Posts Tagged ‘health’
Unsurprising Revelation
It does not surprise me one bit that recently discovered documents reveal the influence the sugar industry applied to deflect attention away from sugar and toward saturated fats as the culprit in a link with heart disease back in the 1960s.
This successfully contributed to a national campaign to reduce fat in our diets. How ironic that the net result some 50+ years later is an epidemic of obesity.
I bet that’s not hard on people’s hearts.
A trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists to publish a report and made it clear that they wanted the results to favor sugar. The rest is history. Bravo. They have profited handsomely and altered the health of a nation for the worse.
The food industry responded by reducing fat in their products, and adding sugar.
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Please, read the labels of processed foods you eat and pay attention to both the serving size and the grams of sugar. You won’t be able to see what percentage of the daily recommended amount of sugar the food contains, because industry lobbyists have successfully influenced politicians to keep that incriminating fact out of sight.
We have to do the math ourselves. Be informed. Eat smart. Be healthy.
Good luck. You will be up against an industry that is banking on people not stopping themselves.
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Not There
It has been 15 months since I began paying attention to how much sugar I was consuming on a daily basis and trying to achieve a level closer to the World Health Organization’s recommendation of limiting sugar to only 5-10% of my daily calories. Prior to that time, I was consuming the daily total and more by the completion of my breakfasts. By the end of the days, I was likely hitting somewhere around quadruple the recommended amount.
For more than a year I have been measuring the amount of cereal and yogurt I serve myself to keep the serving size small enough to provide no more than 10 grams of sugar per meal. Based on a 2000 calorie per day diet, I was aiming to stay below around 200 of those calories to come from sugar.
One gram of sugar contains 3.87 calories.
One trick with my plan is keeping the total calories at the daily target of 2000. The average American diet all too easily exceeds that amount. So, by wanting to reduce my sugar intake, I found myself also bringing my total calories down. That is not something I ever bothered measuring before this effort.
I simply knew that I should aim for a balance of obvious healthy choices. At the same time, an addict will respond to urges that exceed what they know to be healthy. I was addicted to sugar.
Not only were the lab results for my blood work revealing I was pre-diabetic, I was uncomfortably pudging out. The love-handles and belly bulge, the flabby arms, and my usual full face were ever present and slowly expanding.
My main goal was to appease the pressure from my doctor to get my numbers down for glycosylated hemoglobin, or HbA1c. After a year of working on it, I was looking forward to this year’s physical to learn the results of my efforts.
Much to my surprise, I’m not there yet.
Two years ago, my HbA1c reading came in at 5.8. My clinic seeks a level of <5.7, so I was just barely outside their “normal” range. Thus, the diagnosis of “pre-diabetic.”
My results this time, after a year of attention to my sugar intake, came in at 5.9.
Humpf.
Doc says there may be some genetics involved, as well as the fact that as we age our pancreas function deteriorates. I figure it’s because I had eaten so many of Cyndie’s sweet caramel rolls over the years, it will take me longer than a year to purge the glucose from my system.
So, my HbA1c may not have come down where the doctor wants to see it, but in the past year I have pleasantly reduced most of that flab that I never liked and I’ve dropped 8 pounds since my last visit to the clinic.
I’ll claim that small victory and keep measuring my sugar grams in search of a lower number for the level of my hemoglobin-bound-to-glucose next year. I want to keep my diet below the daily amount of recommended sugar to help my body as much as possible.
My poor pancreas isn’t gettin’ any younger.
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Alarming Rise
In one of the many ways I feel lucky, it is my great pleasure to be able to awaken easily when it is time for my alarm to go off. For that matter, I also enjoy the good fortune of falling asleep relatively quickly, without any trouble at all. It was not always so.
During my years of greatest depression symptoms, sleep was problematic for me. Having that for comparison makes my current pattern of blessed slumber that much sweeter.
The radio alarm clock that I have at my bedside has been my companion for decades. It doesn’t get very much interaction from me, so it has grown a little persnickety about responding to button pushes. I fear that the years of dust it has endured have led to some hesitation of electronic connections.
Recently, I have experienced a recurring pattern of waking just before the time that would trigger the radio alarm to come on. One day last week, in exception to that rule, I snoozed a full 6-minutes past the alarm and decided the volume should probably come up a little bit to better get my attention.
