Weekly Update #3
My doctor’s visit on Wednesday lasted over an hour even though he checked me for less than ten minutes. He was fascinated by this little project of mine. We talked the whole time about everything surrounding my manifesto. He gave some really good advice and also offered to help anyway he could. Some changes he suggested include adding yoga to my routine, so I get some strength training, along with integrating fasting occasionally as well. My doctor fasts once a week and has also done extended fasts as well, all for health reasons. He suggested I experiment with extended fasting that lasts at least a week so I’m going to research that a little more and possibly work that into this project at some point in the future.
We also went over my blood work and there were a couple concerns. First off, my LDL (bad) cholesterol is at 130. This is considered “borderline high” by the American Heart Association. My doctor is not too concerned since I am only 28 years old but said we would be having a different conversation if I was in my mid-thirties or older. He is also pretty confident that my new diet will cause it to drop significantly over the next couple of months.
The second issue with my blood work is my vitamin D levels. Vitamin D deficiency is one of those things that doctors have just recently realized is a major problem. According to my doctor, one in six people are vitamin D deficient. Since it is such a new issue, doctors do not know all of the ramifications of vitamin D deficiency, but symptoms include colds and flu, periodontal disease and cavities, depression and seasonal affective disorder, osteoporosis, heart failure and cardiomyopathy, high blood pressure, lung cancer, ovarian cancer, colon Cancer, asthma, breast cancer and multiple sclerosis. The healthy range of vitamin D is between 50 and 80 ng/ml. Doctors get pretty concerned if you’re in the 20s and I’m sitting at a solid 18.3 ng/ml.
The recommended daily intake for vitamin D is 1000 IU/day. For people like me that are deficient need to be taking a lot more. My doctor recommends I get 2000 IU/day. You can get some vitamin D from food. Certain fish contains a decent amount of vitamin D, but otherwise it’s really hard to get it by eating. For instance, I would need to eat 100 eggs or 13,300 grams of beef liver every day to get my 2000 UI. Fortified milk contains vitamin D but I would need to drink 20 cups of milk a day to get enough which goes against the manifesto and my lactose intolerance. So the other options left are eating a bunch of herring everyday ($$$), getting more sun or taking a supplement. Since supplements are also against the manifesto, I’m going to opt for getting more sun every day. With spring quickly approaching I’ll be spending much more time outside so I am going to wait and see what my levels are in two months before I start taking a supplement.
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Eating the right amount of calories every day continues to be the most frustrating part of this diet. The combination of consuming food with much fewer calories plus only eating until I’m 80% full make it mentally taxing to keep track of everything. If I skip a meal, which I’ve been prone to doing in the past, it makes it very hard to catch up on calories. Or, if I eat a lot of food but it is all low in calories, I get 80% full quickly but end up with days like Monday where it’s 8pm and I’m lightheaded and grouchy because I’ve only consumed 900 calories so far. Then I end up sopping up extra virgin olive oil with whole wheat bread just to get enough in my system.
Emotionally, the hardest part of this new lifestyle is when I go to the grocery. Today I was wandering around looking forlornly at all of the food I can’t eat. I even stopped in the bakery section to see what kind of donuts they had available. I think I would have gone for the jelly filled today.
I’m pretty much regulated to the produce, canned beans and bread aisles when I’m shopping for myself but I have to veer off course when picking stuff up for the rest of the family and that’s when I start to get frustrated again. I miss my old habits of eating whatever I want. I also miss not having to constantly think far in advance about what I’m going to eat. Three weeks in and living a healthy lifestyle is proving pretty difficult.
That is also one thing that makes this hard. Three weeks in. That means I have forty-nine weeks left. There is currently no light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve done thirty day experiments before and they usually go well but by this point I’m nine days away from the end. Instead of 344 days from the end. Easter is just around the corner, a big time of feasting and celebrating in our family and I get to tackle it with no meat, candy or cake. Soon after that we’ll move into our family’s birthday season, again with none of the usual fare on my plate.
Why is this so hard? That is a question that I will spend some more time on in future posts, but it is a question that is resounding in my head on a daily basis. Why is it so extremely hard, both emotionally and physically, to live a healthy lifestyle in this country? Until this changes, we’ll continue to have the highest obesity rate and highest percentages all of the diseases that come with that.
