A month (and then some) of bad eating really skewed blood tests

I intend to, and have intended to, go over the details of the various blood tests that I’ve been conducting at quarterly intervals for almost a year now.  I even have some tests that go back to 2010.  The point of the tests are to look at how my body is reacting to the diet/lifestyle that I was previously on.  While I will one day go into the gory details of each one, I just received the results of my tests back in December, and the numbers, I thought, were pretty incredible.

It’s a bit of a mixed blessing. I was always curious if diet would dramatically drive my blood tests in a particular direction over such a short period of time.  I think I now know the answer to that, and it’s a definitive yes.  While I also had the marathon ramp up happening at the same time, I pretty much sat out the rest of the month of December.  Therefore any residual of that should have gone away.  At the same time some numbers which would have stayed low, such as Testosterone scores, were back up to my pre-ramp up levels.  I therefore think that the results are mostly attributable to my incredibly poor diet for the last month and a half of the year.

Again, I’ll be going into detail later, but by far the biggest numbers that changed for the worse were my cholesterol numbers, some liver enzyme tests and my Vitamin-D levels.  While my numbers are still within normal levels, the rise is them is unmistakable.  For example, while my total cholesterol has been between 125 and 133 for all of last year, for the end of December it was 152. Since 199 is the level people start getting worried about, that’s not completely horrible, but a jump of 30% is pretty clear.  My triglycerides score may still be half of the level people start worrying about but it’s also 50% higher than it was for the second half of the year.  Lastly, a measure of liver enzymes that is still a bit below the top of the normal range, is a full 100% higher than it was for the rest of the year.  I certainly hadn’t done any strenuous exercise for the past few weeks before the test, nor was I sick.  That’s therefore me overtaxing my liver compared to other times.

My previous test results were from the end of September.  In the beginning of September I had a pretty good heavy eating and drinking (for me anyway) week at the beginning of the month.  December was comparable to that but for several weeks in a row.  While my numbers from July to October were only slightly worse, definitely in the noise, it is clear that a month and a half of treating your body like this can start a slide.  Where would it stop?  I’m not looking to find that out.  I am looking forward to seeing how they snap back at the end of this Virgin Diet phase however.