I never tested that because the next two days I was up well before the alarm time. Since I am able to leave it off over the weekend, Sunday night I needed to reset everything. It balked over multiple attempts, but eventually I thought I had it.
Whatever song that was on when I tested it in the evening did not prove to be a good reference for the song that was on Monday morning at the appointed hour. Like usual, I had woken up before the alarm, but it being a Monday, I decided I should linger in comfort for the remaining time before the alarm.
It didn’t take me long to fall back asleep, and it didn’t take a second for me to startle awake to the volume of music that came on the short time later.
Oops.
Maybe it’s time to download a fancy newfangled app for my phone to gently increase an alarm until I wake up. I usually am charging the phone at my bedside every night anyway.
I don’t know if I could do that to the old Sony Dream Machine. It’s like family after all these years.
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Precious Sleep
I have been coming up short of sleep lately and I can feel everything suffering as a result. For one, it makes commuting for 2-hours a day a hazard of droopy eyed distracted driving. I’m too exhausted to think clearly, I’m getting grumpy, and my sugar cravings are defeating my best intentions of thwarting them.
It becomes a vicious circle of fatigue breeding fatigue. On Tuesday night I had hoped to get to bed promptly in the evening to allow time for a full 8-hours of slumber. Circumstances foiled that plan and I stayed up about 2-hours later than I planned. In and of itself, that would have been manageable, but then my keen mind and body betrayed me an hour before my alarm would have gone off Wednesday morning, leaving me wide awake, when that was the last thing I could afford to experience.
Precious sleep got lopped off on both ends of the cycle.
It hasn’t helped at all that our internet connection has been totally unstable of late, causing me to languish in the limbo of half-loaded pages and images in my quest to toss up another entry in the daily blog effort.
I have a plan to get back at the dang fickle connection. I’m writing a short post and getting it done fast, so I have more time to sleep. Wish me luck…
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Rest Day
Sunday was certainly a day of rest for me yesterday, after having ridden so many miles on Saturday. I took a most luscious nap in the middle of the day. My eyes just didn’t want to be open, so I gave them some rest. The rest of me followed suit.
After my nap, I revved up to do the tiniest of chores. I was able to mow the overgrown trails in the woods, because it has dried up lately just enough I was able to drive on it without getting stuck. I wound new line on the spool for the trimmer in the cool shade of the shop. I stood with the horses while Cyndie tended a scrape on Legacy’s front leg.
I also ate a few extra calories, to make sure my body had more than enough to regenerate itself. Visions of the week of biking that lies ahead next month.
Will I be ready? I think I already am, despite having been on my bike only twice so far this season. Must be all that pitch fork work and hill walking I do around Wintervale that has allowed me to stay fit.
Rich Gordon snapped a photo of this athlete in action…
I wasn’t hurting too much yet!
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Yes, Shingles
For all the personal detail I freely display in my posts on a regular basis, I found myself holding back recently from blathering on about the daily progress of my shingles outbreak. I think part of it was a hope of saving you from frequently repeated lamentations over the pain and suffering I was enduring, but another part of it was my plan to give this affliction as little attention as possible. My intent was to get over this quickly and with a minimum of symptoms.
It all started on the Monday after I had trimmed dead wood from our apple tree and a nearby maple tree, using a pruning saw on an extended pole. It seemed entirely logical that I would feel sore muscles in the area of my torso after the workout I had done the day before. Upon a feeling of even more stiffness the next day, I became more assured my discomfort was a function of delayed onset muscle soreness from the weekend’s exercise.
By Wednesday I was growing normalized to the soreness and stopped thinking about it. After my shower in the evening, I noticed a red spot on my abdomen, but it didn’t mean much to me at the time. However, it seemed odd when the redness was still there the next morning. Without previously having had the slightest inkling that I might be getting sick, when I saw the spot still present in the morning, I reacted by lifting my arm and turning in the mirror.
How did I suddenly know?
There were enough splotches in a line around to my back that I instantly thought, “Shingles.” When I got to work I did a little research and checked in with my clinic back in Wisconsin. They directed me to immediately visit an urgent care site near my workplace. The doctor there did little more than listen to my description and look at my torso before confirming my self-diagnosis.
