Tag: Fitness

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1732 and It’s Getting Hot In Here So Take Off All Your Clothes

You might want bring towel though, as our handcrafted Finnish sauna will need some use before the cedar is completely smooth. Yes, that’s right, the MilFred family Yellow Barn now has a sauna. And she is a beauty. Just check out the view we picked for her.

Alex and the wonderful family who built the cedar sauna structure placed her under the back awning of the big yellow barn today. Wiring and electronics are underway as I write.

We’ve been slowly but surely turning our barn into our ideal wellness center both for our own use and eventually for the wider community as well. We are privileged with skills, capital and loads of very expensive personal experience with chronic illnesses.

So naturally as geriatric millennials it is always our instincts to turn our pain into something useful and also if we are lucky pay back the expenditures and turn a profit. Which we can then reinvest. It’s the circle of life for a generation who found the circle of life to be a tad more inflationary than expected.

The man of action putting the finishing touches on the electronics. We don’t have anything in our home systems connected to the cloud, so he built his own fully local controller with
ESP32 as the brains, 60a 240v contactor for heater, RGBW LED controls
UI/ final control via Home Assistant and HomeKit. You can snag the code on GitHub

In true MilFred fashion, we are building and testing everything all on ourselves. An n of 1 is good, an n of 2 is better, and if you’d like to test it out hit us up while it is a work in progress. Build in public and beta test with your friends.

Tucked under the awning of the barn so one can easily pop in from gym, HBOT or cold plunge to warm cedar comfort and mountain views

We’d like to ultimately build a space for healing, relaxation and training for those who prefer time tested modalities like heat, cold, oxygen and pressure.

Friends and family can come and test out our now very impressive range of equipment as we build this all out.

We have one of the few hyperbaric oxygen therapy chambers available outside of hospital use in the region. You can pressurize to 2 atmospheres and set a range of parameters for a range of treatments. I use it for my inflammatory condition while Alex is treating the remains of long covid. You’d be shocked what pressure and oxygen can do.

Our hyperbaric oxygen therapy chamber

If you want a work out get in some squat reps in our power cage, take a swing at the punching bag or lengthen your spine on our Pilates reformer. You can even climb around on the rock wall built into the the barn ceiling (not even kidding that is the work of the previous family).

If you are looking for a spa day you can have a sweat in the sauna, do red light therapy on your face, chill out on a PEMF mat, and hopefully soon take a dip in a cold plunge. Though if you are ambitious you can sprint across the front pasture and jump in our pond but I’ll warn you that the ducks might not love it.

The pond is fed by a creek that comes from the canyon above our house

The point being that we are building by hand and through personal experience something that improves our lives and others and that’s a pretty hot thing to do. Don’t worry, we will provide towels and robes if you do indeed take off all your clothes. Just come on over and try it out.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1688 and Deciding What To Outsource to Artificial Intelligence for Health and Wellness

One of my Twitter mutuals recently published an artificial intelligence prompt for making an adaptive fitness coach which works inside any of the major large models.

Having recently been saved from going septic and a gnarly deep tissue infection thanks to clever diagnostics from the commercial chatbots I am considering what else they might be able to help me along with in my day to day.

Being failed rather regularly by doctors over a decade of chronic illnesses has made me skeptical of the institutions in American medicine. But having one doctor (a dermatologist) miss a glaringly obvious differential really shook me.

Her dismissal of the details and particulars wasn’t malice, but a function of the systemic inability to put enough attention on the details of the person in front of her. Attention really was all she needed ironically.

I’m sure she didn’t set out to be that kind of doctor, I’d bet she hates that it’s all 90 second visits and Medicare coding and making money for the private equity group who owns the clinic. I feel for her. She surely wants to get back to doctoring.

No one can spot every detail and retain the complexities of every case. Especially one like mine. But a computer has a much better shot at mimicking Dr House than I do at finding a Dr House for myself. And it certainly has a better chance than someone who let the system dominate them into breezing over the details.

So I am using my mutual’s prompt to see if I can outsource a very slow and adaptive return to fitness after my month off from exercise to recover from surgery. I like what I’m seeing from all models that I’ve tried it on but I imagine I’ll have all the same “me” problems with overdoing it and pushing too hard. But who knows, maybe this aspect of wellness is better handled by machine than by me.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 564 and Not Exercising

Summer is supposed to be when you are outside and most active. But that’s not been true for me. I’m not entirely when I stopped working out this summer, but I suspect it was sometime this May when I got the flu. When I was in Montana I caught influenza A from my husband while we were buying our new homestead.

