Matisyahu's Blog

As much as I like to relax on my day off I also want to get things done that I can’t or don’t get done during the week when I’m working. The first thing I did today was doing a clean install of all the Apple devices (including my iPhone 16 Pro Max where I did a DFU restore before setting it up for the first time), a pre-winter cleaning and the one thing I found interesting was an issue on my Mac Studio. I created a bootable usb drive following the instructions which created a macOS 15.4 bootable installer which worked perfectly fine on my MacBook Air but when I did a clean install on my Mac Studio it rebooted and then asked me to select a bootable drive, I selected the built in drive but it came back saying it wasn’t bootable. I then did a network recovery and it wasn’t until afterwards that I found that the recovery version offered was 15.4.1.

Long story short the previous macOS installed on my Mac Studio was 15.4.1 so it appears that the 15.4.1 appears to have also updated the firmware which meant an older version of macOS couldn’t be loaded on the device hence the drive being not bootable. Makes me wonder whether part of the security fix was related to the M1 because my MacBook Air M2 had no issues restoring 15.4. I do a clean install off a usb bootable for two reasons, 1) it is quicker 2) in the past I have sometimes found what is available for the internet recovery lags behind (it appears that isn’t the case in this situation – maybe the security vulnerability forced Apple to update what is available for recovery).

How did it go in the end? it all worked out in the end and everything is running smoothly – Safari is working well with the 1Blocker extension which has done a great job replacing AdGuard for Safari (the lack of updates for the last 4-5 months for Safari along with the lack of following up on the bug I reported 2 months ago hasn’t been acknowledge by the developers). Yes, I am back to iPhone, Safari and Apple TV but that is another discussion entirely but what I can say for the TLDR version – the iPhone 16 Pro Max is wonderful.

Today (Tuesday) I’ve cleaned my place from top to bottom, weeding the garden and tidying up outside around the house as well. One of the benefits of losing weight has been a big boost in energy – it is amazing how I tried to normalise the lack of energy by trying to convince myself “oh, this is perfectly normal” when in reality it wasn’t normal and more importantly was an indication of an underlying issue that needed to be addressed.

On Monday I also tried an experiment, as I noted on a previous post I talked about diet soft drinks and carb cravings but then I read and watched some videos and I suddenly realised that maybe I got it all wrong. Around 3 months ago I had a HbA1c blood test and it came back saying that my blood sugar was too high and the link that I made in my brain was that even if I kept off sugary foods that I kept getting cravings for high carb food so I drew a correlation but I didn’t look into it further wondering whether there was a causal link between the two. The reason why is I assumed that that the spike in blood sugar wasn’t due to savoury food I was eating my sweet food but even when I cut sweet food out of my diet I still kept craving carbs. The problem is that I failed to understand the bigger problem which was the fact that my blood sugar was high because I was eating not only too many calories but too many carbs and I was flooding my body with fuel which was spiking my blood sugar which then made me more hungry.

What was my theory? now that my blood sugar has come down I have found that I no longer have that ravenous hunger then if I consume diet soft drink it shouldn’t have an impact on my appetite. There is only one way to check whether my theory is correct is to run an experiment and see what the results are. Well, yesterday I bought a 600ml of Diet Coke (and 2 x 1.5L of Pepsi Max to see if there is a difference between the effects of one compared to the other) when I went shopping, I drank it and nothing happened so I waited and waited, went to sleep (which funny enough, I was expecting to be up going to the toilet but it appears that high blood sugar also results in higher rates of having to go to the toilet). Today I had a cup of Pepsi Max and the same results – no change in appetite.

It appears I was believing there was a causal link when I was ignorant of the larger issue which was high blood sugar and that was because I thought high blood sugar was due to eating too much sweet food when in reality it was the high number of carbs I was eating (and sweet food, along with other types of food I was eating were high in carbs) and the sedentary. As soon as I cut the carbs down to a minimum and focused on eating protein, fresh fruits and vegetables along with exercise I started losing weight and getting it all under control my appetite also was under control. My appetite is also dealt with my controlling carbs and calories – a meal with too many carbs will make me feel hungry but if I eat a meal with the same amount of calories (sometimes less) but hardly carbs along with a decent amount of protein I feel full and satisfied for a along time.

Getting healthier is a journey and in that journey I admit I have made some really silly mistakes along with drawing conclusion where there was no causal link but life is about making mistakes, learning from them and then becoming a better person because you’ve had the experience and learning first hand how to avoid the situation in future.