A Carnivore's Guide To Cardiology- Big Five Oh Round Up Part 1

Metabolism, or Lack Therof

Yes, I know WandaVision ended, but it's going to take a bit for me to let everything that happened settle in.

Speaking of categories (like Up the Lake) that were big in the early days of this ten year old blog, I've been remiss on one of the original reasons I started writing regularly.

Being as of yesterday, I have completed my half century year pass around the sun, it's time to review my medical state of affairs.

Translation- Now that I'm officially, by certain standards, old, I can gripe and moan in public about health issues.

This is also a good time to bring this up as pretty much every doctor I visited this year said, "Well, you're fifty, so lets check this *insert thing that I wasn't worried about until they recommended a test for it here*."

I suppose I should start with a confession about one of the early posts about my then new cardiac health.

I had mentioned that my much improved diet, and increased exercise had reduced my weight below 180 pounds for the first time since college.

There were some corollaries to that:

A) In college, I was lifting weights for about an hour three times a week, and jogging/ running/ lumbering for forty-five minutes two to three times a week. At that age, I maintained below one-eightly with only that regime.  

My diet consisted of eating whatever college food I had a whim for that day.

Pizza, beer, wings, Chinese food, unlimited dining hall chicken nuggets...

all the finer things.

Heck, I'd often stop at the Union to grab a bag of kettle cooked bar-b-que potato chips and eat them on the way back to the dorm from the gym.

Life was good.

B) When I reached one-eighty after my first stent, I did a half hour every day on either the bike or treadmill and followed a diet that positioned me directly in crazy hungry land every waking moment of my life.

My ability to focus on anything was greatly reduced.

I couldn't function to levels required at work.

I was crabby all the time. 

(Ask my poor family...

 ALL 

THE 

TIME.)

Part of this came from replacing food intake with water whenever I felt hungry. While this was healthy to a certain extent, having to pee every five minutes was not helping my ability to complete tasks...or conversations most days.

I eventually relaxed my restrictions a bit, hovered within a few pounds of one-ninety in a stable fashion for a long time, and was in much less danger of being reprimanded at work, or slain by a close family member.

Fast forward quite a few years.  Without changing my diet or exercise pattern significantly, my weight kept creeping up, mocking me cruelly. In an attempt to battle this, I increased my exercise to an hour almost every day, combining the treadmill and exercise bike.  Yet, even with that change, it is now a battle to hold my mass steady just above two-hundred pounds.  All my other numbers, (cholesterol, heart rate, blood pressure and everything else they read when poking, prodding and draining me) read very healthy.  

Dad always said, "Aging sucks but it beats the alternative."   However, he was never specific about what was being sucked was the functioning speed of every single internal piece of equipment in the human body.

There is one part of me that has remained thin due to these fun medications.

My blood.

Come back next week for more on that.