Poop….cause poop is funny.

OK, let me say that although I absolutely love “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” I don’t necessarily find the topic of poop all that funny…well maybe a little bit…OK it depends on the situation.

Pooping is one of those topics that no one wants to talk about. It’s gross, it smells bad, and it puts you in a vulnerable position grunting one out with your pants around your ankles. But it’s a great indicator of how things are doing inside in a very general basis (no fancy glucometer required). Poop should be brown in color, sink slowly and should smell like shit. When your poop stinks the digestive enzymes and bacteria in your gut are alive and flourishing!

OK enough shit talking…..as many of you know I was giving Intermittent Fasting (IF) a drive to try and gain some control over my blood sugar levels. This was a great tool for me when I was training every other day for maintenance – but since I started training for the Metro Dash I have upped the frequency and the intensity of my workouts…..and IF is not working so good for me. I’m hungry and I am not doing IF to develop anorexia – when I set out to try IF I said if I got too hungry I’d eat…well I’ve been more hungry than my 4 hour window was allowing me.

I am past the stage in my life where I am going to worry about timing each meal for accuracy – so when IF became a numbers game I said fuck it. However I still have the glucose issue. WTF? And sometimes even when I am practicing IF 90 minutes after a meal I am still not back down to 80-90 glucose levels AND these meals are simple Paleo eats…no “sugars” to spike – so WTF is going on?!?

Well low and behold some other “problems” cropped up and I had to figure out (yet again) what was going on…here is how it started.

I started to notice my pee was dark, and being a good trained Marine we always pay attention to the color of our pee, no matter how much water I was drinking it was still pretty dark. Being the compulsive loser that I am I set out on a search to figure out what was going on. My journey started with water and I am not sure how deep I should delve here because the science on this seems sketchy – you can Google “what water is best to drink” and you get varied opinions – unless I know who is giving their opinion on the other end of the internet, their background and can verify that they aren’t selling something or a 22 year old kid who thinks he knows everything about nutrition because he reads Muscle Fitness, I disregard. And so came the next problem.

Ahhh, then came the constipation. Yep, 8 days worth – I know it’s embarrassing to even put it into print – poop is definitely not funny when you aren’t doing it. At first I tried telling myself that my body was so efficient it was using up every morsel (another IASIP reference) – but then I came to my senses and bought a bottle of magnesium citrate and the good times rolled….figuratively speaking of course.

Magnesium makes you poop…how weird…hmmm…let’s do a Google search on magnesium. Turns out I don’t consume any foods that contain real quantitative levels of magnesium. Foods with high levels of magnesium are fish, grains, dairy, nuts, beans, soy, bananas and potatoes. I don’t eat any of those foods. Spinach and broccoli are on the list too and I do eat these foods but not like I should. I usually eat asparagus. OK so it is a safe bet to say I need magnesium…but why?

Mineral deficiency can lead to insulin resistance….ding, ding, ding! It can also lead to constipation, irregular heartbeats, high blood pressure, excessive muscle soreness and migraines. I don’t suffer from irregular heartbeats or high blood pressure and I don’t think what I experience is a migraine, but it can take me a good two hours to shake off a mild headache in the morning. I dread waking up in the morning – as soon as I start to wake up I can feel it coming on. I thought it was from sleeping funny so I bought a fancy pillow, no help. If I wanted to have a few drinks I’d make sure I did it early in the afternoon because going to bed with even one glass of wine coursing through my veins was a sure way to wake up with a full fledge hangover. Consuming alcohol reduces magnesium. HOLY SHIT! This is all starting to fit together.

We have these two underrated, walnut sized glands that sit over are kidneys called the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands get stressed and fatigued when we don’t consume enough magnesium, potassium and sodium. Why should you give a flying fuck about stressing your adrenal glands. Well when they are stressed you get fat, you don’t sleep well or you can’t fall asleep, your libido suffers, you are nervous, you have cravings, hormone imbalances, high blood sugar levels and your fatigued and you get sick easily.

Your adrenal glands produce adrenaline, cortisol, estrogen, progesterone, testosterone, and DHEA. Cortisol has an important function in the body but when you are under undue stress your body produces too much cortisol. Too much cortisol causes inflammation, high blood pressure, and decreases your sensitivity to insulin. DHEA is also called the youth hormone – cortisol suppresses DHEA – not good for those of us that would like to retain are youthful looks past 40. There are many reasons for additional stress: your job, taking care of kids, exercising, marital problems, money problems, etc. But additional stress also comes from mineral deficiencies – MY problem! Is my mineral deficiency causing higher blood sugar levels and the constipation?

Most importantly…..if so how do I fix this! Well it turns out all I need to do is add a magnesium and potassium pill and start consuming more spinach. Popeye would be proud! But I am going to steer you back to the water conundrum. I like the taste of distilled water or purified water. Spring water has always tasted “soft” to me. Well turns out that distilled and purified water have all the potassium, magnesium and sodium that is naturally in well and spring water, removed. So I was pretty much screwing myself left, right and sideways with the whole mineral thing.
I am on day two of my mineral supplements and drinking nasty ass spring water and eating spinach with every meal. I will let you know how this positively or negatively affects my blood sugar levels. I need to buy some testing strips – I should hopefully have an idea if this is helping in a week.