Project HEALTHY Mom
in Blogs
By Jamie
We were at the grocery store to stock up on healthy food and found ourselves staring through the glass doors in the freezer section at a tub of Dreyer’s Samoa ice cream.
Touche Dreyers, touche.
I look at my husband and make a proposition:
“Why don’t we forget about all this weight loss business and just buy that tub of ice cream and enjoy our lives. Our lives full of yummy, yummy foods.”
“You know,” My husband says to me, squeezing my hand “I’d be on board with that plan, except for the part where my doctor said I’d die if I didn’t loose weight.”
“Right. Ok, let’s walk away now.”
And we did. We walked away from that ever so delicious looking tub of ice cream.
My husband was being a little dramatic, he’s not knocking on death’s door. However, he is overweight and he has high cholesterol and if he stays on his current path, considering his family history, he is likely to have a heart attack in the next 10 years. Obviously, we don’t want that to happen.
I haven’t had my cholesterol checked in years, but I’m fairly certain my numbers aren’t much better than his. And I’m thinking, maybe I should get my numbers checked. I assume I’m not as healthy as I should be because I’m overweight. Maybe I should go find out exactly what I need to work on. I suspect my butt dimples and arm flab can really only suggest so much. Do I have high cholesterol? Am I pre-diabetic? What can I do to make sure I will be alive and healthy enough to play soccer with my grand kids in 30 years?
Getting thinner and wearing a smaller pants size isn’t as motivating to me as living a long and healthy life with my family. Maybe I’ll never get thin. Maybe I’ll end up looking like a supermodel! Either way, I think it’s time to take a step back and identify my real problem areas. Not my butt or my back fat, but my heart, my blood chemistry, my HEALTH.
I’m going to call up my doctor this week and make an appointment for a physical and blood tests. I’ll let you know what I find out!
March 30th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
I think that’s an awesome idea and I’m proud of you for doing it.
I have been under a number of doctors watchful eyes for many years for many reasons. Part of it’s annoying. Part of it’s comforting.
Taking care of yourself so your babies have a momma for a long time should be more important than what size your jeans are and I’m so proud of you for seeing that.
March 30th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
Oh, this was me. Not long ago we went to get a ‘heart healthy’ exam near both of our birthdays, and guess what? Me, who exercises four times a week for twenty years, and he who does basically nothing; Me, who does all the ‘healthy eating’ stuff (God, I sneak FLAX seed into foods); HE, with the big family history of heart disease, blah, blah, you see where this is going…I, ME had the high cholesterol! I was PISSED! AT HIM! For doing nothing and getting a better score than me! (Obviously, still am, ahem.)
It’s not fair, at all. I’ve done it all right, and yet my genetics are still biting me in the ass. So who knows? My kids are super skinny, and yet they get mad at me when I restrict their sweets and junk because of all the family history. Le Sigh.
(P.S.; I hate to point this out, because I like your writing, but it’s ‘lose,’ not ‘loose’ weight. xo.)
March 30th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Good luck! Whatever the numbers are, remember, you have a lot of options. My super-skinny, running fanatic husband, who for the 17 years I’ve known him has never added even a half-teaspoonful of butter to any food at the table or used it in cooking, whom I have never seen eat a “regular” potato chip (he eats only the low fat, baked kind), who eats one piece of cake a year (on his birthday), who has not had a “real” hamburger since he turned thirty, who will eat only whites-only omelettes, found out few years ago that despite all his diligence during his entire adult life, he had high cholesterol anyway. He’s just genetically screwed, poor boy. He now manages it with drugs.
March 31st, 2009 at 5:12 am
It’s a hard step to take but your health is worth it. My father had a heart attack at 44. If I didn’t get pro-active I was afraid the same would happen to me. My children are the most important thing to me and I want to be around to torture them for a long time. Good luck.
March 31st, 2009 at 6:29 am
Good for you! My husband is in great shape, works out a lot and plays hockey all the time, and yet at his last physical he was told his cholesterol is high and so the dr wants him to lose some weight. BMI is not accurate in his case, what with all the hockey-leg muscle, etc, but he’s still motivated to get those numbers lower and that’s been resulting in us both eating better. I’ve been working on the last bit of baby weight for a while, but having him on board as well is really helping.
Excellent post and I don’t mean to criticize, but it’s ‘lose’, not ‘loose’.
March 31st, 2009 at 6:36 am
Oh, in context of all this high cholesterol stuff, doctor friend of our family’s who researches quite a bit in the area of body levels, etc, says that the measurement of cholesterol level may not be the best system. He said that if you’re looking at someone who has an ideal physical fitness and eating pattern but high cholesterol, the odds are that they are indeed healthy and that their body’s setting is simply higher. This does not necessarily mean that they are unhealthy or due for a heart attack.
My mother’s family all have high cholesterol, but there is no history of heart disease. My cholesterol is high and I eat an exceptionally healthy diet. There are some doctors and reaserchers who are beginning to suspect that this is perhaps another area in which we are all different, and ‘ideal’ levels may not be the same for everyone.
