Payback

I visited my parents at the weekend.

My mother's memory is starting to go and so she repeatedly shares the same news and asks the same questions.

We took a drive out to visit some old haunts. She kept commenting it seemed a long time since we had been to them.

I could tell her when and the circumstances of our last visits.

Before I began this process of remembering every day that passes, I would have been almost as uncertain as her. Was it just last year? At another place, was it really two years ago?

This is the payback for the effort of developing these skills.

It is becoming easier with time. I am more routinely using the full-date tagging approach I have blogged on previously. When I recall the image for today it will be associated with 14 January 14.

Knowing the year is becoming more important as they begin to mount up. For a while, I was losing my way between years, but this technique seems to have resolved that problem.

Blood glucose

So I gave up processed sugar on 16 June 2014. Going to find a book on the subject having decided it was a healthy option is in my memory tag for the day.

I've been reading up since then and following a low GI diet: eating natural foods, predominantly those with a low glycaemic index.

I have lost a bit of weight (now down to 80 kg – BMI below 25) and reduced my body fat (23.8% – classified as 'good').

I feel better in a way that is difficult to explain.

A bit more comfortable in my body, never feeling stuffed. And with clearer eyesight, it seems. Which is reassuring given in my hypochondria attack back in March when beset by tiggling fingers, I ran on a beach with my eyes closed, thinking how it would be if I lost my sight. That worry has receded, though I do still have the tingling fingers, and cracking spine.

I am eating well and enjoying food. I do sometimes feel a little hungry and so snack between meals, as advised, but on healthy things like carrots, oranges and apples. Or crackers with peanut butter.

The GI diet is supposed to maintain blood sugar at a more balanced level through the consumption of carbohydrates that take longer to break down.

I thought I would find out what was happening to my blood sugar and so bought a test meter and finger pricker on 27 June (yes, it's in my memory tag).

I've done various tests since then and found my blood sugar is very stable. To see how it might have varied in the past, I turned the clock back and with my evening meal yesterday of low-fat french fries, fish in butter sauce and vegetables (I did eat pretty healthly in any case) had a can of coke, followed by an icecream. Oh, and a chocolate bar while I was cooking.

According to the nutrition app on my smartphone, I have topped 100g of sugar today. Over three-quarters will have been processed sugar, rather than natural sugars in fruit and vegetables.

The World Health Organisation recently dropped its recommendation on sugar intake to 5% of calories, or about 25g for a adult male. Reports on this and other sugar warnings started me thinking about giving up sugar in the first place.

Note, that the can of coke had 35g of sugar in it alone. The chocolate bar and ice cream each had 22g. So that's 79g of processed sugar, over three times the recommendation, in just three processed foods.

The results of my experiment do suggest I have a lower blood glucose spike following the GI diet.

I've only run this experiment once and there is a margin of error in readings, but here are the figures.

A fasting blood test (after 8 hours with no food) using my new meter gave me a blood glucose reading of 4.7 mmol/l. (I have a clinic fasting blood test result from 2012, which records a value of 4.3 mmol/l, so a similar order).

My high-sugar meal and drink gave me a peak of 7.9 mmol/l. I measured from about 20 minutes after eating (6.3 mmol/l) then at 20 to 30 minute intervals. The high reading was at nearly 50 minutes. At 75 minutes, I was down to 6.0 mmol/l.

After 2 hours I was down to 5.4 mmol/l and at 3 hours at 5.3 mmol/l. This seems to be my steady-state level between eating.

I measured my blood glucose the day before the high-sugar test as a control. I ate a similar meal without the processed high-sugar food and drink. An hour after eating, my blood glucose was 4.9 mmol/l. Two hours after eating it was 5.5 mmol/l. Which suggests it takes longer for the glucose to arrive and when it does, it is less dramatic.

Having made various measurements on other days before and after eating, it seems my blood glucose on the GI diet fluctuates between 4.8 to 5.8 mmol/l. One day I went for a 20-minute run an hour after eating and it dropped to 4.6 mmol/l, but an hour later recovered to 5.3 mmol/l without eating anything else. In fact, this was on a low-calorie day in the fasting diet I follow (two low-calorie days per week – see 'fast living' blog posts).

The peak of 7.9 mmol/l appears to show the impact of the high-sugar intake. It is within acceptable limits according to the literature I've read. My body produced insulin to instruct my cells to absorb glucose and the level dropped to the steady-state level in 2 hours.

But the swing is less marked with the GI diet. Apparently this translates into less risk of developing type-2 diabetes, which arises when cells become less responsive to the insulin signal and blood sugar can run out of control.

This has only been a snapshot test, but it does seem to support the theory.

The GI diet is no problem to follow, though it is making me averse to processed foods. There are whole aisles in the supermarket that I now ignore as they scream 'sugar' at me.

