Turning over a new leaf in dietary habits

My father died of a sudden heart attack when he was 53. He was not overweight and did not have high blood pressure, so everyone figured he was fine. But when they checked after the fact, they found he had lots of bad cholesterol.

I've just passed 40. I'm not overweight, don't have high blood pressure, and all my blood stats are fine - except for the bad cholesterol. For some reason I have lots of bad cholesterol.

After a quick degree from the University of Google, I've decided I need to somehow add a ton of bird food to my diet.

1. oats
2. olive oil or canola oil
3. nuts and peanuts
4. beans and lentils
5. barley
6. pears, apples, fruits with lots of pectin (soluble fiber)
7. anything with omega-3 fatty acids (fish, flaxseed)
8. soy (tofu, edamame)
9. things fortified with plant sterols/stanols (check the OJ)
10. okra
11. tomatoes
12. avocados

Lots of things that are plant seeds of some sort. The hardest part to add will be the fresh fruit - I just don't normally eat fruit. The hardest thing to subtract? I'm really going to miss cheese.

We Can Haz Health Care Now?

A hypothetical scenario: Joe Blow is informed that he is being laid off. Shortly after, he discovers an unusual lump in his leg. What happens next?

Well, if Joe Blow lived in any first world country other than the U.S., he would go to a doctor, get it diagnosed, undergo any necessary medical treatment, and otherwise get it taken care of. Then he would find a new job and go back to being a happy, productive taxpayer. The End.

In the U.S.?

Being laid off means that health insurance is about to end. Sure, health plans can be extended through something called "Cobra" - but in practice that means adding a sizeable new bill during a time of zero income, which is not a financially sound thing to do.

Being diagnosed with something serious while without health insurance means that all health care costs must come out of pocket. This is even less sound financially during a period of zero income. Especially if Joe Blow only has enough savings to afford being laid off OR have a medical issue, but not both at the same time.

Being diagnosed with something serious before acquiring new health insurance means that "pre-existing condition" clauses might kick in, thereby causing the new health insurance to cost more.

Thus, financially speaking, Joe Blow should delay going to the doctor until after he has acquired a new job with new health insurance. Then he can discover he has now-incurable terminal cancer, and die.

Because the other choice would be to go to the doctor "now," discover he has cancer, undergo treatment, and enter financial ruin. Then he'll become homeless, possibly no longer be able to afford the rest of treatment, and die.

Ahh, the U.S. of A. Very nice first world country - if you're rich. Third world country if you're not. Alas for Joe Blow.


(Note: the above is all entirely hypothetical, of course. Entirely.)

Things learned from a week of wearing a pedometer

A pedometer is a device that counts the number of steps walked, and also estimates distance covered (based on stride length) and calories burned in the process (based on body weight). I acquired one recently to find out how much walking I do in my daily life. It's an Omron HJ-112, and I have no idea how it works, except I keep imagining that it contains artificial semicircular canals. That's probably not it, but it manages to be pretty accurate as long as I either clip it to some part of my clothing that doesn't move much (the top of my pants works well) or keep it in a snug pocket. Too much swinging around in a loose pocket confuses it mightily, as does walking funny.

The recommended walk count is 10,000 steps per day. I get nowhere close to that. On a workday it tends to be somewhere between 2000 and 2500, and on weekends it's much less - but that's partly because I forget to wear it while I'm bumbling around at home. Could I actually manage 10k steps in a single day? Hmm. I'd probably have to leave the computer and go outside. o.O

An Anecdote

At the beginning of some of my yoga classes, the instructor asks us to "pick an intention for your practice, a dedication to someone or something, a reason for why you're here today. Could be a part of your body that especially needs work, could be anything."

Mine tend to be about areas of my body that need work - neck, shoulders, that incessant ringing in my ears that started last December and refuses to go away. Sometimes I'll pick writing, either as a whole or a particular character that I'm writing for.

One day a few months back, something odd happened.

Me: "Hmmm... is my shoulder extra stiff today maybe?"
Voice¹ in my head, suddenly speaking up: "God."
Me: "Huh?"
Voice: "GOD."
Me: "Umm. God? Why would I pick that?"
Voice: "GOD. GOD. GOD."
Me: "Okay, well, what kind of God? There are lots of different versions of--"
Voice: "Christian² God."
Me: "But I'm not--"
Voice: "Specifically, the Catholic God."
Me: "..."
Voice: "GOD. Definitely GOD."
Me: "Well umm, I do have a character who is a knight templar, and that's how he'd feel about it, so, how about I just think of him then?"

