Breakfast of Supplements

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 ...

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 an...

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 achie...

I modified my diet, right after my last blood draw, and started eating soft boiled eggs.  Two a day, for a series of days and now I'm skipping days and am considering how many eggs to eat in a week. Eggs are nutritious, which almost goes without saying, and have all four oil soluble vitamins, in varying amount.  They have the omega-3s that I know I need, and I'm not sure about the rest. I started to take them because I thought they would help with some of the brain fog I seem to have occasionally.  I suspect there may be lipids that I need but don't have a name for.   I'm guessing the gooey stuff in the egg may have some of those. When I used to eat a lot of eggs, I felt much better mentally, but that was before so many things.   Such as open heart surgery, and my diet which is largely sans lipids. I can report that eggs seems to help, but I don't know how much of that effect could just be placebo. Although I recover from strong muscle relaxants better...

I recently discovered the joys of PB2, which as you probably know is peanut butter processed to eliminate most of the fat and some sugars.  Adding PB2 to my smoothies really makes them taste good, and I can add some protein too. The inevitable problem is that too much PB2 and protein, and yes I had too much, resulted in the slow rise of GERD, gastroesophageal reflux disease, a little something that irritates the throat. So I've been busy trying to figure out a work around and more or less, have my cake and eat it too.  So I stopped the protein and  PB2 for a day, and then tried small doses mixed in to food or smoothies.  I've been mixing maybe 10 grams into my soup and 15 grams into my smoothies, and I'm waiting to see what happens. So far, so good.

It's been about almost a month since my last post about the dreaded hives, and trying to overcome them with beans.  The beans have been helpful, and I cook batches of navy beans with some adzuki mixed in and it turns out this combination helps thicken my soup base.  It tastes good, and presumably is good for me.  What I found also helps is the addition of 50 to 100 grams of pea protein every day.  I usually mix the protein in reverse osmosis water and add fruit, especially blueberries.   I think wild blueberries are a little smaller and mix better.  A banana or part of a banana helps.  Sometimes I add some coconut milk or almond milk. I think the protein change how I digest my food, so that the environment for my gut bacteria is different. Although I still have the hives, I don't have them as badly, they are much lighter and the splotches on my skin are much smaller in the morning. It's as though everything is getting back to normal. ...

I've been successfully battling the hives by cutting back on sugars and starches, or rather cutting back as much as I can.  I was considering stopping the crackers when I saw a video by  Dr. Bulsiewicz:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=un90A52gX-Y&t=2895s I didn't watch all of it but the part I did watch was very interesting, where he talks about certain beans feeding gut bacteria (the good ones) and providing substances that help rid your colon of dysfunctional ones. I  bought some dried navy beans and purchased a pressure cooker and cooked up a batch and put it in a jar.  I intend to eat more beans. Black beans were mentioned in the video, and I think I shall get some of those and combine them with the navy beans and add them to my soups. I shall, over the coming weeks, find out if this helps with my but bacteria problem.