takes between 2-7 days. I’m on Day 8, and the test strips aren’t detecting any ketones – or at least a very low amount.

    Since I’m on day 9 now, either the test strips are wrong or I’m doing something wrong.

    The thing that occurs to me is that I’m still consuming too much protein. I’ve tried to bump up my fat intake and at least slightly lower my protein intake starting yesterday, and I’m hoping that does the trick. Today, however, I’m not feeling anything different.

    The strangest part, then, is that I’m still going about my day without much discomfort. And I’m also not feeling like a complete idiot. I’d think that having only 25ish grams of carbs and exercising for 40-60 minutes per day would burn up that amount.

    I’ve read that our bodies can create glucose from protein as well as carbs in an emergency. That’s my best guess.

    So far, the scale has me at about 5 pounds less on a 3-day average reading.

    Overall, I’d say the experience is a positive one so far, but I’d really like to see what this ketosis business is all about soon.

  • Transitioning to Keto…the slow and sometimes painful way

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    Craig

    Around July 2021, I decided I wanted to drastically cut carbs and possibly try the keto diet. Only 16 months later, and I’m finally doing it!

    It’s been a journey that was originally sidetracked by terrible illness resulting from my changes in food choices.

    Up until then, I’d followed my “Heart Rate Health” program I developed and wrote about in 2003, with mostly pretty good results. For 10 years, my weight had stayed consistently between 191 and 200, depending on whether I was also adding resistance exercise. At 6’1″, this is not perfect by any means, but I was mostly happy with it and not willing to commit to a big change.

    During that time, I was eating oatmeal and an ounce of cashews for breakfast, a big salad for lunch, and a health combination of meat, vegetables, and some sort of “good” carb like quinoa or coos coos for dinner. Ok, also pizza and occasionally a giant plate of pasta…but that was becoming more rare. Between lunch and dinner, I ate not very good snacks of Goldfish and a Belvita bar, and I ate 1 1/2 ounces of M&Ms almost every night before bed.

    Still, like I said, I was mostly happy with how I was doing, as I exercise almost every day. Not 6 of 7 days. Probably 59 of 60 days. It’s just a habit I picked up and feel great doing.

    The first thing I did was to eliminate the carb-loaded afternoon snacks. I replaced that with slightly less carb-loaded protein bars.

    Then, it was time for the biggest shift…and the most painful one!

    I replaced my oatmeal breakfast with either meatballs or eggs, and I was much more strict on getting the right dinners. My weight started dropping pretty quickly during that time with the small consequence of stomach discomfort.

    Within a few weeks, the weight was still coming off reliably, but the stomach discomfort was turning into full on pain. I knew it was the result of the changes I was making, but to me, everything was tasting good, and the results were great.

    Eventually, though, I was doubled over in pain almost every day, and I could feel there was a real problem. I went in for blood tests, and they revealed I had an allergy. My eosinophils count in the white blood cell differential test was all the way to 3.8 thous/mm3. The normal range is 0.0 to 0.4 thous/mm3, so I was at nearly 10 times that. (A good friend of ours reported having intense stomach pain at 0.8thous/mm3.)

    At that point, I *had* to change something, as my doctors said I may have developed an adult-onset allergy, and we started to do tests on that. I completely gave up all dairy at that point.

    It turned out that I did have a moderate allergy to egg whites. I’m not sure when that developed, but I can tell you eggs are just about my favorite food, and I felt pretty devastated. (If I ever opened a restaurant, which I absolutely never should or would, it would be called “Craig’s Eggs”. Yes, I loved them that much, and I was pretty good at making them *very* tasty.

    Within a few weeks, I was somewhat back to normal and wasn’t spending hours per day in complete agony. Unfortunately, over the Thanksgiving holiday, I not only missed all the very best parts of the meals and treats made by our family, I still got so sick I missed a flight home. The culprit was a kale salad of all things. So I didn’t eat anything I wanted, did everything completely right, and I still go sicker than I had been almost ever. I now avoid any store bought kale salad!

    By the time it was Christmas, I was back to normal enough to go almost all-in on the holiday treats.

    I had lost 17 pounds between July and December…and then I started gaining it all back.

    So, my first attempt at a keto-ish switch failed. I did stick with protein and fat for breakfast (meatballs with parmesan or sausage with cheddar), and I continued to avoid the carby afternoon snacks.