This seemed acceptable to the voice in my head. The class moved on to the usual variety of poses and stretches, and I got too busy keeping track of proper posture to wonder why I was suddenly a devout worshipper of the Catholic God, when the most involvement I'd ever had with them before was to attend the occasional wedding or funeral in one of their churches.

After class, a young man three mats away from me started talking about a horrible car accident he was in several months ago. It was amazing that he was still alive, and although his back was seriously screwed up, he was lucky to be walking and not paralyzed. His father told him that the very first thing he said, upon waking up from his month-long coma, was "I was walking with God." The young man said, "I'm so thankful to God, I wouldn't still be here if it wasn't for Him."

A few days later, while I was driving home from a completely different yoga class (one that didn't have that young man in it, and where no voices suddenly insisted that I had a deep, hitherto unknown devotion to God), I finally thought (I'm slow that way sometimes): "...oh. So THAT'S where it came from."

Stuff like that happens to me all the time.

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Footnotes:
¹It wasn't an actual, verbal voice. It was a sensation of strong conviction. One that as I poked at it trying to figure out what it was, I got more and more info out of it.

²Every religion (and Christian denomination) has a slightly different conception of God, which makes their 'feel' slightly different. This is most noticeable in their churches. God comes in a lot of different distinct flavors that are distinguishable once you've seen them enough to recognize them. Churches that are mainly used for worship by their members will convey their flavor strongly, while churches that allow lots of different views are more generalized, and churches that double as tourist attractions usually lose their signal to all the noise.

Followups

1. The empty restaurant building across the street from me now has a sign that says:

Coming Soon
Cajun Grill Cafe
Bourbon Chicken !!

So. More chicken then. But at least it's not the battered and deep-fried kind, like the last two places (that failed there). If it's anything like the one at the mall food court, I'll probably eat there regularly. If not, well, I hope it will serve actual Cajun food, which the mall food court doesn't.

2. I stopped using the shoe lift.

You know how when one of your joints needs to be cracked, it feels sort of itchy and naggy (and eventually stabby) until you crack it? Well, that's what happens to an undefinable spot in the back left of my skull after a few weeks of shoe lifting. The chiropractor couldn't reach it. The backup chiropractor couldn't either. It takes weeks after I stop shoe lifting to work out on its own.

I think I'll save the shoe lift for times when I'm doing lots of touristing.

3. She is a dear, sweet little old lady. She was retired and gone, but says she found it not to her liking. Now she's unretired and back, and watching over us all once more.

4. Good things that have ended sometimes have epilogues and sequels.

Business at their wholesale seafood market is slow but growing steadily. The bun that came in February is now in China. The bun's brother, who was in China, is now here. A few of the original takeout customers have indeed found their way there. And apparently my Mandarin has improved due to those eight months of being unable to communicate with the new takeout staff otherwise.

5. The traffic light that hates me still hates me. For a while I was driving through the shopping center to go through the crosslight without having to make a U-turn. Then for a while it looked like it had changed its ways - so I lost the habit of driving through the shopping center. But it was all just a clever ploy! Now, this past week, it's back to the same inappropriate redness as before. T.T

6. Last year I was paid to skulk around a dormful of sleeping children. Last week they paid me to do it again. Next year I'm penciled in to do it a third time. Who says peace of mind is priceless?

7. Not only can I touch my toes without warming up, after today's yoga class I could touch my thumbs to the floor! Yay progress! :)

Hair

Every two or three years, usually at the beginning of a summer, I get a haircut. About 15 inches get trimmed off, and most of it goes to Locks of Love - a charity that makes wigs for children with cancer or other hair-losing medical conditions.

After that, I do nothing. I wash it, I brush it when it gets long enough to need it, I use cheap ponytail holders. Otherwise I go about my business until it's time to do it again.

