Carnivore Week 3 and Sum Up

 Week 3 was week 2 with dairy - mainly cream, butter and cheese. I realise this isn't strictly carnivore (seems to be referred to as dirty carnivore), so maybe more inline with zero carb or "animal based".

So how was it

This was the best week yet and I could comfortably eat like this the majority of the time. Everything felt pretty good, weight dropped another ½ kilo. The addition of butter for cooking made the meals much more enjoyable, and I had really missed cheese.

The Verdict and General Thoughts

My intention for doing this was to try and determine if there is anything to all the hype around this style of eating, or is it mainly a vehicle for getting social media credit. Putting it on here is just so I have a record of it in times to come (and I haven't done anything technically interesting of late).

The verdict - I think there's definitely something in it, and something I'll be looking to work in as a permanent change going forward.

 As with anything there are pros and cons. The biggest pros are health related - losing extra weight, better bowel function and feeling generally better. The cons were more "soft" cons, but still things that would need to be addressed to do this long term.,

Cons

Firstly, the rest of the family aren't keen on this style of eating, which means separate meal prep. Not a huge problem but a bit of a pain logistically having to cook multiple meals. Meal prep is, for me, another con. I enjoy cooking and experimenting with different foods and flavours.

I also like to eat a lot of the food that I gave up - though this is a problem with any diet change, and I suspect undoubtedly why many people fail to change their eating patterns.

These cons could probably be resolved pretty easily, e.g. having set days to eat and prepare more detailed meals, and if there're no real health issues having more of an "animal based" diet than strict carnivore.

Now for a short rant. 

It's also difficult to determine the long term effects. Trying to get information online swings from the "you'll die if you don't eat fruit and veg" to "fruit and vegetables are trying to kill you". Conventional medical and diet practitioners seem to be firmly in the first camp with most being very reluctant to hold a view outside of the 5+ a day and plenty of fibre mindset. The carnivore camp is getting almost as dogmatic in their views as the vegan community with an almost religious dedication to what can and can't be eaten, and digital crucifixion of anyone who decides they want to start incorporating any sort of plant. Ok, so probably only a few with this mindset, but it is (disappointingly) growing from what I've seen on social media since looking into this. It could also just be the algorithms trying to rage bait me, but does contribute to the difficulty of finding accurate information.

There's also the tendency for people to want to make money by selling you something - "vital" supplements, books/content to stop you making fatal mistakes etc. And man do some people go overboard - a simple statement to eat more fat results in people telling you to drink lard and add copious amounts of butter to your coffee, when I'm pretty sure the intent was to not cut the fat off your meat and maybe cook your eggs in some butter.

Rant over.

Other (Possible) Pros 

Other than the health benefits already mentioned, there were a handful of things that I noticed during the journey which I can't categorically say are related to the diet, but they do appear to be worth closer investigation. 

Smell/Odour - I try to limit the use of deodorant if not leaving the house, and must admit it can get a bit fragrant particularly in hot weather. This seemed to be significantly diminished by week 3.

Sun Tolerance -  I'm a pale specimen that rapidly turns pink in direct sunlight, but I avoid sunscreen where possible, preferring to cover up with clothing. We went for an impromptu walk during week 3 and although I had a hat, was only wearing short sleeves and the sun was pretty intense so I was expecting some arm heat and redness. This didn't eventuate as I thought it would, but maybe the sun UV wasn't as strong as I thought,

Skin itchiness - Occasionally my skin will have a very mild itch, which is noticeable but easy to ignore. This seemed to disappear in week 3.

So What Next?

As mentioned above, this had many benefits so I'm keen to work this into my regular eating. I'm thinking more of a zero carb, animal based diet, but with plant based herbs, spices and seasonings, for most of the week, then maybe a bit less rigid over the weekend to cater for some cooking enjoyment. Restricting treat foods to special occasions, which I had been doing but slipped a bit over Christmas. Hopefully this gives similar health outcomes while allowing me to scratch the mental itch around food preparation and enjoying different foods. Time will tell

Windows Missing Taskbar Icons Fix

 For a while I've had the problem that apps like Outlook and Teams have been missing their icons on the taskbar when running. I tried the recommended fixes of deleting icon and thumbnail caches but none of these worked so I just put up with it, as the apps were still running and hovering over the space on the taskbar brought up the preview so I could tell which one it was.

