Hi, kids. Today we’re going to learn about how your body uses nutrients, how it affects sleep, and what I’m doing about it.

I’ve been working with a fitness/nutritionist expert once a month on improving my overall fitness level. He has a machine that examines how much fat, muscle, and water in your body there is, as well as doing monthly tests on my toxicity levels. The toxicity thing is just a quick measure to look at how inflamed muscle tissue is, it doesn’t test for specific substances in the body.

That said, they did do a specific mineral analysis on me two years ago and I had off-the-chart levels of copper in my body. High copper levels can come from a multitude of sources – my mum probably already had high copper while she was pregnant with me  – and drinking a lot of unfiltered water from older, rusting water pipes probably significantly increased my copper levels.

The reason why you don’t want high copper is because while in trace amounts it is desirable, in large amounts it will block your body’s ability to absorb other useful nutrients; zinc and magnesium particularly. It’s probably one of the factors behind why I have such frequent insomnia (magnesium plays a key role in allowing your body to relax and fall asleep, and zinc improves the quality of sleep). If you’re interested in this sort of thing, there’s a great local doctor by the name of Doctor Dingle who’s written about this at length in an accessible fashion in books. He also does seminars and the like.

I don't know what my copper levels are like right now, but they're probably improved on what they were two years ago. I'll get another test in a year or so when I feel I can spend the money on it.

Anyway, over the Christmas break I managed to gain half a kilo of fat and one kilo of water. The fat isn't a big shock, given the way I ate at various family gatherings, but the kilo of water? My body was holding on to the extra water because I'd dropped of my exercise over my three weeks off, and I spent a lot of time dehydrated, which makes the body attempt to become a camel. It's just a thing that bodies do. Explains why I was feeling so sluggish in my third week off.

Anyway. Now we come to my three goals for the year. One is to pass Level 4 of the Japanese Language proficiency test in December. The second is to put enough money aside to manage a 2-3 week trip to visit my friends in Japan in the second half of the year.

The third goal is to get my nutritionist's machine to guess my age correctly.

The machine gives you an 'age' rank based on physical fitness, and while I'm chronologically 26, my muscle/toxicity/fat is that of a 32 year old. Could be worse. Still, I'm determined to get it to 26. Why? Because even though I don't know where exactly my life is going, I'm enjoying it. And the only thing that could really get in the way right now is poor health. So I am determined to do everything I can to make sure I'm as robust and healthy as possible.

That will also involve several trips to a quality skin specialist (not MoleScan - every MoleScan staff member I've ever met seemed to hate both their job and the world in general) because the number one killer in my family is cancer.

I'm going to write about some of the things I'm doing to improve my health in the next entry.