Good Blood, Bad Blood

I had my yearly physical a week ago and got the results of my blood test. A little over a year ago I was diagnosed with very high cholesterol and was prescribed statin medication which I decided not to take and to try lowering it with diet and exercise alone. Here's how it's been going:

                 January '08   June '08  August '08  March '09 ***April '11 ***May '12  *August '16  **August '18 ****August '19
Total Cholesterol     289         215         183        195          197        189          221           197          179
LDL Cholesterol       214         121         115        122          115        112          131           110          110
HDL Cholesterol        48          46          42         47           52         43           51            52           46

*   Added August 21, 2018 - darn it, cholesterol is still too high after all these years.
**  Added August 31, 2018 - well, it is headed in the right direction but not far enough.
*** Added October 3, 2018 - Dr. McDougall 10-Day program from 2012
****Added September 20, 2019 - so now LDL between 70 and 189 mg/dL is a reason to consider statin therapy. Ugh.

In November I had it checked at a health fair where I work and got a reading of under 150 but I doubt that was accurate. In any case, I've been successful at keeping it down but it has creeped up since the summer.

I've got to confess that because of that super low reading in November I started getting a bit careless with my diet and exercise. I'm still riding my bicycle and eat mostly vegetarian and low fat, but the dessert bar at work is way too tempting and I tend to gobble down whatever is put in front of me.

Feeling a bit apprehensive over this last exam I decided to do the equivalent of cramming for an exam. I rode my bicycle hard and fast over the hill to work all week and cut out all the fat I could from my meals. I'm not sure if it made a difference on my cholesterol but something else popped up on the blood test:

Hematocrit 40.3

YOU ARE MILDLY ANEMIC. STOP BY FOR ADDITIONAL BLOOD TESTS TO FIND OUT WHY YOU ARE ANEMIC.

Geez, if it's not one thing it's another! In addition, my blood pressure was rather low. What's up with low blood pressure and anemia?

Well a quick check on the Internet (what did we do before Google?) calmed me down. It turns out that many athletes experience these same symptoms when starting up a strenuous exercise program. So much for cramming for a blood test by over training. In addition, there's a slight chance of vitamin B-12 deficiency that could also cause anemia but I'm not a big fan of popping pills (including vitamin pills) for a quick fix.

I need to go back for another blood test but I won't be cramming for the test.

Hybrid Bicycle Experiment

We recently became a one-car household so I've been doing some experimenting with alternate forms of transportation. The bicycle was working fine, especially when combined with public transportation, but it was nowhere nearly as fast or convenient as a car. However, driving the one and only car we own to work just so it can sit in the parking structure all day and leaving my wife stranded at home without wheels--well, that wasn't an option.

Riding the bike was fun for the most part but mashing my way over the Cahuenga pass, in traffic, in the rain, late at night, not so much. What I needed was a little push to make it a little easier and the answer seemed to be to augment the energy from my legs with an electric motor.

I already had a couple of bicycles so I had a backup in case the experiment went awry. Good thing too.


The motor I settled on was a Bafang geared front hub. The reason I went with a front hub was because it seemed simpler to mount. A geared motor should have more torque than a direct drive which should make climbing the hill pretty much effortless. Another advantage of a geared motor is that it freewheels. Some may say freewheeling is a disadvantage because it cannot regenerate electricity and recharge the battery like a hybrid car--but this requires a special controller and I didn't want to over complicate things since this was my first e-bike build.

I got the motor as a kit that included building the hub into a 700c wheel along with an ecrazyman controller, twist throttle and brake levers with cutoff switches so you can't apply power and brakes at the same time.

What the kit didn't include was a battery and that's where I went all out and got the latest craze in e-bikes, a lithium iron phosphate, LiFePO4, 48 volt 20 amp hour Ping battery pack.

Granted, it doesn't look like much more than a bunch of metal strips wrapped up in black duct tape, but it should deliver quite a jolt of power for many years, more than enough to get me to and from work. Notice that it has three wires, a positive, a charging negative and a discharging negative. Also notice that it doesn't have a connector and the end of the wires. The charger came with a connector but the controller had a completely different connector. Neither of these connectors were standard of the shelf items so I soldered common XLR audio connectors that are available in any neighborhood Radio Shack store--though you might have to do some searching because the sales people probably won't know they have XLR connectors.

