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Showing posts from January, 2021

It all Comes Down to Fats

My new doctor, a young woman in her late 40's explained to me that having a plant based diet made up of everything but fat leaves very little for my myelin sheaths to playfully reconstruct themselves as they so wish.  I think she used other words. Not entirely sure what she recommended after she explained that, but I had started eating eggs at that point because I knew I needed something.  She later recommended small amounts of butter from pasture raised cows.  Butter is delicious, but was one of the things I stopped eating because I wanted to clear my coronary arteries.   Like so many pleasures of my youth, I thought my days with butter were over. To someone on the Esselstyn diet this is a bit like telling a chaste gentleman that he must participate in wild erotic sex with a beautiful woman at least once a day.  For his health. I'm 71 years old right now; I will have to settle for butter. My hives are slowly not as bad as they were, and I am wondering if it is the change in fa

Breaking a Diet and Putting it Back Together

Now that I've eaten so many of the wrong things , and spent money on an air fryer with associated accoutrements, changing my diet will involve wasting sunk costs.  I say this because I've noticed a few problems with the additions I've made to my diet.  And one bright spot. I've been eating fish, first canned fish and next fresh salmon.  If I eat it at night it raises my blood sugar the next day to 125.   And it goes up more after. Meat appears to put a high floor under my blood sugars, and then spikes it too. I have some chicken I'll have for lunch tomorrow, but I think I'm ending my meat binge for a good long time. I just have to figure out how to use the air fryer on other things than meat. The bright spot is Bulletproof MCT oil which is very beneficial but, if eaten with or soon after the wrong foods, can cause an upset stomach. The good part is that my muscles feel stronger, much stronger, when I walk.  I walk further and feel better, more resilient and fee

Turning My Diet Upside Down

As I understand the Esselstyn diet, it relies on eating large amounts of whole grain starch and other things such as dark green leafy vegetables.  It avoids certain things such as oils and nuts.  In the lecture I saw on You Tube, Dr Esselstyn talked about the high points and how certain foods were responsible for plaque on artery walls, how to improve the endothelium and avoid the resulting heart attack. From watching Doctors on You Tube describe this, or a similar diet, the fat content is about 12% while in a normal diet it is much higher.  A description of the diet is HERE .  I do wish that I had known about the Esselstyn diet before I went through a triple bypass.  One of my grafts failed, within a month of surgery and I decided to carry on without a stent. I would find myself with severe back pain when I went beyond five minutes on a tread mill and my pulse rose above 115.  The diet cleared my arteries enough so that I could exercise normally, and achieve a sustained pulse rate of