    In the summer of 2022, I took an interest in resistance training and put on quite a bit of muscle. By early November, I decided I was ready to go all-in on a keto diet. It was just a matter of when.

    Halloween night, I decided I’d start the next day. I had awoken in the middle of the night with an itchy head that seemed like a possible spider bite. We had spent Halloween evening on the patio with a friend, and I figured some spider had dropped on my head and taken a healthy chomp.

    So I started keto the next day and stuck to it extremely well for 5 days. No extra hunger, no issues with giving up the nightly M&Ms. It was going pretty well…except the itching was spreading down my forehead and I was having some twitchy nerves above my eye. I called the doctor’s offices, and they said the bite area (if it was a bite) was strange enough looking to get checked out, and they almost casually asked if I’d ever had shingles.

    By the next day when I went in, every one I saw in the office looked at me like something was very wrong. The doctor confirmed I had shingles. That’s a story for another time, but it did knock my plans for sticking with keto into the New Year.

    Now, finally, in 2023, I’m all in. I “practiced” the transition by weaning myself off the Christmas cookies, Manhattans, and champagne and finally started it again on 1/9/2023 – 7 days ago.

    So far, so good. No shingles, no pain, no hunger…and so far, no signs of ketones or the keto flu. I’m not doing it all the way right yet, but I have seen a sizable change in the scale – from a one time high last Monday of 202.2 down to 195 today. That’s 7 pounds of something after just 7 days. I’ll take that win and work harder on limiting my carbs and protein this week to try to force the ketone production sooner.

    The 16-month “transition” wasn’t what I expected, but I’m off and running now, and I’ll try to catch up here on my progress.

    More soon…

  • 2022, A Year of Sharing More

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    Craig

    We’re now a few weeks into 2022, and I have to say, it could have started better without the omicron variant of COVID. At least it’s not 2021 or 2020 anymore.

    For the most part, I think this will be a great year, but there’s a long way to go for that happen.

    This year, I’m already very close to the physical health goals I set out to achieve, and that’s the main thing I’m happy about right now. It’s January, though, and I’m never all that happy in January…or February or March either.

    That brings me to what I want to share more about in 2022: depression and mental health. I’ve now been managing chronic clinical depression for almost 35 years. I’ve very rarely shared anything about it with anyone.

    The reason I’ve decided to do so now is that I finally feel as though I’ve figured it out. That doesn’t mean I don’t have it, I won’t get it, or that I’m not suffering from the ravages of it all time. It’s just that I now have the information I lacked before to know why it happens to me, and maybe this information will be useful to others, as well

    To get things started, I’ll say this. There’s absolutely no outside reason for me to suffer from depression. I had a good childhood. My parents were good to me. I had everything laid out in front of me in perfect order. I’m a white male American, I’m not an idiot, and I’m not offensive to talk to, be around, or look at from what I can tell.

    I also have great internal drive and strong motivation to learn new things. By the time I was 15, I was a nationally ranked chess player while playing 3 sports.

    I can’t say I was exactly *happy* at that age. I’m not sure anybody is at that age, but I was doing ok in the grand scheme

    But when I was 16, depression just full on attacked me right out of the blue. I was mostly able to cope with it, but my trajectory in life was altered terribly. By the time I was 18, I really fell apart.

    Like I mentioned, there was no good reason for it. Nothing “happened” to me.

    Only in the past couple of years have I learned the cause of my depression is almost certainly the overproduction of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. I figured out around 15 years ago that acetylcholine has other negative affects on me, all of which I’ll talk about in future posts. But I missed the bombshell research papers in 2012 that linked acetylcholine and depression until late in 2019.

    Suddenly, it all made sense. I’d figured it out. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean it’s gone or subsided in anyway. There’s no surgery to reduce acetylcholine, and the state of medicine for it is severely lacking.

    So I’ll talk about understanding it and also living with it. And I’ll talk about how it makes me a bit different on the inside. I’ve looked at it from just about every angle, and I’ve come to know that I’m definitely not the only one who suffers from this particular variation of depression. So maybe I can help others with it, and maybe I can help some caregivers understand better how it’s affecting their loved ones.

    That’s it for now, but I promise I’ll be back with more. More about why I faint, why I sweat so much, why I have a great memory, why I exercise every day, why my dreams are so vivid, and why my left hand is starting to shake so much I can’t drink my coffee with it.

