Health Update - Month 14

This month has been a positive one. After the scary bleeding episode last month, I focused on recovery, stress management, and slowing down. The results have been encouraging: normal bleeding, continued weight loss, and better sleep.

I did not do any blood work this month. I have learned so much about how to listen to my body and manage my health. I want to rely on my experiences rather than frequent blood tests or seeing doctors. At least for now, it works.

Contents

• How I Feel
• Body Weight
• Gym Performance
• Sleep
• Heart Rate (Resting Heart Rate & HRV)
• Menstrual Cycle
• Autoimmune Update
  • ITP
  • Lupus
• Learnings
  • The Hunger Code
  • Birds
  • No Plastic Water Bottle
• Next Steps

How I Feel

I added this new section to gauge my overall well-being. In this section, I will review how I feel physically, mentally, and emotionally. I believe that when I'm physically healthy, my body tells me through my mood and emotions. I pay attention to feelings like agitation, worry, depression, and self-doubt, which I believe are related to my physical health.

Throughout this month, my body felt great. I did not have any joint pain, which was such a blessing. Life without pain is wonderful! I had no bruises. I had one pimple, which faded away within a week.

I felt happy, energetic, and peaceful. There was one time I felt agitated, which was likely caused by fasting. Eating regular meals fixed it quickly.

Body Weight

This month my weight has been going down, continuing the trend from last month, despite lowering my gym workouts from four times per week to two times per week.

My weight right now is probably the lowest since high school! Last April I was close to this level, right after I switched to the carnivore diet. At that time, I think the weight loss was due to water loss caused by the diet.

This time, my diet is more balanced, and even with less intense workouts, it is still dropping!! It is amazing. I attribute this to:

• No snacks between meals.
• Making myself very relaxed, no stress, walking comfortably (lower cortisol).
• At meals, eating slowly. Eating until 80% full, then waiting for the satiety signal to kick in. If still hungry, I eat more. Most likely I will not be hungry.

This successful weight loss experience confirms what I heard before:

• The gym is for building muscle, while diet is the key to weight loss.
• Stress management and sleep are also very important for weight loss.
• The body can tell you when to stop eating; you just need to listen to it. You don't need to count calories.

This is a brand new, wholesome way to think about weight management. God has everything planned out; He designed us beautifully and wants us to be at ease and happy.

Body Weight - Previous Cycle

Body Weight - Current Cycle

Gym Performance

Since the last bad bleeding experience, I have reduced my strength training to twice a week. I am focusing on pliability and flexibility rather than just chasing numbers.

Sleep

Sleep has been good and consistent this month: 8 hours of sleep, falling into deep sleep around 9:30 pm while watching some light shows, and waking up around 5:30 am feeling refreshed.

I don't need to track my sleep using extra devices. If I sleep well, my body knows it: my limbs feel a little numb upon waking up, and I feel happy and energetic. No digital gimmicks can replace this feeling.

Despite requiring myself to slow down and avoid activities that would cause my heart rate to go up, I just learned that I should not have phone conversations for too long, as they can cause my heart rate to rise as well.

I have written down the protocols for sleeping well from all the experiments, which you can read in my Sleep Hygiene post.

Heart Rate (Resting Heart Rate & HRV)

My heart rate has been stable in the past month. It is around 56 bpm and the HRV is around 36 ms. No huge swings.

Resting Heart Rate

Heart Rate Variability

Menstrual Cycle

Bleeding was normal this month, under the same dosage of Doptelet (40mg every 9 days), which means my changes to my workout routine and stress management are working.

Autoimmune Update

ITP

Given no bleeding episodes this month, I decided to slightly reduce the dosage of Doptelet to 60mg every 14 days (from 40mg every 9 days). We will see how it goes in my next bleeding cycle. I will continue to manage stress and avoid heavy workouts when it is close to my period.

Lupus

The Texas sun is getting stronger and stronger, but I still go out and play with my kids. I have no sensitivity. I don't feel like I have lupus anymore.

Learnings

The Hunger Code

I picked up Dr. Jason Fung's new book The Hunger Code. Even though I felt like I had learned a lot about food, weight loss, and health in the past year, I still learned new things from this book.

The book argues that obesity is not about "calories in, calories out"; it's about how your body feels—whether it's hungry or not—which is the root cause of obesity. When your body is out of balance, you feel hunger more often, even if you have enough food in your stomach.