She prescribed an anti-viral to be taken 3-times a day for a week, to minimize and hopefully shorten the duration of my symptoms. She asked what I knew about shingles and began to describe the varying levels of hell that can occur.
I interrupted her to say that I did read that some people may not have severe symptoms. When she nodded in acknowledgement, I proclaimed that I would be one of those people, so she didn’t need to bother describing the worst it could get.
For the most part, I would say I achieved my goal of not having the rash erupt in multiple waves of increasing severity. It got worse for about 3 days and then began to slowly recede. There is still some residual visual evidence left, but my skin is mostly healed. The deep (what felt like muscle) pain was a chronic annoyance for about 2-and-a-half weeks, but seems to be fading now.
I’m so close to being done with it that I want to claim victory. There is just one small problem. Even though I succeeded in willing myself to the easy end of the shingles spectrum, it appears that I am getting a good dose of a common complication: post-herpetic neuralgia (PHN).
The most common complication of shingles is a condition called post-herpetic neuralgia (PHN). People with PHN have severe pain in the areas where they had the shingles rash, even after the rash clears up.
The pain from PHN may be severe and debilitating, but it usually resolves in a few weeks or months in most patients. Some people can have pain from PHN for many years. ——–cdc.gov/shingles/about/complications
I wouldn’t exactly call what I am feeling as pain. It is more a hyper-sensitivity. At times, it feels like a sunburn on my skin. Other times it feels “crawly” like having a fever. I get frequent shivers, and the act of shivering is uncomfortable. I want to avoid it, but I can’t.
So it’s that kind of pain. Not so much a “hurt,” as a very uncomfortable nuisance.
Yes, that’s my version of shingles.
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Watching Amy
We watched the documentary, “Amy” last night, about singer Amy Winehouse, and it triggered a recurring sadness for me that you can’t instantly remedy whatever it is that drives a person to make unhealthy coping choices. You can send love to those who are hurting, but if they aren’t able to love themselves, health and healing can only wait on the sidelines to be invited in.
I’ve had moments of grandeur where I thought the environment we have created at Wintervale, the horses, the labyrinth garden, wooded trails, and our dog & cat, combined with the life experience and emotional intelligence Cyndie and I have gained, could serve as an intrinsic salve to any and all who visit.
Reality isn’t that simple. I have had opportunity to discover my acquired peace doesn’t automatically transform others merely by proximity. I found that it is possible not only for me to be helpless about inducing healing in another, but I am as susceptible as anyone to being drawn down by contagious unhealthy energies.
Being a positive healing influence on the world is something that requires definite effort.
Detangling from a general pattern of unhealthy behaviors requires a definite choice. We have to make an informed decision to change our life for the better. It doesn’t happen by just spending some time at a healthy place.
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The movie about Amy Winehouse includes a significant amount of footage showing the frenzy of paparazzi she faced. It was tough to witness. Nobody deserves that abuse. Take a moment to cherish the anonymity that allows for normal daily life.
Cyndie and I were talking about situations of celebrity hounding and recalled the amazing surprise we felt years ago, when we spotted Eric Clapton on a street in Chicago, unnoticed by anyone but us. We were killing time on a weekday visit and strolling the shops along The Magnificent Mile, or possibly some side street just off Michigan Avenue, when two guys stepped out the door of some apparel shop.
They were carrying large bags of their purchases, which was one of the first aspects that caught my eye. Two guys on a little afternoon clothes shopping expedition? Seemed somewhat off gender-usual to me.
As my surveying glance traveled up to their faces, I wasn’t able to mask my shocked recognition at the face of one of my musical idols, just inches away. In a split second, I chose to avoid spoiling Mr. Clapton’s moment of walking the street like any anonymous bloke.
As they passed I looked at Cyndie and she was looking at me with that same wide-eyed shock over who was walking by. It didn’t seem possible. We immediately began debating our decision of not saying anything to him.
I consoled myself with the vision I will never forget: the look on Eric Clapton’s face when he saw our shocked expressions and knew he’d been recognized, …yet not hassled.
I wonder if Amy Winehouse ever enjoyed the pleasure of being recognized, but not hassled, in the brief time after her music became wildly popular.
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Periodic Assessment
Yesterday was the day of our annual furnace inspection by the company that installed it a few years ago. So far, so good. Honestly, I would have been shocked if he had found something amiss. We are past the initial break-in period where manufacturing or installation issues could appear, and it is still new enough that no parts should be wearing out. Plus, it has been performing flawlessly from the start.