Finally got tired of it when I started getting more apps from Windows Store and realised that all of these were affected in the same way. Popular Internet solutions were:

• Uninstall Google Drive
• Create a new user profile and copy all personal items from the old profile to the new one
• Reinstall Windows 

Google drive wasn't installed, and migrating profiles sounded painful. Windows reinstall was never going to happen. 

Thanks to an Internet stranger the fix was actually pretty straight forward.

• Open regedit
• Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT 
• Expand .png key
• Delete any keys under the shellex key
• Restart explorer

 

That was it, all of the taskbar items are back and harmony is restored

 

Carnivore Week 2 Thoughts

 Week 2 of the carnivore "experiment" was less strict than week 1, with the addition of eggs and other meat sources - mainly chicken, fish and organ meats.

So how was it? 

Adding in the extra foods made the week a lot more enjoyable. Where I think I could do the lion diet if I needed to, I could happily largely stick to what I ate during week 2 for a reasonable duration. 

Most of the results were along similar lines to week 1, however meal prep was more interesting and the meals themselves were also less boring. I have still been avoiding herbs and spices, with the exception of some pepper this week

The Detail

Weight loss continued though at a much reduced rate, around 1/2 kg down this week.

TMI section. Reduced frequency of bowel movements continued this week, even though it felt like I was eating more. Still no constipation symptoms, but it still just seemed like there was significantly less waste product to be moved. When movements do happen they're quick and easy, so all in all this seems like a pro.

Intestinal "unrest" has quietened down and isn't noticeable. This could be due to the added variety or just that I've adapted

The Cheat

Well, sort of. We were out away from home one night towards the end of the week and decided to grab some Maccas for dinner, which is not something we have very often at all. I expected some bloating/discomfort and there was a bit of that, but I also noticed that my nose started a slight run which made me realise I'd been blowing my nose a lot less frequently during the past week. I'm usually good for a nose blow to start the day but hadn't been doing that for a few days. Something to look into. I also found it not as enjoyable to eat

Week 3

So onto week 3. This week will include dairy (super exciting!) and basically anything that comes from an animal.

 

Carnivore Week 1 Thoughts

 Week 1 of the carnivore "experiment" done, completed on a diet of beef and lamb, with water, black coffee and salt the only other ingredients.

So how was it? 

All in all not bad. Here's the tldr; more detail below

Pros

Meal prep is very easy

Weight loss

Better energy

Food consumption awareness

 Cons

Slight intestinal discomfort 

Less bowel movements

Boring

Difficult if not at home

Slightly anti-social 

The Detail

While it appears there's more cons that pros, the pros are pretty significant and the cons pretty minor. The most noticeable effect was weight loss - 3kg for the week. Now most of this is probably fluid but this is still significant. It's highly likely that I wasn't eating as many calories as usual, but I definitely didn't get hungry as often. I usually do an OMAD type fast most days anyway and continued that this week.

TMI section. Related to this (I think) was a very reduced frequency of bowel movements. Not constipation,  as there were none of the symptoms of this, but it just seemed like there was significantly less waste product to be moved. This could be a pro but was a bit disconcerting to start with.

There was also some slight intestinal unrest. Very minor and I'm guessing this will disappear as my body adjusts.

Energy levels seemed a bit more consistent - not necessarily more energy, but less fluctuations during the day.

Especially on the first couple of days I became aware of how often I opened the fridge. I wasn't hungry, and didn't get any cravings so this was just a habit

Probably the hardest part of this was that, for me, this was quite boring. I like different foods, and cooking, so just prepping and cooking like this soon became a bit boring, though it did free up some time to do other things.

Week 2

So onto week 2. This week will include eggs and other meats, so a bit more variety which is exciting.

 

Carnivore Experiment

 Something a little different, and not tech related.

I've been seeing a lot of stuff online about the carnivore diet, and on initial reading it makes a lot of sense nutritionally and biologically. The carnivore community can be a little intense, like most of these sorts of communities, so I haven't dived too far into those, but figured I'd give it a short trial to see what it's all about.

We tend to eat a reasonably low carb diet anyway, though Christmas and New Year certainly didn't stick to that, and I don't have any significant health concerns that I'm trying to heal, which seems to be a common reason for switching to carnivore.

Before starting out though I thought I'd get some basic, baseline, tests done then depending how it goes repeat them at the end. My primary comparison is against the markers for metabolic syndrome (https://healthify.nz/health-a-z/m/metabolic-syndrome/), rather than the seemingly more common focus on total cholesterol.