    So, welcome 2022. Get your act together! We’re going to be busy!

  • ACF Illegal String Offset

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    Craig

    When using Advanced Custom Fields in WordPress, I often get and use a custom link field like this: 

    <?php
$link = get_field( 'link' );
$link_url = $link['url'];
?>

    When doing this, PHP will gently remind me with a notice that I have used an illegal string offset.

    Warning: Illegal string offset ‘url’…

    The top result in Google send us to this ACF support page. I usually figure out the problem right away with these support links, but this one was a little difficult for me to follow, as it winds through some different possibilities, including a plugin conflict.

    The answer lies within the responses, though: “the field is returning false.” I often use ACF to check if a value is present on a page. If it is, something happens. The field return false if the field is NOT present on the page. That means the conditional is not true and PHP 7.1 considers this illegal for using a variable array.

    The solution is really simple and is the standard way of testing to see if the value is true or false: using a conditional.

    <?php 
$link = get_field( 'link' );
if ( $link) :
$link_url = $link[ 'url' ];
endif;
?>

    The code added was “if ( $link ) :” and it’s ending statement “endif;”.

    Here’s the ACF Link documentation for reference.

    This note is mostly so I can get to the answer quickly and learn it more deeply myself, but I hope it helps you if happen across it, too.

  • A Few Words on New Year’s Resolutions

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    Craig

    It’s January 2, 2020. Have you broken your New Year’s resolutions yet?

    I’d bet about half the people who make resolutions don’t even make it to Day 3. And that’s absolutely fine as long as they don’t give up or feel badly about themselves at this point.

    For me, I start thinking about things I want to change or do better in December. I give a couple of them a try throughout the month. For Christmas and New Year’s celebrations, I try to keep them in mind just a bit, which helps to curb the excesses that normally happen at this time of year.

    January for me is all about “practicing” resolutions in the form of habit-making behavior. For simple ones that don’t require much cognitive load, I’ll try to do them every day but don’t punish myself if I miss every now and again. That worked well for the habit of making my bed every morning, and now it’s hard to *not* make my bed.

    For the more complicated ones that require my body to cooperate, I’m much more lax about the process. I’ll do them for a couple of days and then probably miss a couple. Then I’ll up it to a few more consecutive days. About 3 weeks into this process, I’m usually ready to go for it every day. By the beginning of February, I’m in full-swing.

    My philosophy on making lasting changes is to keep the changes as small as possible on a day-to-day basis.

    This is especially helpful during and after the holiday season. Most of us eat and drink too much in December. It seems our bodies quickly adapt to too much of anything. Trying to completely reverse course to nearly nothing to eat and drink on exactly January 1 is next to impossible because our bodies go into panic mode almost immediately. If you haven’t noticed, your body will almost always win over whatever will power you thought you’d saved up by not using it during December.

    But if we just ease back to normal eating and drinking and then try to do a little less over the course of 30 days, our bodies don’t panic. We don’t have to do battle with our evolutionary instincts. Our bodies will agree to work with us instead.

    Once we’re rolling at the end of January and into February, it’s simple to keep going at that point. And I promise you, what you can accomplish over the course of 11 months is far more powerful than what you can do just in January.

    If you find this helpful or have any questions about it, feel free to leave a comment.

  • Happy 50th Birthday to Chess Great Vishy Anand!

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    Craig

    It’s Day 7 of my #500DaysTo50 project, and right on time, Vishy Anand, one of my chess heroes, turns 50 years old today.

    I’m sure I first heard of Anand when he was 14 and I was 13. Back then, I thought I was on the path of becoming a grandmaster player, and I figured I had plenty of time to catch up to him on my way to greatness. 36 years later, it’s obvious I’ll never be as good as he was at 13 years old!

    That’s one of the strange things about aging. Prior hopes and dreams simply must die – or at least be scaled back to reality. I still enjoy chess immensely, and I can be among the top 1-2% of all rated players in the world. But statistically, someone like Anand would beat me 100% of the time for up to 1,000 games in a row. That’s a big difference!

    I first realized I didn’t have that special thing that makes for greatness when I had to chance to play 3 tandem games with Peter Svidler in 1989 as part of the run-up to the Goodwill Games. I was 17, and he was 12.

    We easily won the first two games. In the third game, I couldn’t see the right way to conduct an attack, and we drew that one. Young Svidler was extremely upset. In perfect English, he went through a series of moves that I hadn’t even considered. He just saw the game in a different way. He had a genius for that it that I just didn’t have.