Key takeaways added to my learnings this month:

• Satiety over Calories: Eat fiber and protein first, then carbs, to feel the satiety signal sooner.
• The Deadly Combo: Natural foods are either high in carbs or high in fat, but rarely both. Combining the two creates maximum pleasure and highly addictive effects—no wonder processed foods are so hard to stop eating!
• Equilibrium over Stats: Chasing a low resting heart rate (RHR) is meaningless. If you're active during the day, the body automatically lowers your heart rate at rest to conserve energy. It's equilibrium—a fantastic design.
• Fun Fact: GLP-1 (the basis for many weight-loss drugs) was originally developed from the venom of the Gila monster, a small venomous lizard.
• History: As cigarette sales declined, major tobacco companies acquired processed food companies like General Foods and Kraft to profit from another highly addictive product.
• Portion Size: Served portion sizes are much larger today than in the 1970s or 1990s, and larger in the US than in France. Yet we're expected to finish everything on our plates, which leads Americans to overeat.
• Easy to Digest ≠ Better: Being easy to digest is not a good thing—it means food breaks down faster and keeps you full for less time. Ultra-processed food is often deliberately over-processed for this very reason.

Birds

I read something about birds:

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. Right now, in this room, it is on.

The circuit predates primates. Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continuity as a predator-detection system for roughly 200 million years. Birds stop singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of mammalian history, a forest full of song meant no large predator was nearby, and the cessation of sound was the warning. Your nervous system never updated this software.

The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong dropped anxiety with a medium effect size. Six minutes of traffic noise raised depression with the same. The effect worked on subjects who lived in dense urban environments and had no regular contact with nature. The brain still ran the check.

Birdsong sits in the 1,000 to 8,000 Hz range. Your brainstem reads continuous patterns in that band as a signal that nothing dangerous is currently moving through the environment. EEG data shows birdsong at 45 to 50 decibels boosts alpha wave activity by 14.1% relative to silence. Alpha is the brainwave signature of relaxed alertness. Push the same birdsong above 60 decibels and the response flips. Stress markers rise 29%. The circuit only trusts the signal at the volume of quiet conversation, which is exactly the volume birds sing at from a typical distance.

Three things happen simultaneously when the brain registers ambient safety. The amygdala downregulates. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over from the sympathetic. Heart rate variability rises, cortisol drops. The posterior cingulate cortex, which sits at the center of the rumination circuit, quiets down. King's College London tracked this through a smartphone study with over 1,200 participants and found the mood lift lasted hours after the sound stopped. People diagnosed with depression got the same response as healthy controls.

Most of what gets labeled mental fatigue is hypervigilance running in the background. Birdsong tells the circuit it can stand down, and the brain reallocates the freed compute everywhere else.

A quiet park feels different from a quiet office because the parks have sentinels.

— Aakash Gupta on X

I started paying attention to the birds in our backyard. I noticed there are so many species singing different songs. As I pay more attention to their songs, I realize that the world is polluted with noise, and I had never noticed it before.

Right now, I'm building a bird app to identify bird songs and species. As I test it in the woods, I am getting to know so many amazing birds close to me. It is a totally different world living in a different frequency range. The process also makes me happy and relaxed. I guess it is the magic of birdsong.

I'm amazed by how intricately God has designed the world. He orchestrates the entire dynamic system in perfect balance.

No Plastic Water Bottle

As I explore ways to get rid of toxins, changing my water bottle is another step. I recently did a lot of research, and it came down to these categories:

• Glass bottles
• Food-grade stainless steel bottles (316 is better than 304)
• Titanium bottles (even better than 316 stainless steel)

Since I have other requirements for a water bottle, such as the following, finding an ideal one is very difficult:

• Fits in my car's cup holder (less than 3 inches in diameter)
• Has some level of insulation
• Easy to clean
• Leak-proof
• Durable
• Not too noisy when placed on a hard surface
• Not too heavy

With all of these requirements, it is really hard to find the perfect one! I just bought the Keith Titanium Ti3032 Plastic-Free Sport Bottle - 23.6 fl oz. It is the most expensive water bottle I have ever bought - $70! I hope it lasts a lifetime.

Next Steps

• [New] Monitor the effect of the reduced Doptelet dosage (60mg every 14 days).
• Have meals fit into the fasting schedule
• Keep strength training at 2x/week
• Focus on body comfort over stats
• Avoid stressful workouts before and during my period
• Rinse the mouth after coffee and brush lightly, to prevent staining
• Get blood test done around ovulation to get the most accurate lipid panel
• Strength training focus on pliability and flexibility
• Increase fiber to feel full
• Keep Doptelet at 40 mg every 9 days (20 mg for 4 days, then 20 mg for 5 days)
• Keep pork intake low; focus on beef, fish, lamb, and eggs
• Eat clean, sleep well, and get regular sun exposure
• Monitor low heart rate and HRV
• Continue eating complex carbs, vegetables, fruits, and nuts
• Continue avoiding gluten for now (!!!) until platelet count is back to normal range
• Continue using organic cloth menstrual pads
• Continue avoiding screens while eating