Still, I pay good money for the peace of mind to know all is well.
Our experience last fall of discovering the cracked tiles in the flue of our chimney bolstered my confidence in the value of regular check-ups.
Upon recommendation from someone at work, I watched “That Sugar Film” last night. I invite you to check out the trailer for a sampling. It might make you crave seeing the whole movie. It served as a periodic assessment of my sugar reduction/control efforts, not that I wasn’t aware of some slippage in the wrong direction.
I struggle with a physical addiction to sweetness. Well, mental and physical, frankly. Every time I cheat a little on my attempt to stay below the recommended healthy daily amount of calories from sugar, I feed the mental monster. My mind then works with my body to coerce me into feeding the urge.
It is weird to watch the movie and get a sense of how similar my sugar craving is to drug addictions that are publicly looked upon as all around bad things, while the food industry flashes spectacular and colorfully happy ad campaigns in broad daylight for products laden with the chemical that will capture our minds and make our bodies sick.
Think, tobacco industry. How many years did they get away with it? Cigarettes were safe. Heck, they were even good for you! NOT!
That scene is happening today with soft drink companies, cereal, yogurt, pasta sauces, …pretty much all processed foods. They are all safe! Enjoy!
We can trust them, because they pay scientists to collect data that shows everything is okay. It’s fine. Don’t worry. Have some more. You know, a calorie is a calorie, whether from sugar or otherwise. NOT!
Don’t fall for the ruse that you should be able to exercise enough to justify that next sugar laden meal. That is a war that can’t be won.
If you have children, save them from this. Please, understand the effects of sugar on our brains and bodies.
Addiction is addiction. Pick a poison. Street drugs, prescription drugs, tobacco, gambling, sex, shopping, food, sugar.
When choosing to profit off the human brain’s cravings, a company should have a plan to hide the facts about making their customers sick. Maybe no one is noticing the obesity trend and subsequent increase in associated diseases, like diabetes and heart disease. Go ahead, keep on eating the convenient foods filling the grocery store shelves.
What this movie points out is that he doesn’t eat the obvious soda pop, candy, and ice cream which most people know should be moderated.
He chooses supposed “healthy” choices of cereal, yogurt, juices, and snack bars during his 60-day experiment. It’s eye-opening, even for me.
I need to renew my effort to spot what my brain is doing to feed its craving.
Last night, it was pasta for dinner. It was soooooo good.
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Warm Indoors
It has been darn cold the last few days. It has an extra bite because we had been experiencing such un-winterlike conditions up until now, and got lulled into complacency. I finally realized I should pull an actual winter coat out of the closet, the one with my scarf tucked in the sleeve.
I got a good chuckle out of the legendary former Minnesota Vikings coach, Bud Grant, walking out to the ceremonial coin toss prior to last Sunday’s playoff game on national TV, without a jacket on. It was below zero and he was wearing a purple Vikings short-sleeved polo shirt, flaunting the Minnesotan hardiness.
Last night we chose indoor recreation, with a wonderful fire to make it extra warm and cozy. Cyndie had designs on making chicken parmesan, and talked George into bringing his pasta machine over. He showed up with that, and more. Can you say, “homemade ice cream?”
Oh, but that’s not all. He also made chocolate sauce to go with it, and brought some fruit toppings.
Good thing I was appropriately prudent with my choices earlier in the day, and had headroom left over in my sugar quota to enjoy my favorite treat, guilt-free.
The highlight of the evening was Cyndie’s glee over her first successful made-from-scratch pasta making, under George’s helpful tutelage. He arrived in time to intervene on her baking tendency to add flour continuously while working the dough. Together, with a little water, they got the consistency back from being too dry and the pasta turned out great.
We enjoyed a treasure of an evening, laughing in the kitchen while preparing food, luxuriating in sitting down to eat the food, and then hanging by the fireplace to play cards, eat ice cream, play guitars, and thrill in the joy of simply being together.
Indoors. Where it is warm, and life is good.
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I stored the ice cream George brought, out on the deck, where it was a lot colder than our freezer. Plus, there wasn’t any spare room in the freezer, anyway.
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Relative Something 