    I do remember being mostly OK with that, even though it was clear at that moment becoming a grandmaster was just never going to happen.

    Getting back to the present, Anand at 50 does give “old guys” like me great hope for our own future. Chess is a sport – yes, a sport! – for the young. He is one of only two World Top 20 players over 40 years old, and it’s just now becoming apparent he probably won’t be competing for the World Championship again.

    If he can remain *that good* at 50, we can all still hope to achieve our own amazing progress at more advanced ages.

  • A Career Path Defined by a Few Embarrassing Incidents

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    Craig

    Here we are on Day 3 of #500DaysTo50. I’ve been trying at this “career thing” for over 25 years now. If I’m asked the “what do you do” question now, I’m answering that “I’m an entrepreneurial web developer and online marketer”.

    That’s largely in keeping with how I’ve made my career. I formed my first company in 1996, my first successful company in 1999, and I’ve pieced together a bunch of other things since then based on my interests.

    One thing that has been an absolute constant for me is learning new things. And I realize a lot of that learning has been based on fixing gaps that were exposed in embarrassing ways.

    While running an online marketing agency, I didn’t have any real coding skills. One of our offerings was helping companies make sure their new websites were going to work well for SEO and SEM efforts. While we were great at that, we weren’t qualified to look through the actual PHP code our subcontracting agencies built for the websites. When our client’s site was due to go live, it turned out almost zero work had been done on the site, and we were able to launch exactly one page of the site.

    I swore I’d never let that happen again, and I learned PHP and the LAMP stack to be able to make sure I could be better prepared. I now develop WordPress sites for clients as a result. They do very well with the search engines due to my previous experience.

    Along the same line, in a business development meeting, I once said, “You can just give us access to your database, and we can build the sites automatically for you.” The CEO of the other company rightly replied, “Well, we’ll never give you access to our database, but we have an API.”

    I almost shut down my company at that point, but I chose instead to learn more about MYSQL and other databases and how APIs operate.

    But maybe I should have simply hired people who knew a lot more than I did to cover those weaknesses I had. I’ve spent about 5 years re-tooling instead, as I’ve always been disappointed that I couldn’t code. That’s meant a lot of financial sacrifices. Nobody I know would consider them smart career moves.

    But that’s how I work, and I can’t see myself stopping. It’s a Sunday morning, and I’m going through a course on ReactJS for a couple of big projects I have thrown myself into. I have others helping along the way, and I’m able to make a few small contributions as I get up to speed.

    It’s entirely possible my fear of public embarrassment has shaped my career in completely unreasonable ways. My hope is that the payoff in the end will be huge to make up for the lost time. We’ll see…

  • Acetylcholine + Common Cold = Extra Miserable

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    Craig

    It’s Day 3 of #500Daysto50. I started this on Day 1, even though I’ve been suffering with a cold for around 10 days now. Honestly, it’s been getting me down more than a cold should. Why is that?

    I’ll be talking much more – way too much more for some people – about acetylcholine (a powerful neurotransmitter), but we’ll start with an extra small dose now.

    I suffer from an “above average” amount of acetylcholine in my system. (No reliable consumer-facing tests exists to prove this, but the evidence for that un-diagnosed diagnosis is super clear in my case.) That means all the regular symptoms of a common cold are heightened – runny nose, congestion, etc. In fact, most cold medicines contain anticholinergic properties, which suppress symptoms.

    So you might understand why I missed a day, and you’ll hopefully understand that when I miss a lot of other days in this set of 500 posts, it’s almost definitely due to acetylcholine.

    As I mentioned, lots and lots more of that to come…

  • 500 Days Until 50 Years

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    Craig

    As of today, it’s 500 days until I turn 50 years old. I promised myself I’d start writing more, so let’s get going. I’m not getting any younger after all. #500DaysTo50

    I have a lot to say, and I’ll start saying it tomorrow. My hope is to make this a daily practice and to cover all the hard parts as well as the joys and lessons of a man of a certain age…

  • Up and Running Again

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    Craig

    Wow…it’s been awhile. I’ve been so hard at work on client sites that I’ve completely ignored my own. That allowed an overwhelming amount of malware to build up in my account, and Bluehost shut me down. I’ve had to delete everything related to the style of the site, and now I suppose I’ll start over. Onward!