I was able to find a Topeak trunk bag that fit the battery perfectly. The bag, paired with a Topeak rack made it very easy to remove the pack from the bike and take it inside for charging. However, in order to make this practical the controller and all the other wires and connectors had to live somewhere other than the trunk bag so I got a frame bag which worked great for this purpose.

Except for the connector for the battery everything seemed pretty much straight forward even though absolutely no instructions were included with any of the items that I ordered. Some wire colors didn't match up but the connectors did, like this one for the brakes:


While on the brakes, the controller had only one brake connector but of course there's a front and rear brake. I ended up splicing the brake wires in parallel so that applying either brake would cut off power to the motor.

So, all the connectors fit and the wires matched up by color and it was time to go for a test ride.




It worked! It ran little rougher than I expected and there wasn't much pull, but it pulled--for about two blocks then it cut out. That wasn't very impressive, but whoa did the motor get hot! It turned out that I succeeded in burning out the motor on the very first test run.

With the help of John Robert Homes from Holmes Hobbies we were able to determine that the problem was that the proper way of hooking things up is connecting the green wire to the yellow and the yellow to green. What? That's right, the motor manufacturer and the controller maker obviously weren't talking to each other when they made their products. In any case, JRH replaced my burned out motor stator assembly at no charge and once I got the wires switched over it finally delivered as promised.


This time I made it a few blocks before encountering yet another problem. The hub motor attaches to the front fork with a sort of "key" in the axle:


The fit was nice and tight but after just a few accelerations--wow that was cool, it has so much torque that the front wheel spins when I take off. Oops:


The fork dropouts deformed and the axle spun around a few turns and nearly broke off the cable! It turns out that what I needed was a set of torque arms, another hard learned lesson. Gee, this would be so much easier if it came with instructions!


I didn't have the facility to fabricate anything beefy enough so I ended up Googling around and found some made specifically for e-bikes made by AmpedBikes. Just to be safe I bought a pair and put one on each side.


Finished, finally--or so I thought.


The spinning front wheel was annoying so I put on my extra large Wald front basket. I was planning on using the removable battery feature for bus rides but technically, you're not supposed to mount a bicycle with an "over sized" basket on a bus bike rack. However, as it turned out I got to work much faster without having to use the bus so it didn't make a difference. Besides, I now had a cargo bike capable of carrying three bags of groceries--and then some with the panniers on the trunk bag deployed.

I did take the bike on the metro rail system regularly for the ride home--no need to remove the battery for that.

The cruising speed on the flats was a rather quick 22 miles per hour. Yeah, I know, that doesn't sound like much but believe me, on a bicycle without any suspension it is plenty fast. Even the hill that had me huffing and puffing before the conversion was an easy 18 MPH on the uphill side and coasting downhill, geared motor so no drag, was the same scary 35 MPH. I burned out a few brake pads on that route!

One thing that was a problem was plugging in the battery, the connector would always arc. If the pins were not lined up properly it could make a rather loud pop. Of course this wasn't very good on the connector so I tried this trick:

I used XLR instead of Deans connectors and it seemed like it would work.


But it didn't stop the arcing so I removed it. I think a better solution would be to put a heavy duty switch on the power line but I got used to the spark when connecting the battery, though it did blacken the pins on the XLR connector it didn't seem to affect performance.

I rode the bike daily for a little over a month through wind, cold and even rain over the brutal Los Angeles winter--OK, it wasn't all that brutal but I rode the bike when my bike riding co-workers wimped out.

There were a few problems, like the time I got off work late and I was in a hurry to get home so I decided to ride over the hill instead of take the train. There's several miles of rough road without street lights and I hit a huge pot hole at full speed. I usually don't get flats but with the extra weight of the battery my rear tire didn't stand a chance. My wife came to the rescue so I wouldn't have to do a repair job on a dark road in the rain--glad we kept one car, and the bicycle carrier!

The only other problem that I had was when the brake levers got wet they would short out. It wasn't all that bad, just a quick brake and release would shake them dry enough to continue. That problem went away after one day without rain.

All stories have an ending and this one ended one morning going into work. After crossing the Cahuenga Pass the motor lost most of it's power and it was feeling very rough. Did I wear out the gears? Did the motor burn out? I'm not really sure. It might be repairable but the quick fix would be to replace the motor--or get a Vespa. Since it was my dream all along to get a Vespa and the e-bike was just an experiment I decided to end the experiment and put the bike up for sale.