Diagnostic Tests

Cholesterol

 Total cholesterol is at a point where doctors would be reaching for the statin prescription pad, but that won't be happening so I'm not concerned about that. In my case HDL was higher than recommended and triglycerides were lower (both good) so I'm not concerned with this

Blood Pressure

Blood pressure was a bit high but I had just had coffee and walked down some stairs. Something to keep an eye on as this is a risk factor for metabolic syndrome.

Weight/BMI/Waist Measurement

BMI is a bit on the high side, but waist measurement is lower than the marker, so again not too concerned. Weight has jumped a little over what I like over the festive season so this coming down would be a good thing. 

Blood Glucose

This one was also fine, though towards the higher end of fine so something to keep an eye on 

The Test

First off, this is not very scientific and also not very intense. The plan is to spend about 3 - 4 weeks eating this way to see how physically and mentally sustainable it is, and if there are any immediately noticeable effects. I acknowledge that there's often an adjustment period and effects might not be noticeable immediately, but I'm just looking to see what the lifestyle is like. Also, I'm not cutting out coffee! So here's the plan:

Week 1 - Basically the Lion diet. Red meat from ruminants, salt and water (and coffee). This is the most intense form of carnivore so jumping straight in will give an idea of the mental requirements of this style of eating.

Week 2 - More in line with a standard carnivore diet. Other forms of meat and eggs. I'm going to keep avoiding dairy and processed meats like bacon and just see how introducing some small changes impacts the mind and body

Week 3 - Adding dairy. This will be a good test to see if dairy does have any negative impacts

Week 4 and beyond - Who knows? I might decide enough's enough after 3 weeks, or could be a full on, intense, convert

 

So, onto the test. Just a note that the area I live in has a strong agricultural sector so all red meat we buy is grass raised and generally local within about a 100km distance so is all relatively low carbon footprint

SSIS – Unicode data is odd byte size for column. Should be even byte size

I'm posting this here as I always forget what the fix is when I run into this error. Massive thanks to LSDBTECH for this fix.

When using a script component in SSIS with a Unicode text stream (DT_NTEXT) output column to an NVARCHAR(MAX) database column you can hit the error:

Unicode data is odd byte size for column <column number>. Should be even byte size

This usually happens because the method for adding the large content takes a byte array argument, and the common way to convert the string to a byte array is using Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes function. The blog post linked above has this explanation:

 “Notice that compressed Unicode strings are always an odd number of bytes. This is how SQL Server determines that the string has actually been compressed, because an uncompressed Unicode string—which needs 2 bytes for each character—will always be an even number of bytes” Source

The fix is to use Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes instead. Here's a code snippet, in this case reading an Azure blob

... (Azure connect stuff goes in here)

var content = blob.DownloadText();

BlobPropertiesBuffer.AddRow();
BlobPropertiesBuffer.Name = blob.Name;
BlobPropertiesBuffer.LastModified = blobProperties.LastModified.Value;

// This next line will cause the error "Unicode data is odd byte size for column 3. Should be even byte size"
BlobPropertiesBuffer.Content.AddBlobData(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(content));

// Instead use this line
BlobPropertiesBuffer.Content.AddBlobData(Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(content));

Also noting that adding to the output buffer column for nvarchar(max)/text streams needs to use the function AddBlobData rather than assigning the value to the column which you do for strings and numeric values (see snippet above)

Azure Blob Container SAS Key Authentication Error

 Setting up Azure blob container access with a SAS key recently and kept hitting a wall with authentication errors trying to list the container contents. The SAS key had read and list permissions, but even granting full permissions kept coming back with the error

Server failed to authenticate the request. Make sure the value of Authorization header is formed correctly including the signature.

I was testing this using PowerShell Get-AzStorageContainer, and this was the problem. Getting the storage container needs a SAS key generated at the storage account level, changing the call to use Get-StorageBlob without specifying a blob name allowed the requests to succeed with the read and list permissions.

Here's the full test code as an example (actual resource names removed)

$storageAccount = "my-storage-account"
$container = "my-container"
$sas = 'sp=rl&st=2024-04-08T04:56:21Z&se=2024-04-08T12:56:21Z&spr=https&sv=2022-11-02&sr=c&sig=sig'

$context = New-AzStorageContext -StorageAccountName $storageAccount -SasToken $sas 

# this line fails with a 403 authentication error
#(Get-AzStorageContainer -Context $context -Name ci-finance-samples -)

# this one will succeed and output a list of blobs in the container
Get-AzStorageBlob -Context $context -Container $container