I stepped off and stepped on the scale again, just to make sure I wasn't dreaming it. This scale is an electronic piece of garbage but it's the one I've been using for the past 6 months so I know the ins and outs of it by now. I know you have to kick it just right to get it to turn on and zero itself out so it'll give an accurate measurement. I did all that several times and it was still saying 225. Holy crap, I'm officially on my last ten pounds.
Let me back up a bit so we can talk about motivation here...2008 was not very good year for my family. I'm originally from NJ but I've lived in various parts of northern CA for almost 15 years now, and at the end of June I got that horrible 3 AM call that nobody wants to get living cross-country from their family - my sister tearfully telling me our father had died at the way-too-early age of 68. I found out later that it was from complications from atherosclerosis, which if you're not familiar with it is a kind of plaque build-up on the interior of your arteries. The plaque can build up over time from inconsistent diet/exercise and is known to be exacerbated by smoking, all of which my dad did for years. He smoked for nearly 40 years before quitting, and then after that he would gain and lose pounds by the dozens while either not exercising or burning himself out. There were times I came home to visit and he would have his usual slight pot belly, but there were at least a couple times where he was so thin and frail I barely recognized him. Mom said sometimes he just wouldn't eat at all. At the very end of his life dad was in what we all thought was reasonable shape - he had lost weight again and was able to bike 10-15 miles a day which is a pretty good accomplishment seeing as how he'd had years where he did nothing at all. But athero is a slow, silent killer and it doesn't care what you've done for it lately - if you screw up long enough in your life over a period of decades you can calcify the stuff on the insides of your arteries so that it takes decades more to chip away, if even then. The increased blood pressure from restricted arteries makes it even harder to recover from even a mild cardiac event. And when it flakes off it can cause a stroke, or in the case of my dad, one giant heart attack that took him out in minutes.
But it doesn't end there. At my dad's funeral I met his natural brother B. (name withheld - dad was a foster child) - and was instantly freaked out by how much he looked and sounded just like him. I've only met B. once or twice in my life, but so long ago that I'd forgotten everything about him - there was a whole drama between the two of them that we won't go into here. But after I'd gone back to CA and had started putting my emotions back together over the whole mess, my mom calls me about a month later to tell me that B., too, had also passed away - also complications from atherosclerosis. She'd also found out that my dad's natural sister D. had already had some sort of bypass/stent surgery to take care of clogging in her arteries as well. So not only did I now have both of my mom's parents develop diabetes and die in their early 80's, but from my dad's side I have a risk toward this horrible invisible disease as well. I'd always been so proud of my ability to put on those medical/insurance questionnaires they give you at the doctor's office that nobody in my family had died of this or that major risk factor, particularly cancer or heart disease, and now I've got two of the biggies in my gene pool. F**k. To put it lightly.
A couple months later after I'd finally dealt with all the emotions, talked it to death, written the soundtrack and tried to start moving on, it was time for my yearly physical. Let me just say that with all the public furor lately over health insurance (both real and imagined), I'm really fortunate that my company takes care of us very well with its very unique self-administered plan. I'm still all-guns-ahead for public health insurance to compete with the less-than-great private insurance companies out there, but for the moment, in this job, I'm very comfortable and happy with my insurance. If this job went away though, I'm screwed. Anyway about two years ago they started offering discounts on monthly premiums if we'd agree to get a routine physical each year. My doctor is very numbers-oriented and understood my mom's side of diabetes history so with each physical he would have me get a full blood work-up as well. Not to mention I'd been heavy for over 20 years at this point and he was always on me about losing weight. So October 2008 marked the second annual round of blood work that I'd had, and wouldn't you know it - while my overall cholesterol wasn't super high (193, down from 203) and neither was the LDL (around 92-93 steadily), but my HDL was low at 37, my VLDL was 63 and the triglycerides were weighing in at a whopping 316 (down from an even more whopping 341 the previous year).
To make sense of why that's not good, I did a little research on wikipedia which I'll paraphrase here. LDL (Low Density Lipoprotein) is what is commonly known as "bad" cholesterol because it's the root cause of athero. Ordinarily LDL performs a useful function - since cholesterol doesn't dissolve in water, and blood is 75% water, LDL carries cholesterol around the body, and this cholesterol is used to generate brain tissue, Vitamin D, etc. However when the LDL/cholesterol comes into contact with something called a "free radical" (ROS - Reactive oxygen species - usually the normal byproduct of oxygen entering into the blood stream), it can become "oxidized" and damage the tissues nearby. Since veins hold little oxygen and arteries have plenty, that's where the damage usually happens. Once damage happens, the body responds by sending out these special white blood cells called "foam cells" that are built to absorb intruders like foam on an airstrip will absorb fire. The problem is these foam cells can't process oxidized LDL so they absorb it until they blow up, which sprays more cholesterol into the artery wall, causing more damage that triggers the body to send more foam cells, and starts this vicious cycle. Eventually the artery wall gets inflamed with cholesterol plaque, which causes the muscle tissue in the artery to swell up and form a hard cover over the plaque. This is why you'll often hear athero referred to as "hardening of the arteries". This hard cover reduces blood flow through the artery and increases blood pressure, and if left unchecked could eventually shut blood flow off altogether. Triglycerides - nearly the same deal. Those are carried around by VLDL (Very Low Density Lipoproteins) and do the same type of damage.