In fact, I am enjoying food more, even embarking on some of the recipes in the books I've been reading.

Goodness. I even baked my own wholemeal bread last week.

Goodbye to 2013

The current technique I use for refreshing the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags starts with me thinking of this date 6 months ago. From there I move to the same day of the week. My review involves recalling the images for the day before and the same day for every week until one month ago (from where I run through every day until yesterday).

This is usually my waking routine, sometimes extending into getting ready for the day.

So today being Wednesday 2 July, I first stepped to 2 January on my mental calendar and found it to be a Thursday. So my review began with Tuesday 31 December 2013. The each Tuesday and Wednesday of successive weeks.

In other words, this was the last time the 6-month window started in the year 2013.

I feel a sad sense of letting go with this realisation.

It was not a good year: a young niece passed away towards the end of it after an illness diagnosed a little over a year before that. So the memory tags for 2013 are punctuated by final days shared and moments of suffering.

I still revisit each day of the year, but now on a slower cycle.

At some point during the day, I recall the same date in each month. So a day per month, starting from 2 January 2011, through the 2nd of each month in 2012, 2013 and the 6 months of this year that have already passed.

As more distant days only come to mind once per month, they are sometimes a surprise. Today it was 2 December that struck me. My memory tag is standing on a street in the capital looking at the Christmas decorations.

Before I began this process, a memory like this might well have dwindled to nothing. Or if I recalled it, I might not remember to which year it related.

I bought a laptop on that trip – then went for a walk to look at the lights while they fitted a memory expansion board (ironically enough).

Without my memory tags I would be hard pressed to remember when or perhaps even where I bought the laptop I am using now.

So 2013 lives on.

 With the moments and the people that made up the days I lived through.

Pick a month

In recent days I have had difficulty locating some of the images pinned to my memory calendar as memory tags to remember each day that passes.

I was starting to wonder if this may be associated with my decision to give up sugar. As I mentioned recently a sugar rush from raisins (natural, but still with high on the glycaemic index) boosted my alertness on a long car journey (see 'no sugar' posts). Could the opposite be happening if my blood glucose is stabilising at a lower level, without the peaks and troughs brought on by processed sugar?

I don't think that was the cause. As is often the case, the days that presented problems were in the months that have most recently dropped out of my more comprehensive daily review of the past 6 months: September and October 2013 in particular.

I used the techniques I have developed to recover these lost images, though for some it was actually a day or two before they burst back into full vividness. I was starting to think maybe it was time to accept some days will be lost and that seemed to kick my brain into gear so I remembered the missing image was actually a particularly valuable memory I did not want to lose. That boosted my motivation.

Of particular benefit in locating them was running through each day of the specific month sequentially. The surrounding days provide context and triggers.

Starting my review today on 27 December 2013, it struck me that this month has been progressively dropping out of the 6-month review window. Instead of refreshing images every day, or at least twice each week, they are refreshed only once per month (see the link in the side panel to 'refresh technique' for more details of my current method).

So today I decided to do a run through of December. It was well worth it, as some of the memory tags really benefited from being dusted off. It can take time, however, as the images trigger other memories that are tempting to explore.

A year ago, when I had less days to remember since beginning this process, I would occasionally do a run through every day in sequence from when I started on 17 December 2011. I haven't done that for a long time and doubt I will have the time to do it again as the days continue to pile up. Perhaps if I have time to spare on my death bed.

But I think I will make a point of picking a month every now to run through each day.

Brain boost

Apparently when you remove processed sugar from your diet, it takes a while for your body to adjust.

Before, blood glucose levels spike after eating food or drink with processed sugar, only to drop sharply as insulin is produced to tell your cells to absorb it.

Glucose levels are more regular, but lower, maintained by the breakdown of more complex sugars, carbohydrates and fats in foods with low Glycaemic Index (GI). Processed sugar has a GI of 100. Foods with a lower GI take longer to be broken down to glucose. Foods with a GI below 55 are recommended.

From what I have read, it is advisable to snack between main meals to maintain blood glucose at a steady level. Fruit is good, though I am partial to raw carrots. Carrots have a GI of around 50, more than apples (GI 38), but contain less sugar overall and has the advantage of coming with fibre.

Driving to my parents recently, I felt a familiar drop in alertness, which usually prompts me to stop for coffee and some chocolate.

This time, I had the coffee, but looked for an alternative snack without processed sugar. A mix of nuts and raisins seemed a good bet. Raisins have a GI of 64, so they are not a green lighted food in Rick Gallop's traffic light system.

They had an immediate effect in energising my brain for the remainder of the journey. I'm now carrying some nut and raisins mix in the car for whenever I need to boost my alertness with a healthier sugar hit.

On the return leg, I tried coffee without raisins when I started to flag to see if it was the caffeine hit that had been responsible. It was not.

