BJJ Caveman

Vitamin D Update

Posted on May 4, 2014July 16, 2017 by BJJ Caveman

Vitamin D Update

After I reached the 8 week mark of my Carb Back-Loading experiment, I planned to draw a series of blood tests to see where things stood compared to my most recent set of labs which were drawn after doing Carb Nite for 10 weeks.

As a quick review, here are some of the basics of Vitamin D that I addressed in my prior post:

Basics of Vitamin D

It is a hormone derived from cholesterol
It can be made in the skin with exposure to sunlight
It can also be ingested with food or supplementation

Effects of Vitamin D

Maintains calcium levels in body which is important for bone health
Regulates gene expression
Helps immune function
May provide anti-cancer effects
Vitamin D levels need to be in the 50 -70 ng/mL range for thyroid hormone receptors to respond properly
Low Vitamin D levels are seen in obesity, although I’m not entirely sure if it’s known whether obesity causes low vitamin D levels, or if it’s the other way around.

Carb Back-Loading Results After 8 Weeks

Posted on April 28, 2014May 9, 2017 by BJJ Caveman

Carb Back-Loading Results After 8 Weeks

Carb Back-Loading (CBL) is John Kiefer’s variation on a targeted ketogenic diet in which a large load of carbs are only eaten after heavy resistance training (optimally in the afternoon). This theoretically takes advantage of the body’s hormonal and metabolic response to stimulate muscle cell growth while at the same time increasing the breakdown of fat cells. You can read more about the basics of this approach from my review of the book. If you want to see my results from the first 4 weeks, you can check them out here.… Read More

More Carb Nite and Carb Back-Loading Tips

Posted on April 25, 2014June 25, 2015 by BJJ Caveman

Over the past few weeks I’ve been listening to a steady stream of some of John Kiefer’s podcasts, some of which are from his own site, Body.io and some from when he appears as a guest on other folks’ podcasts. For those that don’t know, Kiefer is the author of both The Carb Nite Solution and Carb Back-Loading, both ways of eating that I’ve been playing around with recently.

Each time interview or discussion I listen to I end up coming away with another tidbit of information that he reveals that wasn’t quite written in either of his books, so I wanted to aggregate some of these nuggets here. … Read More

Royler Gracie Seminar

Posted on April 21, 2014April 21, 2014 by BJJ Caveman

Was lucky enough to attend a Royler Gracie seminar this past weekend and had the pleasure of seeing one of my instructors, Darren Branch of Gracie Humaita Cleveland, receive his blackbelt. He did get a little bit emotional, but it was completely understandable since I know how hard he’s worked and how much of his life he has dedicated to BJJ. It was a long time coming and I’m proud to have been there to see him get promoted.

Obtaining a blackbelt is a process that takes 8-10 years of regular training so it would be hard not to succumb to emotion at such an event!… Read More

A Day in the Life of My Ketones – Part 2

Posted on April 20, 2014May 9, 2017 by BJJ Caveman

Part 2 of my day in the life experiments (here is part 1). This was a much shorter experiment, and looking back I think I was mainly interested in seeing how a bulletproof coffee (upgraded coffee + grassfed butter + Upgraded MCT oil) would effect my ketones. At least in this case, it looks like it will raise them by 0.1 – 0.2 mmol in the 1-2 hrs immediately after ingestion.

Can I exclude normal ketone variation from this? Nope, but I imagine the more I test it, preferably at various times of days, the more the answer will become clear… but at this point I’m not sure this is something worth testing. … Read More

A Day in the Life of My Ketones – Part 1

Posted on April 16, 2014October 9, 2014 by BJJ Caveman

When I first received my ketonix acetone breathalyzer, one of the experiments I tried to run was to see how it changed along with my ketones over the course of a typical day. I decided to document everything I did along with the specific times, so that when I tested my ketones, it would give me a clearer picture of how certain actions affected my ketones.

I was hoping that the ketonix acetone breathalyzer would be able to give me the same level of moment by moment detail that blood ketone testing would give me, but alas, as we saw in my final review, it didn’t. … Read More