January 24th, 2025
We ended up with three more snow days Wednesday, Thursday, and today as we were waiting for temperatures to rise and snow to melt. I could have written the same blog from January 21st three days in a row so opted not to write the last two days as there was nothing new to share. However, I did have a moment where I tasted a little almond butter thinking it was all natural. I immediately thought this is great and dug in for another spoonful but paused enough to read the label. There was indeed some added sugar. It just goes to show how powerful the substance is. Nearly a month later my brain was lighting up like a Christmas tree at just the hint of it.
Today cleared up enough for me to pick up my annual health screening report from the doctor’s office. I just needed a signature for my insurance form, but the data was from my pre-surgery visit on November 1, 2024, so I have decided to use that as my baseline data. I am 100% sure I did not get healthier between then and December 30th when I started going sugar-free. So here it is.
Height- 6’2 Historically, have been 6’3 so must have shrunk a bit
Weight- 210 lbs- Highest I have been
Blood Pressure- 117/71- Not awful
Total Cholesterol -181
Tryglycerides- 192
HDL Cholesterol- 46
LDL Cholesterol- 104
Fasting Blood Glucose- 87
The report I can pull online also says, “Overweight with body mass index (BMI) of 27 to 27.9”. My college rowing weight was 185 and I was all muscle so clearly I had become 20 to 25 lbs overweight. My height hides it well but the truth is in the numbers. I am confident that I have shed 5-10 pounds of that since the no sugar diet started but the gut remains.
The bigger problem is the cholesterol. In 2023, my triglycerides were at a sky high 360 mg when a normal value is less than 150. The doctor prescribed me Pravastatin to help reduce the cholesterol, which I took for about a month. I never want to be beholden to that type of pharmaceutical drug. I knew what the issue was. I was getting pizza from Whole Foods every day for lunch and I am sure it spiked my triglycerides. It is easier for a doctor to push a pill then tell me to change my lifestyle though so that’s what we get. Without taking the medicine, I dropped from 360mg to 192mg so on the right track.
My Non HDL Cholesterol dropped from 150 to 135mg but is supposed to be less than 130 mg and the doctor told me he wanted my LDL Cholesterol to be less than 100 mg. He also told me he had never seen someone achieve that without medicine but I was free to try. Damn right- Challenge accepted!!! Let’s see what I can do this year. By the way, doctors also told me lipomas don’t go away- mine did. And for a longer story, I was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis when I was around 30 which is a condition that does not go away. I was put on 9 pills a day- which I stopped of course and have not seen any signs of it in nearly 20 years. I know it was stress that caused it- I hadn’t taken a day off of work in a year or so at that time. So let’s see what a healthy 2025 without big pharma can produce!!
