Thursday 26 May 2005

Pic of the day: "Let us all work a little harder!" says the class rep in Mahou Sensei Negima. I suppose my mitochondria have been thinking along the same lines. Time to burn some fat! Not to mention glycogen.

Adjusting

After three long and thoughtful entries, it is time to play catch-up. So let me just tell you what's going on with my days right now.

The last two weeks I have been exercising more than before. I wasn't completely passive before either, hard to be when you don't have a car, but it has been measurably more after I got my pulse watch and started to use it as entertainment. One brisk walk to the shop and back can burn 6-700 kcal, compared to the 100 you burn sitting at home during the same hour. That's 1/5 of a whole day's energy budget for a grown man without manual labor. So obviously the body cannot in the long run just look at this without reacting somehow.

The first reaction was shooting my appetite through the roof. This makes perfect sense, except my digestive tract has been downsizing for a decade or two, so it is simply not able to comply with the sudden demand. (Let this be a warning to all you trigger-happy CEOs out there...) After two weeks, the capacity is expanding. I can have three cups for lunch instead of two. But if I go too fast, I get sick and can barely eat at all for a day. (I guess I am used to playing computer games, where empires rise and fall before my eyes. In the fleshworld, things take time.)

The other thing that happened was that my legs started to feel tired and kinda ... empty, it probably the best word. It is also the most accurate, I suspect. The muscles store glycogen, an animal equivalent of starch, which can be made into glucose (the simplest sugar) at the drop of a hat. A genial invention, its branched geometry lets the enzymes peel glucose off it at astounding speed. But if there is only so much glucose to go around in the blood, the brain commands the lion's share. The liver also keeps a store to regulate blood sugar from minute to minute. So probably the muscles have been shortchanged on this one. This was pretty bad for a few days, but seems to be fixing itself now.

Perhaps my body is saying to itself: "Dude, seems like he's for real this time. Better start to take it seriously." But that's where the body is almost certainly wrong. A month from now, I'm probably not walking around the hills sweating for no good reason. New gadgets stop being cool after a couple weeks, and then my interest wanders off to something else. Change is a constant in my life. One of the few, along with my journal I guess.