tegid’s BodyBlog

BNBF Central Championships, 26 July 2009: Report by David Kaye

"Masters Over 40
In 3rd place was an elated Mike Dancer. Mike had made considerable improvements to his physique since his Southern outing and deservedly took home the 3rd place trophy. Mike has a very detailed upper body with a good chest and wide back, all Mike has to do now is bring his legs up to match and he will present a nicely balanced and competitive package. Mike seemed to lack a little confidence on stage and should endeavour to impose himself more in front of the audience and judges".
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So…. What do you think I can do in the next 9 weeks before the National Finals in Glasgow?

As a teenager, I lived in dread of ‘Physical Education’ lessons at school. So much so, that I wouldn’t be able to sleep, the night before these lessons. I was scared about what would happen in them. The teacher that led these lessons thrived off terror and encouraging a pack instinct in those with typically ‘alpha’ instincts. I didn’t match these personality traits and they clearly didn’t like me.

Today I was woken up early, thanks to a thunderstorm that hit the south-east of Britain at about 5AM. I realized that these days I lay awake contemplating what I’d be doing in today’s workout and that going to the gym is the part of the day I now LOOK FORWARD TO. That is quite a contrast to my earlier experiences. I’d say that it has a lot to do with the attitude of the people I meet through training and a feeling of belonging that I associate with the gym culture.

I’m really lucky to have experienced this. How many other people felt scared of Physical Education lessons at school (at that particular point in history - I know it’s different these days) and as a result never did any form of exercise in adult life?

In May 2008 I was told that I had a condition that would kill me. I was sat next to my father at the time. Now that I can reflect on this incident in a calm situation I can see that I was immediately concerned for him. I didn’t really consider who would look after my feelings because I was scared about how this news would impact on those I hold dear to me. I went into ‘protective’ mode - and stayed in it for quite some time.

There were those that offered their help via this website and to whom I am so very grateful - Carla, mk2004, FireMedicMike being the immediate ones. I am so very, very lucky to have discovered dpd55 - whose scientific approach has brought me astonishing discoveries with the low-carb diet that now outsmarts the disease that the UK’s ‘experts’ predicted would finish me. I have tried to stay objective and analytical throughout the seven months that I have used this diet, recalling the method of intuitive thinking that I learned back in the 80s.

Battling the outside world with intuitive thinking is one thing - confronting the inner world of feelings with emotional intelligence is another. And with that I really have problems: I’d been told I was going to die and just about everything I coming back to haunt me.. Anger, fear and sadness. Right when I needed it most Adam247 was there -in person - to listen to me and all the stuff I’d never dared to voice before. I suspect that quite a bit more is needed as time goes on - but the outshot of all this is that I’m learning something new: to trust.

The seizures came back in December/January. Once a week, in the mornings they would strike. It was a mystery as to why - as I hadn’t changed anything so I couldn’t figure out a cause. My waking hours were spent making sure that I was doing everything I could to keep them at bay - but they were back…

Here is my latest idea:

The brain uses glucose to power epileptic seizures - the chemical reactions involved when the neurotransmitters all fire off need the rapid energy that glucose provides. A low carb diet gives the brain limited glucose - the diet gives it ketones - which are a much slower form of energy and can’t power the neurotransmitter ‘big bang’.

So glucose is coming from somewhere - once a week early in the morning…

The part of my brain that IS damaged is called the amygdala. This was shown in MRI scans taken back in 2001. There’s two amygdala - one on the left, one on the right side of the brain. My damaged one is on the left side. The amygdala is involved with the formation of memories and intense emotions. When we sleep, it is particularly active during REM sleep and the dreams we have during this time. Could my left amygdala somehow activate the hormone system while I sleep?  In particular during dreams that involve anxiety or distress, could it not make the adrenal glands release more cortisol? During waking hours, the adrenal glands can do this…  Under normal circumstances, cortisol levels are known to be highest as we wake - so if there was some disruption to this normal system, could my body be making more cortisol as sleep - and in particular as I dream?

I say this because cortisol increases gluconeogenesis - the chemical process where the liver breaks down protein and turns it into glucose and then releases it into the blood. This would increasing the amount of glucose circulating in the blood. This could then explain how my brain gets hold of the glucose it needs for seizures in the morning.  

Cortisol also decreases amino acid uptake by muscle, preventing protein synthesis. This could explain why my body is simply not growing despite high amounts of dietary protein and fat. I eat 300g/30g/350g (pro/carb/fat) daily.

Any suggestions?

This is the time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, that is associated with the action of reflection and prediction. Starting something that is positive and taking action - as in new years’ resolutions- is a tradition for this month. January is named after the Roman god Ianus - the god of gates and doors or endings and beginnings.

There have been some very inspiring things written by members in their BodyBlogs, today. I feel slightly humbled by the experience of reading these.. as I don’t have anything like so profound to place in mine.

So, I’ll do what tradition encourages and look back through the past 12 months  and see what I can take from my experiences to make the next 12 months of my life even better.. One of the characters I met last year is one of London’s top therapists and the thing that they said to me that I found profound is the following line:

"When it comes down to simplifying matters, there are really only two reasons why people come to me for help. Either they believe that they can’t love anybody else or they believe that nobody can love them".

