Breakfast of Supplements

I haven't abandoned some of the strictures of the Esselstyn diet, but I have decided that it's not giving me enough of what I need.  Let me point out what my personal doctor said about going back on the Esselstyn diet:   "I reminded him that he looked pretty terrible when I first met him - tremulous, weak, low mm tone/density, more confused, hives all the time - and that he seems much better now so he needs to be quite cautious doing this." Since June 1st , I’ve been cutting back on saturated fats, which I presume will result in lower cholesterol numbers. On June 1 st my hives were mild, I almost didn’t notice them; my cholesterol was 255 and my LDL was 172. My cardiologist wanted to put me on a statin. I've had them before, and I don't like them. So I've been watching ketogenic diet experts discussing the details of how to do a keto diet.  One of these was Dr. Berg , and the other Dr. Stephen Phinney .  They both had interesting things to say, especially ...

Well, I had my first day at the gym in a very long while.  Imagine my surprise when I came home and tested my blood sugar: 175? Why? For the sake of craving, I've been adding the occasional soft or hard boiled egg to my diet, and I had that morning.   Well, and the occasional tin of some small fishy thing like sardines, mackerel or oysters. I think my blood sugar was in a high normal range before I went to the gym, I'm guessing here, but it was really spiked by the time I got back. My guess is that my body went into my stores and converted glycogen or converted something else to glucose.  I've just never noticed that before; maybe I was in better shape. If I stick to my diet which is based on the Esselstyn diet which I cannot tolerate for too long (I tried), then my blood sugars even out in the low to mid 90s.  But I really feel that I'm missing something. I had been missing something, I had a BMI test which indicated a degree of muscle loss (there was not basel...

 I've watched doctors on You Tube explain this or that about diets of various kinds and claim connections between things.  What follows is a presentation by Nina Teicholz a New York Times investigative journalist.  I thought I knew things, apparently I don't , and I'm not sure the people I listened to did either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rz-8H_i1wA    

I change my mind so much about what I should eat that I hesitate to make any proclamation about food, supplements and health.  Now that I've dropped the Esselstyn diet, I see its flaws.  It was thoroughly anti animal fat, that place where we get oil soluble vitamins and right sized omegas. It put me in a position of not having enough of that kind of fat to make muscle and God knows what else.  It was consistent with so much of what I was being told at cardio rehab, and I fell for it.  After all, they were the experts. The obvious things to eat and not eat could be put in a one page memo.  And it probably has been at one time or another.   I like lists, and this one is what I think is good.   Please take it with a grain of salt, I'm not perfect. Let's start with vitamins:   I like liposomal vitamin C because it stays in your system.  That doesn't mean don't take the other stuff.   The other stuff has a two hour half li...

 I've had the most unpleasant time over the last couple of weeks, since I developed vertigo and had to start watching what I was eating because the wrong food would cause me to repeatedly vomit when I had vertigo. The thing is, repeated vomiting results in stomach upset which, along with vertigo, leads to more vomiting.  I think the vertigo started with an ear infection, which damaged my inner ear of the left side.  I don't hear as well out of that ear anymore. So I've been through almost half a dozen episodes and finally I went to the doctor and she gave me a description of the Epley Maneuver, a series of positions and movements one takes on a bed to reposition the little calcium crystals in the inner ear so that they work properly. I'm sure I did it wrong.  Oddly, it worked.

Once upon a time I loved sweets, but to be safe I settled for crackers with blackberry preserves.  It was good.  Then it struck me that sweet fruity things were slowly damaging my liver and I had to figure out how to stop doing it.  I found a sweetener made of glucose, which the body knows how to deal with. When I need a fix, I just have a spoonful of that.  I also found that large starchy meals tend to set me up for needing sugars, which is doubly problematic because starch makes me break out in hives.   So do any sugars. So I am trying to reduce the amount of starch I eat, which is a problem because my diet was mostly starch,  So this morning I did not have the steel cut oats, vegetables and egg.  I had two soft boiled eggs and a tin of Atlantic Mackerel.  Canned fish really tastes horrible, but it's just the right amount of protein and is filling.  Mackerel tastes better than canned sardines, which, depending on how they're fixed, gen...

I haven't finished it yet, but I've been watching: "Professor Robert Lustig- 'Sugar, metabolic syndrome, and cancer'" . Which is rather eye opening and he really hits it with diabetes, which I have, sugar and fructose and how they lead to fatty liver disease and insulin resistance. I'm going to be seeing if I can arrange to not eat anymore of that stuff.  I may fail upon occasion, but the direction will be to eliminate it from my diet.