Dude that's so evil, it's happening all the time on this microscopic level without you knowing it, and you can't fight it, right? Wrong. There's a third kind of lipoprotein called HDL (High Density Lipoprotein) which is called the "good" cholesterol in that it's able to go into the arteries, scrub this stuff away from the walls, and put it down into the liver for excretion. However if your HDL numbers are low, and the other three numbers are high, chances are you're not producing enough of the stuff to stem the tide of blowed-up foam cells, and your arteries will slowly clog themselves. In addition, people with high HDL numbers are supposed to be less susceptible to adult-onset dementia. So in general, normal numbers for all this stuff :
LDL - less than 100 mg/dL is okay, less than 70 is optimal
HDL - greater than 60 mg/dL is optimal, less than 40 in men is at risk
VLDL - between 5-40 mg/dL is optimal, anything over 40 is high
Triglycerides - between 0-150 is optimal, anything over 150 is high
cholesterol - 100-199 is normal
So from my numbers, it's obvoius I was high on LDL, VLDL and Tri's, and low on the HDL needed to clean up the mess all that is steadily leaving behind. So if was walking around saying "oh my cholesterol is still under 200 so I'm normal" I was delusional. I needed to do something drastically different, and once I told my doctor about my dad's recent passing and his family history, boy did he let me have it. More about that in part two, but if you're looking for motivation in the sense of self-preservation - did you really need more?
Diet for Monday 8/31 -
Breakfast :
- Cheerios (one serving) with 1/2 cup fat-free organic milk (we'll get into substitutions at some point and why they're helpful - and yeah I drink the milk that's left over)
- 4 oz. Simply Orange orange juice pulp free w/added calcium
- one "flowerpot" mug of coffee w/2 tbsp Splenda & some fat-free milk - it's a big cup, about 20 oz or more
- 2 pieces Trader Joe's Harvest Wheat bread w/Brummel & Brown Natural Yogurt Spread (it's a butter/margarine substitute)
- I also take the following vitamin supplements with my orange juice (after I eat the bowl of cereal) :
- (1) One-a-Day Men's Health formula tablet
- (1) High Potency B-complex B-100 tablet
- (1) NatureMade C-Plus 1000 mg
- (1) Glucosamine Complex 500 mg
- (1) regular-strength aspirin 325 mg
- (1) garlic tablet 150 mg
- (2) tabs of Fish Oil with Omega-3 Fatty acids (about 1000 mg each, they're pretty big)
Lunch :
- Subway footlong roasted chicken breast sandwich, toasted, with the following on it : provolone cheese, lettuce, tomato, bell peppers, olives, cucumbers, salt/pepper and vinegar (no oil or mayo)
- one 2.5 oz bag of Baked Lay's Original chips
- 20 oz Diet Coke
Dinner :
- The Big Chicken Caesar Salad : 3 oz chicken breast, 1 heart romaine lettuce, 1 handful baby spinach, 1/2 red bell pepper, 1 roma tomato, 1/2 cucumber, 1/2 shaved carrot (I eat the rest too). Chop all that up, add a handful of fat-free croutons, and one serving of Kraft fat-free Caesar Italian dressing.
- big cup of water (I drink like 2 or 3 44 oz cups of water a day)
Dessert :
- 3/4 cup of Breyer's fat-free Chocolate Fudge ice cream
Exercise for Monday 8/31 (these will always be given in order) -
- 5 min warmup on the treadmill @ 3.5 mph
- 10 minutes stretching (will describe at a later date)
- 30 minutes of the "Tar Heel Workout" with a 10 lb medicine ball - see here for details
- 10 minute run on the treadmill (2 min @ 9 mph, 2 min @ 8 mph, 3 min @ 7.5 mph, 2 min @ 7 mph, 1 min @ 10 mph)
- 5 minute cooldown on the treadmill (this is always the same - 1 min @ 4 mph, 2 min @ 3.5 mph, 2 min @ 3 mph)
See you tomorrow for Part 2