The motor might be shot, the bike abused but the battery is in even better shape than when I bought it. Turns out that LiFePO4 batteries need a break in period of about a month before they can stand a deep discharge without damaging the cells. How far will the bike go on a charge? Only the next owner will be able to answer that question.

Making Animated Movies

Although I have signed a non-disclosure agreement with DreamWorks Animation, I think it is OK to post this clip showing how animated movies are made.

One Gear, No Coasting

I'm finally getting the hang of bicycle commuting around Los Angeles and the solution was to get an old bike and "fix" it. This particular bicycle was a high school graduation for my little brother, nearly 30 years ago. He was cleaning out his apartment and when he decided to get rid of it I snapped it up.

Former life as a 10 speed.

The next part of this project was to clean it up and "fix" it. It wasn't really broken, it's just that the current trend in city bicycles is fixed gear, aka fixie. A fixed gear bicycle as defined on Wikipedia is:

A fixed-gear bicycle or fixed wheel bicycle, is a bicycle without the ability to coast. The sprocket is screwed directly on to the hub and there is no freewheel mechanism. A reverse-thread lockring is usually fitted to prevent the sprocket from unscrewing.^[1] Whenever the rear wheel is turning, the pedals turn in the same direction.^[2] By resisting the rotation of the pedals, a rider can slow the bike to a stop, without the aid of a brake.^[1] A fixed gear bicycle can even be ridden in reverse.

 At first this may seem like handicapping the bike, going from 10 gears to one, but riding a fixie is a whole different experience. Maintaining a fixed gear is ultra simple because there are no derailleurs to oil and adjust.

Many fixies have just one front brake or even no brakes at all, applying back pressure on the pedals is all you really need. However, it takes quite a bit of well developed leg strength to make an emergency stop so I opted to keep both front and rear brakes and I'm glad I did, especially going down hills. Remember, there's no coasting so the faster you go, the faster you need to pedal and if your feet slip out of the clips--you're in deep trouble!

My biggest surprise riding a fixed gear was going uphill. You'd think that it would be a weak point but my bike is geared fairly low, 39 tooth chain ring and 16 tooth cog, so that combined with the absence of extra gears, cables and levers makes for a very lightweight climbing machine.

Perhaps the popularity of fixed gear bicycles is an anti hi-tech statement, maybe it is just a fad. It isn't for everyone. I wasn't sure it was for me but since I had a perfect bike to experiment with and lots of inspiration from the posts on fixedgeargallery.com I thought I'd give it a try. As it turned out, it fits perfectly on an MTA bus rack, is easy to carry up and down stairs at the train station and I've been able to conquer every hill I attempted. In fact for the past several months, this bike has been my primary means of transportation to and from work.

Optimum Health Institute

Time out. I had a break from my job but I wanted to find a way to have a much longer break, an early retirement. We were thinking about making this life changing move but first we had to clean out the clutter that was holding us back. Like many homeowners our clutter seemed to be concentrated in the garage. Great, our plan was to remodel the garage so we could either rent it out or move into it ourselves and rent out the house. Of course what was taking up all the space in the garage was just the physical clutter, there was also the mental clutter that was not visible but real nonetheless. It seemed like an insurmountable task but we had an ace in the hole, a trump card, an upper hand--we had just taken our health to a new high, an optimum high, we had just returned from a week at the Optimum Health Institute (O.H.I.).

We visited the institute a few years ago and had friends that have gone there. My wife, Rosie, went there for a week with a friend while I was on an extended job and she had a wonderful experience. Many of the visitors go there when an illness, or excuse me, a health opportunity, has eluded traditional medicine. Still others go as a cleansing ritual. My reasoning was that if we could learn a few new things about ourselves and push the limits of what we would do to optimize our health, it would be worth the $1,000 apiece for the week. Of course coming back with the energy to clear out the garage would be ideal.

Optimum Health Institute is a healing ministry of the Free Sacred Trinity Church. I'm not much into faith based organizations but people that have gone through the program there assured me that it wasn't a "religious experience" at all. In fact on several occasions the instructors/missionaries emphasized that you go with whatever you're comfortable with be it a belief in God, karma, Chakras but just come to class with an open mind.

About half of the classes and activities are mental, somewhat new age, meditation, self-reflecting and even group psychotherapy. The other half is very much physical. There are exercise classes every morning and afternoon. In addition, there's a popular daily yoga/stretching class. 