I was pretty under the weather for the entire month. I probably extended my suffering by being in a high stress situation for several week. I had to do things like attend a two hour property inspection while I was definitely still sick. And then a few days later I was stuck in a car for 8 hours straight back to Colorado. Thankfully my husband actually did the driving. Negotiating the emotions of buying our first house while sick wasn’t ideal either. That was arguably the most intensive part of the entire experience.

Going into May I was hiking and walking an hour a day along with several consistent months of a 3 day a week weight lifting split routine. My squats looked good and my tracker apps were pleased with my low level ambient activity. I was still struggling with fatigue but I felt like being active was surely the best way of improving my energy levels.

I’m not as convinced this is true anymore. There has been chatter for decades about post exertional malaise in various viral and autoimmune cases. It is regularly brought up now in long Covid as well. I’ve experienced some variant on and off for years whenever I have symptom flares. Even modest exertion like a short walk can lay me flat if I’m not feeling well.

As I had a lot of ups and downs in my symptoms in June in July I let even modest exercise efforts go entirely. Between traveling to hot climates like Texas and the Mediterranean I wasn’t exactly eager to be outside either. Heat is my nemesis. I’m probably one of the few people who can go spend time seaside and struggle to be outside unless I’m literally in the water. There is a reason I am so eager to move to Montana.

Looking at my various trackers and diaries the past three years I have seen aggressive declines in my physical activity levels over the summer. As heat domes and 100 degree days become the norm I just can’t tolerate a lot of time outside. The temperature barely dips below 80 even at nighttime. And if I try to be active in that kind of heat I see set backs in all my metrics.

I’ve got years of data at this point and it’s funny that I’m always at my fittest and most active in the dead of winter. Everyone else enjoys sweater weather and Christmas indulgence while I am lifting heavy, energetically watching my nutrition and reveling in the cold. Maybe you can take the Swede out of Scandinavia but you can’t take the Scandinavian out of the Swede.

Categories
Chronic Disease Chronicle

Day 115 and Physical Rehabilitation

As part of my commitment to quantified self and biohacking I have a physical rehabilitation protocol I cobbled together. Two years ago at the start of my autoimmune my journey I couldn’t walk easily. The ankylosing spondylitis manifested in my upper spine meaning I would struggle to get from my bed to the bathroom. I had to shower using a stool. I walked with a cane. This was not great for my cardiovascular health or my muscle tone. I was in this state for well over a year.

As the inflammation has become controlled in the past six months, I’ve been faced with a long rehabilitation. How do you build back stamina when even minor exertion was beyond one’s capabilities? As it turns out you do it one step at a time.

I’ve kept it simple. I get up out of bed every hour and take 250 steps. You’d be surprised how much a commitment to small consistent movements builds on itself. Once I got used to regular “get up” movements and pacing the room, I focused on adding small increments. Add in a hundred more steps at a time and now I’m comfortable hiking for an hour a day on flat or slight inclines. Thanks to a totally inconsistent stretching routines (a mix of Pilates and Alexander Technique) my muscles have retained mobility so that adding in more mileage has always felt comfortable.

I don’t have a program that is specific to rehabilitation though I suspect I should. I just committed to adding 5% a week more steps till I was able to walk 3 miles at a time or about 7,000 a day steps with a small amount of activity every hour. I suspect the regular activity each hour helps more than the steady state work but both add up to fitness gains. I have been adding in weight lifting and found that my strength is reasonably good. The real issue is that if I go to my full strength capacity I find myself struggling afterwards as healing and natural inflammatory processes are still a challenge for me. It’s as if the actual fitness isn’t the issue but rather my capacity for recovery.

Today I was able to successfully hike the NCAR trailhead in South Boulder. It’s a moderate intensity hike with some scramble and a gain of about 750 feet over a 3 mile circuit. What surprised me the most was that I didn’t have any perceptual issues with fitness. The exertion felt fine. The challenge was the occasional spike of pain. I wasn’t entirely sure if discomfort was a function of not being capable of managing the trail or simply that I’m still prone to system cascades. I can’t explain it any better than that. The trail was muddy and I lost my footing sending me into a fight or flight cycle that I needed to let pass.

Now that I’ve reached a point where normal activity is possible I need to find the next step in my cumulative rehabilitation program. The area where I can add 5% gains each week. If anyone has suggestions I’m open to it!