As time has gone on, I can appreciate that just about every difficulty that I have faced can be simplified into those categories. Even the most complex of situations can be explained - and then improved -with those two explanations. Others I have shared this information with have said similar things about it. I wanted the people on this website to have access to that information

I have witnessed some astonishingly honest and personal comments from bb.com members, over the past year; regarding their motivation and enjoyment of bodybuilding (that takes courage - something I don’t witness much in the ‘outside’ world).  They accept that they find it difficult to like themselves - physically, intellectually, emotionally or spiritually.  What they share is that they all believe that they can do something positive to improve the situation. They all have hope. They wouldn’t keep doing the exercises or choose the food if they didn’t have hope that they could improve things.

It is that hope - that optimism - that I’ve kept burning at times when my surroundings have wanted it extinguished. That’s what the astonishing friends I’ve made at bb.com have helped me to do - to keep hope alive. And THAT keeps me alive.

In the northern hemisphere we are heading toward the shortest day and the time of year that seems to be the darkest. Emotionally (and medically) I have been in the dark for a very long time. Very recently, I have come to realize that I held the key to understanding my life - and to its way forward. It was though that key is like a jigsaw and I have to figure out how to put the pieces together in order to get the full picture. As I said - I was in the dark and was trying to do the jigsaw in the dark.

This past 6 months has seen some fantastic people come into my life and they have cast light into it. The most important seem to have been bodybuilders – but where they’ve helped me the most have not directly involved lifting weights… It’s been in philosophy, psychology, optimism and spirit. They have acted as my antidotes for the despair launched at me by one particularly unpleasant epilepsy hospital.  All of these marvelous people use this website.

Without the following three, I would still be in the dark and unable to complete that jigsaw mentioned earlier: Adam247, Carla Hampshire and dpd555.  They all have an astonishing gift of helping other people to feel good about themselves. I am so very lucky to know them. All three write impressive forum posts - I enjoy reading them.

I saw the article called ‘Breaking out of Prison’ written by Adam247 a few days ago:

http://blog.bodybuilding.com/adam247

I like observations - and the questions they raise. I’m glad that Adam and others like him are writing things like this.

One of the things that I have noticed since joining bb.com is the derision that is launched at the bodybuilding community - particularly from the UK’s fitness industry and its medical world. I do not feel that this derision is supported with adequate rationale: I used to run the gyms in a medical university (in the UK) and spent quite some time chatting with the PhD/research students and the trainee medics, listening to their opinions and their approach to things. I’d say that Adam’s approach is as every bit as convincing as theirs. "Bodybuilder" vs. Sport & Exercise Science PhD students. I’d say that the only difference is the way they’ve come to their current conclusions… Think about it, people!

The paralympic games have started today and if you do get a chance- watch some of it, because the achievements of all the people appearing in those games are just astonishing. As Paul McCartney said, they are truly superhuman.

What I have to say may be contraversial, but nevertheless, here goes:

During the Olympic Games, I read various articles about banned substances and how 1 in 10 health supplements may contain them. This must make it impossible for people training for a sport and trying to use optimal nutrition (on a really restricted budget) when even vitamin C tablets may give them a lifetime ban…  But when it comes to the Paralympic Games - and in fact ANY inclusive sports event - it surely gets more complicated.

8 years ago (exactly) I had my first epileptic seizure.  I went to the emergency ward in a nearby hospital and was given pills which I was told to take evening and night. As it turns out, these pills were changed after 5 months because I became incredibly ill while taking them.  I took the replacement pills for another 6 years.

Now those replacement pills were developed in the 70s by a company that also developed another drug – funnily enough at the same time – called Dianabol. Both drugs involved mechanisms that kept their ‘active agents’ safe as they travelled through the digestive system, liver and blood to their target organs. In my case – the target organ was the brain and the artificial neurotransmitter (called carbamazepine) had to be kept active in the body for many hours. Neurotransmitters produced by the body normally get destroyed in the blood after a matter of moments. In the case of Dianabol – the target was skeletal muscle and the active agent or artificial hormone/anabolic steroid also had to be kept active in the blood for many hours where naturally it would be destroyed quickly.

So there you have it – two products produced by the same company with similar properties right up to the active agent and the target organ.  If I’m not mistaken, Dianabol is also known as metandienone. The disabled powerlifter Seyed Mousavi was stripped of his medal in the Athens 2004 Paralympics when he failed drugs tests for this compound.

Now I had utterly no idea what I was being prescribed by those medics, back in 2000. I was too busy getting my head around ‘you’ve got a lifelong condition which technically classifies you as disabled’. It has taken me 8 years to discover the side-effects of those drugs and what they have done to me. The current medical philosophy is to give me a greater variety of drugs, in an attempt to reduce the side effects of the previous drugs but to still keep taking the previous drugs. If I followed this advice, I’d be taking 4 different anticonvulsants plus various things to improve my digestion, sleep and to reduce chronic fatigue.