However, what seems to be the main focus of O.H.I. is wheat grass.

 

So what do you do with wheat grass? To start with, you juice it and I mean you juice it, nobody does it for you. Once it is juiced it is only good for a few minutes, maybe an hour at the most.

  

O.H.I. is one of the largest consumers of wheat grass in the nation. They have to grow it from seeds and harvest it just before juicing. In addition, since the highest quality juice comes from young grass cut only once. Their crop never matures enough to seed.

  

So how did it taste? Well, like grass. If you swallow it quickly it burns your throat, much like a shot of tequila. I found the best way to drink it was to swish it around my mouth with saliva to take the "edge" off and after a while it actually tasted slightly sweet. Some people never got the hang of it. Rosie could take it at first but as the "detox" started taking affect she couldn't stand the smell of wheat grass and I had to do the juicing for her.

Besides drinking the juice the staff suggested putting the wet pulp on the skin in areas that need healing. I saw people taping wheat grass pulp on dried, cracked skin and heard stories of how a "pulps bra" cured some womens' breast cancer.

Drinking and wearing wheat grass was only a part of the wheat grass regimen it goes deeper, much deeper. Don't forget your E's and I's is a mantra at O.H.I. which stands for enemas and implants. Enemas clean out the toxins in the colon and what they mean by an implant is once your colon is flushed out with water, pour in about four ounces of wheat grass juice into the enema bucket and, yep, suck it in. If you thought holding down a few ounces of wheat grass by mouth is a challenge, wait until you try it in the other end. They suggest holding it for about 15 minutes, good luck. Of course an amateur E and I isn't nearly as effective as a professional one and there are several well equipped colon hydro therapists on the O.H.I. grounds. Of course each session will set you back a few bucks. When we were there the going rate was about $80.

Another focus of the program is "live foods" meaning raw, uncooked, unprocessed and preferably, organic. It can be as simple as either a slice of watermelon or some oranges for breakfast but notice the either/or and not both at the same time. According to the O.H.I. diet, melons should be eaten alone, acid fruits and vegetables shouldn't be combined with alkali veggies and--well, there's a whole class with handouts and charts that cover the proper way to combine food for optimum digestion.

  

That's not to say that the food is boring, in fact it is very tasty. However, since many people are there with a rather weighty "health opportunity" the servings are somewhat on the small side. Well, there's the three days of juice fasting in the first week of instruction and once that's over, the food not only taste great but the portions are filling.

What about that cracker in my lunch? It is actually sprouted unlevated whole grain bread prepared in a dehydrater that never goes above the magical 150 degrees farenheit which kills the active enzymes and thus turning "live" food into a "dead" meal.

  

How do you know you're getting the highest quality food? Grow it yourself. On the O.H.I. grounds there's an organic garden where they harvest fresh veggies, salad greens and herbs. They don't have enough space to be self-sufficient, but it does serve as a laboratory for teaching small scale organic farming.

 

There's Rosie, short red hair, in compost class.

  

There's also some surprises at O.H.I. like George's Nature Walk. George is one of the missionaries there who likes to forage for food. The walk is done entirely on the grounds and he points out what at first looks like weeds growing in the flower beds and around the organic garden. In fact, many wild native plants are not only edible, they are tasty and nutritious.

  

What if you don't have the time or space for a garden? Then sprouting class is for you. All you need is a tray of dirt, some seeds and water and in just a couple of weeks:

  

Home grown sprouts.

 

Alright, I know that I've mostly dealt with the diet portion of the O.H.I. experience and that's only half of the program. There's the affirmations, sharing, harmonizing with various chakras colors and tones and well, there's plenty of left and right brained activities to get wrapped up in. I had my share of doubts at the start but by the end of the week we both felt great, both physically and mentally. 

The middle of the week was another story. For three days all we consumed was water, wheat grass juice, watermelon juice and green juices. Oh yeah, and a concoction called rejuvelac made from soaking rye or wheat berries in water until it ferments. With all the cleansing going on rejuvelac acts as a probiotic, building up some beneficial bacteria in the gut.

Some people couldn't make it through the juice fast. Some crashed. Then again there were the ones who drove into town for some tacos--like Rosie and a friend she made on this visit.

Something to blog about

I'm back working full-time at DreamWorks Animation and my free time has been reduced to next to nothing. However, a timely item came up and I wanted to blog it.

