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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1580 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for July 31, 2024

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I have previously commented that I am sloppy about food safety and have never experienced anything that I would consider a meaningful bout of food poisoning. I am here to report that this is no longer the case! As of last Friday, I have become acquainted with the joys of severe gastroenteritis. The vomiting and diarrhea, those I expected to be the case from the reports and I wouldn't surprised. A fever, sure, that's to be expected. The other stuff shouldn't be a surprise if you reason through it, but wow, much worse than I thought! Other adverse effects:

  • Sleep deprivation, with my watch recording my lowest Sleep Score ever with only 3 hours of sleep and no deep sleep or REM.
  • Absolute exhaustion, owing to that lack of sleep.
  • Loss of equilibrium, sketchy balance on the occasions that I did activities as challenging as moving from the bed to the couch.
  • Being absolutely disgusted by almost any food or beverage idea for a solid two days and almost every food and beverage option for a third day.
  • More exhaustion, this time from not being able to consume a meaningful amount of calories.

I still have the lingering effects from the general gut health damage and lack of nutrition. Weighing myself this morning (well rehydrated at this point, so not at the worst of things) I'm about 8 pounds lighter than I was on Friday. Very bad, actually! On the bright side, this morning was also the first time I felt my strength starting to return and I was able to just do a normal walk with the dog. After days of being unable to summon the strength to go downstairs, that's good progress!

On the whole, I'm not sure that it's quite sufficient to make me rethink my approach to food safety, but I'll say that it was a bad enough bout that it resets how I think about food poisoning and level sets just how unpleasant I would expect it to be.

There's a giant Listeria outbreak in Delis over here, which I'm pretty sure lead to me shitting my brains out last Monday all day. Boars Head has recalled another seven million pounds of meat. So you're probably on the right track with the deli ham. I'm 90% sure that's what got me.

Because this is how my mind works: What food or drink was the culprit?

Edit: I see you answered below.

What do you use to track your sleep and produce a sleep score?

A Garmin epix watch. I would say the scores generally match my felt experience pretty closely. It's neat to see how quick you drop down to deep sleep when you're healthy but physically exhausted from the day.

It also gives HRV data and a stress score that's largely HRV derived. The data over the weekend was wild in general. On the flip side, it was actually nice to see some objective measurement of just how bad off I was dropping to help reassure me that I don't really need to do anything other than lie there, drink fluids, and get better when I get better.

Amazon tells me this is in the arena of $500-$1,000 depending on vintage and features. Is that accurate?

I definitely want to track my sleep quality, but am absolutely paranoid that a lot of the devices out there are woo-woo bullshit. Don't mind spendin', just want to spend right.

Whoop is excellent for this without all the doodads of a running watch like a Garmin.

Yep, it was a new Gen 2 when it first came out. Had a corporate discount, so it was $800. So cheap I couldn't afford not to buy it! That and a buddy got one, so I had to keep up.

I like the data, but I mostly got it for the actual running features. The GPS accuracy is superb, the battery life is long, and the running dynamics provide some cool data (e.g. stride length, cadence, estimated power including wind, elevation of stride). The AMOLED screen was the nicest they were likely to have for quite some time, so on something that I wear all the time I valued that a fair bit.

Overall, not something I would recommend dollar for dollar unless running or another sport where GPS data is important. A huge amount of what you're paying for is Garmin's high-quality GPS. Their software used to suck, but it's now excellent as well and allows really nice integration with other platforms.

Do you have any suspicions as to what it was?

Not really. The main potential culprit I can think of was some deli ham, but I cooked it, so it's not the most likely offender. If there was some obviously sketchy choice made, I'd probably be rethinking that approach! All I can think is that I must have screwed up and contaminated something.

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