Another research leaning lately is that perhaps by completely cutting our dietary intake of cholesterol we actually deprive our bodies of a still-necessary element enough that our body begins to over-produce cholesterol itself. Counter-productive.
April 1st, 2009 at 9:29 am
Oh, dear, Ellen, I’m not sure I agree that cutting out dietary cholesterol is potentially harmful. Your liver manufactures all the cholesterol you need; there is no need to get more cholesterol from food.
As for the theory that your liver will “over produce” cholesterol on a vegan diet, I can tell you that when I was a vegan, I had my cholesterol checked, and it was 144. Now that I’m merely following a vegetarian practice, and doing my best to avoid cheese and other unhealthy foods, my total cholesterol is 200 — just borderline acceptable. With my family history of vascular disease, I really should try a vegan practice again and see if I can get it back down in the neighborhood it used to be in.
There’s a really informative book on dietary cholesterol called “Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease,” by Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D., about how you can actually REVERSE the buildup of plaque in your arteries and make them more flexible at the same time, without drugs or surgery, simply by following a vegan practice and eating plenty of folate.
Or, you might google “Vegan Heart Doc” to see the blog of an interventional cardiologist who urges her patients to follow a vegan or a near-as-possible vegan practice.
Of course, those cardiologists see patients who already have heart disease, and who may need drastic modifications in their lifestyle. But even for those of us who do not have heart disease, dietary cholesterol is not “necessary.”
But I DO agree with you that one’s lipid profile is NOT the best measurement of one’s cardio vascular health. The best measurement of one’s cardiovascular health is strength and endurance. If, like me, you have a family history of vascular disease, you might ask your doctor if you should do a stress test.
Another predictor of heart disease that may be more accurate than one’s lipid profile is the hscrp, or “Hiigh Sensitivity C-Reactive Protein” test. You should ask for your hscrp to be tested at the same time as your lipid profile. This test helps determine whether you have the inflammation that casues arterial plaques to develop.
There are people who do NOT have high cholesterol, but who DO have high hscrp and who are at risk for developing heart disease. This population can benefit from statin drugs — even though they don’t have high cholesterol.
Another test you should have done if you have a family history is the carotid ultrasound. The ultrasound of your carotid artery can actually show whether you’ve already started to develop plaques there.
I’ve had all these tests done because I have a strong family history of stroke. Having had these tests done repeatedly over the years, I can tell you that the closer I get my dietary cholesterol to zero or near zero, and the more I exercise, the better the test results come back.
So, I’m one of the lucky ones who can manage their risk with diet and exercise. But there is a population of people for whom diet & exercise are not effective, like my husband, and these people need to look at their drug options.
April 1st, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Oh, also — as for the concern that you might not get all your necessary nutrients on a vegan diet, the only nutrient found almost exclusively in animal products is vitamin B12, but you can get this in tempeh (a vegan, Indonesian food made from legumes) or in brewers’ yeast, or you can just buy a supplement.
April 2nd, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Rhaaz, perhaps you misunderstood my post. You will note that I used the words ‘may’ and ‘perhaps’ and was merely noting that there are some outstanding medical questions about the current ‘cholesterol doctrine’, which is why I think we need to take that doctrine with a grain of salt and look into ALL possiblities more carefully. While I understand that your personal experience may have indicated one thing, that is not necessarily true of all people in all situations.
Unless you are a researcher in this particular area of medicine (rather than simply being one person among many who experience a variance of issues with their choloesterol), I would suggest you be more careful about expounding your views in order to negate other current, quite reasonable, medical research theories.
April 2nd, 2009 at 2:41 pm
I’m having trouble typing a lot because of my squirming toddler ony my lap, but below is one example of a group of doctors and researchers who are questioning the current theories about cholesterol.
http://www.thincs.org/
April 2nd, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Dear Ellen, I am suprised. I did not represent myself as any kind of authority. I merely reported what I have read and experienced. We are both entitled to do that. Good luck to you and I wish you the best of health and success in your fitness.
April 2nd, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Ok, toddler is now happily playing.
No offense taken, Rhaaz. Perhaps you were unaware of the tone that your post presented or perhaps I misunderstood you.
On the topic of cholesterol, I should clarify what I was attempting to share last time. In the medical journals and research this doctor was telling us about, the question that they are now pursuing is that relation between the body’s cholesterol production and our intake.
It is a commonly recognized fact that the liver adjusts its production of cholesterol based upon our intake (do a google search on this and you will find dozens of medical authorities saying this on their websites). According to the research that this doctor was relating, there are questions now about whether, particularly in a case of a person with distorted cholesterol levels, when the cholesterol consumption through diet is completely cut out, the liver will begin to produce that level to which the body is accustomed, thus causing ever greater issues. This can apparently happen to people who don’t even have severely elevated levels but who go onto a vegan or other such diet.
This clearly does not apply to all people, but is apparently a possiblity for some and personally I think that if I was dealing with cholesterol issues in an active way I would want to look into that possibility.