Exercise Progress

An accurate depiction of my life for the decade before this time last year:

The past year: Core Performance by Mark Verstegen

I started with the goal to someday be able to touch my toes. At first I could only do one or two reps of each warmup exercise (and took comfort from the part of the book that says "at first it might feel like a workout itself"). Then I worked up to doing five or six. Then I worked up to doing five or six reps of each all in the same day. Then I started adding stuff from the "real" exercises, and also some short sprinting. The idea was to eventually work up to doing the short version of the "Pain, Deconditioned, or Tight? Start here!" routine.

And then I hit a plateau.

This year: Yoga!

At my chiropractor's insistence, I'm going once or twice a week. It's a good thing I did all those stretching things last year or I wouldn't've survived the first class! Flow yoga is kind of cool - a sequence of different poses arranged in an order that flows, almost like a dance. Surprisingly, after a good class, I'm neither tired nor sore.

More importantly, I seem to have levelled. Now I'm eating even more than last year, and the scale tells me that some pounds are starting to accumulate. Yay new muscles! (Maybe soon I'll actually be able to see them!)

And I can sometimes touch my toes without warming up now. :)

Evolved Vitameatavegamin

It stands to reason that I ought to be able to get all the vitamins and minerals I need through proper diet. After all, we evolved in the Circle of Life as eaters of food, not poppers of pills. So if I'm not getting all I need, and I feel poorly as a result, there must be something wrong with what and how I eat. I should eat less junk, eat more healthy stuff, get in a wider variety of fruits and veggies, make sure there's a properly balanced amount of proteins and carbs and fats, drink more water, pay attention to what I eat in what order and which parts of the day, not too much of these fats but more of those, etc. etc. etc.

Then it occurred to me that it might not be me after all. It might actually be the food. In these modern times of crops grown in monocultures with artificial fertilizers and livestock fed highly controlled artificial diets, where large parts of the process are chock full of chemicals, how do I know that the original, natural range of nutrition is actually getting into the food at all?

So now I happily slurp down a spoonful of this tasty liquid multivitamin every day. Nature's Plus Source of Life Ultra (with lutein!) looks like concentrated pond scum - a blackish green. It tastes like mango long enough to get it past my tongue and down my throat before the strongly vitaminlike aftertaste sets in. And the first round or two of liquid out the other end is a dazzling, blindingly bright yellow. A spoonful just before bed means I sleep really well and wake up refreshed and alert, while a spoonful just out of bed means I can seriously carpe that diem instead of being all groggy and tired the whole time.

And every time I take some, I get to giggle thinking of this:

Unlike Lucy's Vitameatavegamin, mine doesn't have meat in it (safe for vegetarians!) and also omits the 23% alcohol. And it really does taste like candy. :)

A weekend filled with weird, surreal dreams about rotten eggs and farts

It turns out that migraines and tinnitus are both much worse under conditions of carbon monoxide poisoning due to a gas leak from a poorly maintained heater. Also, none of the above are particularly conducive to complex thought.

But it's all better now. We hope. :)

First Big Shoe Lift Test: Standing Around for Three Hours

Today as my takeout shift was coming to an end, I noticed several things:

a) I'm not sore. My back isn't aching, my butt and leg muscles aren't twinging, and nothing is throbbing. Also, all of my leg joints feel fine.

b) I can stand still. I'm not shuffling back and forth to counter the twinging that I'm not feeling. Also, although I'm still going through the motions of attempting to crack my lower back and knees every so often, just out of habit, I don't actually need to. And nothing feels like it's in desperate need of stretching.

c) I'm not totally exhausted. Apparently I normally expend a tremendous amount of energy just by standing around. Today I could probably have kept working for twice as long.

Maybe all this newly freed up energy can now be put to more interesting uses, like gaining strength and stamina! Or acquiring hobbies that aren't in front of the computer! Or fighting crime! Or even just catching up on all the hopelessly behind housework that I can never get done. (Or maybe I'm being hopelessly optimistic. We'll see, I guess. ;) )

In conclusion: so far this shoe lift thing seems like a really good idea. :)

Followup for those concerned...

To continue the story about my mismatched legs:

My chiropractor gave me a shoe lift insert today. He said to try that and see if it actually helps anything before pursuing anything more expensive. It's a piece of rubber, only about a quarter of an inch thick, but my body can tell the difference. My right hip is enthusiastically in favor. My entire left side seems skeptical so far. Guess we'll see how sore I am after a few days of this...