Bye to sugar

The bad press that sugar has been getting has not passed me by, but it has taken me a while to decide to cut processed sugar from my diet.

There is research that suggests a high sugar diet can affect memory and cognitive skills (an example in Huffington Post).

Diabetics are warned of the risk of too high or too low sugar levels on brain function (Diabetes UK).

Most processed food has added processed sugar, whether it is glucose, fructose, corn syrup or some other designation. While there are already warnings about the health risks of consuming too much sugar, there are suggestions that the Guideline Daily Amounts have been set too high, due to influence from the food industry (British Medical Journal article).

Even then, the current recommendation of limiting daily calories from added sugar to just 100 calories for women and 150 calories for men is blown away.

According to the US Center for Disease Control, the average American consumes 440 calories per day from added sugar – that's 156 pounds (70 kg) of sugar per year. Not far off your own body weight, unless you are already obese!

This statistic comes from an article on the Psychology Today website that goes on to suggest:

'Research indicates that a diet high in added sugar reduces the production of a brain chemical known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). Without BDNF, our brains can't form new memories and we can't learn (or remember) much of anything. Levels of BDNF are particularly low in people with an impaired glucose metabolism—diabetics and pre-diabetics—and as the amount of BDNF decreases, sugar metabolism worsens.'

Excess glucose in the blood triggers the pancreas to produce insulin as a signal to cells to absorb the glucose.

In the case of the liver and muscles, this is stored as glycogen. This process can be reversed when glucose levels fall too low in the blood.

But keep overdosing on sugar so that the liver has stored all the glycogen it can and the insulin signalling may break down, leading to uncontrolled glucose blood levels and the development of type-2 diabetes.

Our bodies are powered by sugar, of course. We need it.

Fruit, vegetables and milk contain sugars. Carbohydrates in vegetables and grains, and fat in meat, fish and other foods, are broken down into sugar.

Our brains run on sugar. In fact, as eHow summarises, 'more than 60 percent of the glucose streaming through our blood is consumed by the brain'

So how can we obtain the glucose we need without overdosing and the attendant health risks?

By obtaining sugars, carbohydrates and fats in an unprocessed and unrefined state. That means cooking meals from natural ingredients, using whole grains and eating fruit.

This gives us the glucose we need, but without the glucose spike and overdosing that comes from added sugar and processed foods.

There are guides on the foods to eat. A book I am reading at the moment is The GI Diet by Rick Gallop. This colour codes foods with traffic lights depending on their Glycemic Index, which 'measures the speed at which you digest food and convert it to glucose.'

Sugar has a rating of 100. Boiled potatoes 56. Oatmeal 42. An apple 38.

My memory tag for 16 June 2014 is visiting the library and bookshops to search for information on controlling sugar levels.

I'll tag any future blog posts on this topic with 'no sugar'.

Lost image: 30 April 2014

I lost the image for 30 April 2014 yesterday.

It was strange because I knew it was a corker. It sat within a sequence of images that were still clearly visible on my mental calendar. But Wednesday was a white out. Nothing.

It was also strange because that week had been one I could run through quickly in my reviews. The images were related to each other somehow.

But the day had dropped out of my sequential review of past days on 30 May. Now it is only included when I came to look at past Wednesdays over the previous 6 months each Wednesday and Thursday (see the link at the side for my refresh technique).

Yesterday was Wednesday, so I ran through the Tuesdays and Wednesdays since 11 December 2013. I came to 30 April. Nothing. I had not yet built the associations with days a week apart.

Returning to reviewing the whole week as I was used to, did not help. I was able to remember certain things about that day. In the evening I had looked at hotels to stay near my brother who I planned to visit at the weekend.

But that was not the tag.

The day before I had a meeting about a website I was working on. But the website wasn't in my memory tag for Wednesday, I was sure, although there was some connection.

I didn't sweat it, but moved on to my longer review of a day per month from January 2011. That was fine.

I was expecting the image to pop into my head at some point unprompted, as is often the case, but it had still not done so by the time I was going for an evening run. I was starting to wish I had moved the images into a written record when they dropped out of the sequential daily review of the past month. But I knew that being forced to remember would help to reinforce the memory better than cribbing off a written record.

So I did what I have done several times before in this situation: I ran through the whole month starting on 1 April. I was a little apprehensive as I approached the blank day as nothing was coming immediately to mind. But in the end the associations worked and it came back to me in a flash.

I had been booking the hotel to stay near my brother as we had met for lunch that day. While I was waiting for him, I had been meeting a deadline for filing some documents. That had been the association with my meeting the day before about the website project: getting things sorted.

Image tag: Wednesday 30 April 2014, completing documents while waiting at a café for my brother.

So now it is back and, hopefully, the fact I had to struggle to remember it this time, will make it easier next time.