tegid’s BodyBlog

-Introduction-

It’s nearly 8 years since my first epileptic seizure. Many types and doses of drugs have been prescribed but none have worked.  The side-effects got so bad that I brought myself of all meds in November 2007.

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Back in March, I got an interesting message from Dom, telling me about a doctor that he knew who had experienced encouraging results for people with difficult-to-control epilepsy when they followed the ketogenic diet. Well that’s my category of epilepsy. Dom has been brilliant, listening to my concerns and directing me to helpful information. He got me wondering if the ketogenic diet was possible in my case.

I had a disastrous meeting with a senior neurologist in May who discredited any dietary changes being able to influence epilepsy. He also said that I was likely to die in the next 8 years.

A month later, MK2004 tracked down medical research showing that the ketogenic diet had been researched in the UK for the past 7 years in its top children’s hospital. The research showed that the ketogenic diet certainly did work, although its exact process was not understood.  Not long after this, Adrian (the therapist at the gym) figured out that I had reactive hypoglycemia – which means that I have sudden ‘bursts’ of insulin, which send my blood sugar levels down very low – and that this was triggering my epileptic seizures.

So, the thought of a low carb/high fat diet in somebody my age and with my conditions seemed not only illogical, it was also dangerous - as it could leave me having unstoppable seizures.

I knew that following the same macronutrient proportions as used with the children’s keto diet would be inappropriate for my situation.  I’ve had a high carb diet for the past 24 years and it would cause a huge ‘jolt’. I was scared that I’d end up losing muscle mass.  So I looked at the ketogenic diet used by bodybuilders while they reduced body fat preparing for contests. The macronutrient amounts that they used seemed to make more sense to me, given my age (and need to avoid saturated fats) and lifestyle (the gym!) All I had to do was survive the initial transition while body glycogen stores ran down and keytones started up. This was the point at which low blood sugar was likely to hit me.

Luckily for me Adam was preparing for contest at the same time, so he was ketogenic while these thoughts were flying around my head. All credit to Adam, as he was the one that figured out what makes me tick and how to get me to stop worrying and start the diet.  He had two conversations with me, where he asked some soul-searching and horizon–grabbing questions that asked what fundamentally makes me ‘Mike’: he pointed out it wasn’t epilepsy. And he’s right.

The deal I made with Adam is this: if the ketogenic diet works and controls my seizures, I’ll compete. That’s right – I’ll find some natural bodybuilding contest here in England and do something else that scares the living daylights out of me – appear on the stage.

I started the ketogenic diet on 15 July…  Watch this space.

I want to say a huge, huge thanks to Dom and Adam because already they’ve brought me 10 days of freedom from seizures.

I have just watched an insightful TV programme about the effect that the images of the human body have on us.  We get bombarded with flawless, airbrushed images selling us the ideal as to how we should look – a set of images that in fact are very limited  and which encourage people to go to extremes to mimic the things seen on magazine covers and TV screens.

I was surprised at the astonishing levels of digital manipulation that are routinely employed – using machines identical to mine – and how magazines utterly insist on this. Any bits that don’t quite conform their ‘ideal’ notions of how we ’should’ look are re-touched, decreased, enlarged, coloured etc. The media, as an industry, admitted that it finds it acceptable to utterly manipulate an image of a person’s body. They also admitted to knowing that the public is unaware of the ubiquitous influence of this digital manipulation.

There is now a generation of people that see cosmetic surgery as perfectly acceptable – and so does the medical industry they pay to perform their boob jobs, nose jobs, liposuction, botox and collagen injections. And I have to ask myself: HOW is this any different to the anabolic steroids that have been outlawed by the same society?  

OK: with the steroids and ‘performance enhancing’ drugs people are still expected to work very hard personally in order to get the changes to their bodies that they hope for.  I’m not saying that I agree with either approach – I’m not saying that I criticize either approach. I’m just saying that to accept one as “OK’ while condemning the other as illegal simply isn’t balanced – the philosophies simply collide. It’s not making sense.

Both focus on our dissatisfaction with our own bodies – what we see as flaws. The media encourage people to destroy these flaws, as they reduce the visual perfection that we wish for ourselves.  Bodybuilding and dieting give us the control to alter our appearance using a different approach to the medical/cosmetic ones. Bodybuilding is about taking responsibility and taking control for the way that your body changes into your own hands.  With medical/cosmetic approaches, you hand this control over to a third party – you give them the responsibility to the physical changes you go through.  In my opinion, the use of steroids and other outlawed substances could be described as similar to this, as there is an element of control being taken away from the individual.  

There’s something about the loss of control that society finds unacceptable- society prefers individuals to be in control of their actions and to make informed decisions. I think this is what society is trying to use to justify this imbalance in philosophies I described above.  Thanks to the media, we live in an increasingly visual society.  So visual reinforcement of this ‘idealized’ control is being portrayed in the images shown in the media.  But control isn’t necessarily a visual thing.  So maybe we need to be far more questioning of about the images that we see in the media at present. And what is REALLY being said by them.

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Finally – just to consider…

Three years after first introducing TV and idealized images of people to the Pacific island of Fiji, 12% of the girls there had developed bulimia. They explained that they felt inadequate, inferior and alienated from the modern world. Fiji had never had bulimia as a condition prior to this.