Minor imperfections of anatomy

My left leg is about half an inch shorter than my right. Pictures of me as a kid show that my left leg wasn't straight up and down - it looked bashed inward at the knee. Somehow nobody thought of this as a problem. (Then again, our "health care" during my childhood consisted of "don't get sick.")

Nowadays, this means that I lean slightly to the left (even when I'm sitting down, apparently), that touching my left toe is much easier than touching my right toe, and that standing still is nearly impossible - I have to shift around a lot. Too much walking kills my right hip, which in turn kills every other joint in both legs when I try to compensate by walking different, and eventually my lower then upper back. Also, my present exercise routine tends to leave my right hip seriously sore for days.

My current shoes have soles that are an inch and a half tall. I've recently discovered that walking around with only my left shoe on feels really nice to my right hip.

Earwax

At least in the U.S., there is a myth that one shouldn't allow water into one's ears. In truth, rinsing them with soap and water regularly is a great way to keep earwax from building up to the point of blocking the whole thing. The skin inside the ear canal is the same as everywhere else and can be cleaned the same way. Soap keeps the wax crumbly so that it falls out easier - instead of turning into a hard resinous mass that eventually requires outside intervention.

Outside interventions include:
a) Ear candling. A long hollow cylinder of beeswax is inserted into the ear and lit like a candle. The earwax melts, is drawn upward out of the ear, and rehardens in the candle.
b) Shooting water into the ear at high speed and volume, such as with a giant syringe. The wax slug will pop out of the ear with a sudden loud gurgle.
c) Chemical wax dissolvers. This will turn the wax into a dark brown ooze, which means your ears have the runs. Depending on how much wax was in there at the time, it could go on for days.

It is still true that one shouldn't put solid objects into one's ears. Cotton swabs in particular used to be a popular way to clean out the ear canals. However, all that does is push the wax to the back and pack it in tighter. That never ends well. Leave the cotton swabs in the hands of earwax experts with bright lights.

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More about avoiding earwax

Mmm... massage...

My chiropractor tells me that when he recommends massage therapy to people, men tend to balk, thinking it in the same category of frivolous pampering as pedicures. Women tend to be much more amenable.

I liken it to taking the car into the shop for servicing. The car lasts longer when it gets regular care and maintenance. The body does too. Eating well, sleeping well, exercising and taking it in for regular checkups are all part of it - and sometimes, so are massages.

Ow ow ow...

I've always been a runt. No amount of eating will make me fat, and no amount of exercise will make me stronger or give me more endurance. I hit a plateau pretty quickly and that's the end of it.

Yes, I've tried.

In the former case, I was once on a weeklong work cruise where the cook liked me and made sure I was very well fed. He seemed to take it as a personal failing on his part if I didn't eat. If I ever gained any measurable amount of weight, it was then - and it went away a week after the cruise ended. (Alas I forgot to weigh myself on the way off the boat, so now I'll never know how much it actually was.)

As for exercise, I once considered being a geologist. This included a couple field courses in Montana while I was in college. Unfortunately, it turned out that six weeks of mountain hiking for ten hours a day, six days a week, was not going to do anything other than make me miserable at the way everyone else gradually got faster at passing me. I did this twice in two different summers - just to confirm, like a good scientist should.

So I naturally settled into a nice, sedentary life of being in front of the computer all the time.

Then a chiropractor said, "You need to stop that."

So I bought an exercise book he recommended - Core Performance by Mark Verstegen - which I also highly recommend. While I've yet to become fit enough to start Verstegen's pre-beginner-level workout program (the one for the truly pathetic), there are a large number of individual exercises in it that even I can do. And with no equipment!

The first few weeks, my main goal was "to be able to touch my toes." Well, now I can do that when I'm warmed up. I also gained an invisible amount of muscles and discovered the true meaning of hunger. (And now my food bill seems to have doubled...).

Unfortunately, I seem to have reached some plateaus already. I don't seem to be getting any better at the exercises I'm already doing, and any time I try to add more of them, I wind up so sore the next day I can barely move.

Which brings me to the title of this post. I believe it was Thursday when I overexercised. Now it's Saturday. Ow ow ow...