How many people turning up to the Paralympic games may have been through something similar?

How the heck can the organisers of those (and future) games be aware of the contents of the thousands of prescribed drugs given to manage different conditions – from asthma to x-linked ammagammaglobulinaemia – and how the ingredients that appear on their ‘banned substances’ list may be needed for a legitimate reason?

The final point – the epilepsy drug carbamazepine actually does the opposite to its cousin Dianabol/ metandienone. It can stop the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonad axis (which is a feedback loop of hormones).  It can stop men producing testosterone. So, if the ‘banned substance’ dianabol ever had a legitimate use, it could possibly be for undoing the damage caused by carbamazepine to men with epilepsy.  Obviously, the drug is now banned totally so I, and other men with epilepsy will be denied that opportunity.

Last year I met a man that was left with no legs following a motorcycle crash.  He was being prescribed anabolic steroids, to help reduce muscle wasting while he lay in hospital, as it was agreed that he needed to maintain muscle mass prior to learning to use a wheelchair.

As you can see, the complexity of the situation is huge.  While I understand that it is important to stop people from cheating, it would be tragic if it were at the cost of needlessly excluding very worthy people.

-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.

OK, this might get slightly controversial.. There is a film coming out in three days’ time called Bigger, Stronger, Faster. Its trailer is at http://www.apple.com/trailers/magnolia/biggerstrongerfaster/hd/  (hi def trailer at http://www.apple.com/trailers/magnolia/biggerstrongerfaster/hd/). Now I haven’t seen the film yet, so I want to make sure that I don’t make any ignorant assumptions about the film. The trailer is obviously trying to ’shock’ people into going to watch the film (sorry - movie!) and I’ll leave it to others to form their own opinions on the film itself.

There is one brief scene in the trailer showing the words ‘Whatever the cost’ and then a guy sat at a stadium asking "if you had to take a drug with the known side-effects of anabolic steroids, to keep your job right now and support your family, would you do it?" and this has really got to me. Basically because there are ethical similarities with my own situation at the moment (despite me not actually using anabolic steroids).

For those that don’t know, I developed the condition known as epilepsy eight years ago. This means that the way that my brain’s cells send chemical messages to each other has changed. This has altered the excitability of my whole brain in a way that predisposes it to seizures. I need to take this opportunity to thank the people at the gym that have helped me when I have gone into seizure - Adam247 and Jdavidson1987 in particular.

When I first developed the conditions, doctors simply handed me some drugs and said ‘take these twice a day’. I ended up unable to look after myself (I was manager of a University’s Fitness Services at the time) and hence I had to go and live with my parents. Nobody knew what was happening: my Mom thought I had a brain tumor, my Dad thought I was having a breakdown. I still kept having seizures. Funnily enough, the doctors changed the drugs they had given me for epilepsy and the effects diminished in about a week. So I went out and re-trained and rebuilt my life, becoming a special needs teacher.

Seven years passed and during this time I became slowly more and more sick. By November 2007 I was unable to work at all, had Chronic Fatigue, lowered immunity and a digestive system that was intolerant of more and more foods. I was still having seizures.  So I took matters into my own hands and stopped taking the epilepsy pills. Since that time my health has gradually improved. (I have kept weight training throughout all of this).

Here’s the bit that ties in with that film. The doctors have told me that I MUST take their drugs again, because the drugs will reduce the seizures that I have. They predict that I will either be killed by a seizure or injure myself during a seizure. They have told me that they will not treat me unless I take these anti-convulsant drugs, so I feel that I am being forced into a similar predicament as people that are ‘having’ to take drugs with the side-effects of anabolic steroids in order to keep jobs and support families.

The doctors treating me recently admitted that drugs they want me to take DO have side-effects on the immune system, the hormone system (lower testosterone), the digestive system, sleep (insomnia), vision, skin, memory, concentration and speech. Looking through medical journals such as ‘Neurology’ indicates that there are a number of other side-effects associated with the chronic use of these anti-convulsant drugs, including osteoporosis (brittle bones), and disorders of the blood, liver and heart. A number of psychological illnesses are noted too. These drugs are used to treat mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder, too.

So, If I go back to the phrase that I saw in the movie trailer, showing the words ‘Whatever the cost’, I would like to ask a similar question: "if you had to take a drug with the known side-effects of anti-epileptics, to keep your job right now and support your family, would you do it?". I wonder how people would answer….

I have a suspicion that the same drugs companies developed certain anabolic steroids and anti-epilepsy drugs in the 60’s 70’s and 80’s. How interesting that one of those categories is now seen as ‘a dirty little secret’, ’sends the wrong message’ and ’something simply un-American’ whereas the other category is assumed to be safe and repeatedly prescribed to millions of people around the world. I’d say a lot of this involves people’s attitudes, and dangerous assumptions based on information given out by whoever developed both categories of pharmaceuticals.

People getting yelled at for taking drugs on one hand, people getting yelled at for NOT taking drugs on the other… Crazy.

Is there anyone awake at the end of all that??