There was a "health fair" at work last week. One of the most popular tables at the fair was the cholesterol checking station and I waited in line nearly half an hour before getting my finger pricked and blood checked. Of course it was a just a quickie test that didn't measure HDL and LDL but what was very satisfying was that the result came back as "Lo" which the nurse interpreted as under 150 total cholesterol.

Wow, and I did it without drugs. Just for comparison:

                   January   June   August   October
Total Cholesterol    289      215     183     >150

What the Blog?

There are lots of blogs out there, active, dead, interesting, dull, profit motivated, just for fun, you name it, there's something for just about everyone. The way this blog started was, to use a tired cliche, the horse followed the cart. I built a Linux server to learn something about computers, I used it to handle all of our email services then I found it was also useful to backup the other computers in our home, keep documents on an ftp site, start experimenting with web pages and finally check out some blogging programs. Having a blog with nothing to write about is pretty useless so I started using it as a personal training log when I decided to racewalk the 2006 Los Angeles Marathon. I posted not only my daily training walks but also started posting some research whenever I injured myself. Eventually my posts started going in all sorts of different directions. At times I would post several articles and sometimes, like now, I keep to myself. However, things have been quite active around this household and it is about time that some of our experience gets documented.

The other day I made a list of some things that should get blogged on this site:

• O.H.I. - Rosie and I went to Optimum Health Institute for a week. We only ate "live" food, we fasted for three days, we meditated, we juiced wheat grass, we put wheat grass juice up where the sun don't shine...
• Neti Pot - About two years ago I listened to a broadcast on public radio about the benefits of nasal irrigation. It turned out that the Yogis in India have been doing it for years using a simple vessel called a Neti Pot. Since I started using a Neti Pot I have been sick only once for a few days while my colleagues at work were out of it for several weeks...
• Fixed-Gear - Bicycles are back in style and at the top of the bike culture is the simplest of all, the fixed-gear. You don't need a high priced high-tech, carbon fiber, computer designed frame, that old abandoned rusty steel bike will do just fine. In fact, you're not in style unless you rescued your bike from the dumpster. When my brother was getting rid of the bike my father and I gave him when he graduated from  high school 30 years ago, I snapped it up and turned it into a fixie...
• E-Bike - I'm becoming a hardcore bicycle commuter but when it gets late, the weather isn't cooperating, or if I'm tired and need a little help, an electric assist is welcome. I did some research and bought the parts to convert my old reliable commuter bike into something more than just a motorized bicycle or moped, at least by California law...
• Riding the Bus in L.A. - There are buses all over Los Angeles, but trying to get from point A to point B isn't all that easy. My brother has been riding the bus for years but I'm a newcomer thanks to a program at work that issues bus passes to anyone that asks for one...
• Downsizing - We own a house that has a detached two story garage. No, you can't park on the second story, in fact we never put a car in our garage. The upstairs was the previous owner's design studio which we turned into a comfortable apartment. What was missing was a kitchen and a living room. We decided to remodel with the intention of moving into the garage and rent out our house. That meant turning a huge storage space into a living space. Basically we have to downsize from our house to an apartment, even though that apartment happens to be a few steps away...
• Home Server to Google - I've been a computer junkie for years but when it came time to decide what to get rid of when we started downsizing it was a no brain er, everything but our laptops had to go. Since we switched to Google we've enjoyed great up time and have most of our data and applications online and available to us anywhere in the world on any computer with a connection to the Internet and a browser...
• Motorcycle School - Once we decided to become a one-car family I decided that it wouldn't hurt to keep my transportation options open. Then again it might be that I've always wanted my own Vespa...
• Alternate Car Expo - This year I made it to the Alternate Car Expo in Santa Monica. Surprisingly, electric motor scooters and bicycles were included in this year's exhibits...
• Toxic Jobs - My father worked most of his life and had a relatively short retirement. Maybe we should think about working less and playing longer. Part of my financial plan is to at least semi-retire at 55, that's just a little over a year away...
• Walking - Last Sunday I volunteered to videotape a racewalking event where competitors walked around the track at Cal Tech for an hour then went to an after race party where the major attraction was to watch the video of themselves walking around a track for an hour. It might sound crazy but walking is the most accessible of exercises yet most people don't know how to get the most benefit out of walking...

Hopefully other people will find these articles as interesting as I do. After all, if a blog falls in the Forest and nobody hears it...