High cholesterol

[the_gelf]

Originally Posted by Mjt

@Gelfling, thanks for the exercise link, I think I could almost do that.
Did I mention my allergy to moving fast and sweating?
But that looks ok. I will give it a try.
Thanks again everyone

Don't worry so do I ;p I avoid it as much as possible, however 30min 2 or three times a week isn't much, and I can make every excuse under the sun. Honestly exercise wasn't i it self one thing that did me good, it wasn't until I actively cut excess sugar out did I notcie a change (well, other people noticd, my self perception is a little skewed)

Took me at least 6 months to change my physiology enough that i didn't crave to eat - and most of this forcing myself to eat something for breakfast, but always hungry for lunch. I realised it had worked when I had to buy $1000 bucks of new clothes as nothing fit anymore.

[simonecuttlefish]

I didn't mention the weight loss either. I've lost heaps of weight but I don't weigh myself as my weight fluctuates wildly by 5 KG easily in 24 hours (naked, same time of day, etc - most things being equal), so I measure my weight loss in belt notches. 5 holes due to intestinal trouble, and another three just from diet and exercise, About 25 cm all up and I'm still shrinking.

How do I stick to it? Laying off the grog was hard to start with. I took a real splurge at the GAC and paid for it But 'not' having a drink has now become a habit. I won't shy from a drink, but now I sort of demand something from it or I won't have it. It will be the 60ml of port I just HAD to have after dinner, or the 'OHH I like that one!' glass of red, but I'm not throwing down bottles of whiskey (yes, sometimes plural) "because" I'm playing a PvP online game, or the three litre cask "because I'm staying up all night" arrangement it was for the previous twenty years. I'm also lucky not to have ended up brain damaged or dead from cirrhosis or something similar. So there goes another bazillion terraquads of dead calories pouring in every night.

Now, about the food and more specifically, the FATS! Get rid of margarine and all the oils in the cupboard, except for olive and possibly grape seed. Olive oil is rich in omega three fats. Omega three is just as fattening, but tends not to force up BAD cholesterol levels, and increases the GOOD cholesterol levels - or something like that. Grapeseed is almost all omega 6, and this is generally not a good thing to have in excess, That being said, grape seed oil is a miracle product in the kitchen. It's slippery but not greasy in anyway, has almost no taste, and your oven has to be more like a kiln before it smokes. You only need the tiniest bit as well - I love it when I just don't want the olive oil flavour about the place.

I was told by my GP that I would have to go back and see 'Dr $280.00 a visit' to find out why I was bloated up like a balloon, producing a Jackson Pollock in the lavatory every thirty minutes and in constant pain. Screw that I thought, I'll just work it out myself and not give a specialist the money, given that he should have been able to make a diagnosis based on the previous visit and the colonoscopy he gave me.

So I found out about elimination diets, to try to isolate food types and see if my troubles were being caused by something I was consuming. Then I thought, this is way too involved, but it sounded familiar to me ... "THAT'S IT!", I thought. I remember something like that from TV ... THE PALAEOLITHIC DIET!

Then I made a few alterations as it was WAY too Spartan for my liking. So after deciding that palaeolithic sorbet, palaeolithic red wine and palaeolithic Romano cheese had been left off the official list somehow, I was on my way to success! Romano cheese!!1!!!1! I hear you exclaim! More on that later.

The diet allowed me to stuff in as much food as I liked, guilt free, and had no processed foods, almost no dairy (lactose), and no grains (gluten, especially from wheat) to worry about and in about two weeks I was feeling approximately 2974.390012% better! I gave that a couple more weeks and then did some stress testing on dairy. No bad reactions. I let small amounts of dairy back into my regular meals and stayed there for another couple of weeks and then tried a gluten stress test.

BANG! I was in pain and blown up like a puffer fish in only a few hours. Kick out the gluten, settle down over a couple of days and stabilised again for another couple of weeks. Gluten stress time again and the same BAD result. I'm off it for a full year now, as my doctor said that developing gluten intolerance after the almost year of serious (life threatening in my case) guts trouble, and was not that uncommon as a reaction to that illness. He said to give myself a year off gluten and try another stress test, as the intolerance may well have passed by then.

Now, you have to reward yourself, and you have to splurge. So, schedule in a splurge once a week, and make it a good one Keep yourself on pieces of fruit during the day of your splurge, and make the end of the day meal one to 'laugh in horror at'. I look forward to my splurge days. Another example of acceptable splurging? Eurovision Song Contest. I said, "Nothing is stopping me from having my Chilean strawberry champagne", and scheduled in a full bottle for each of the semi finals and the grand final (over three nights).

I've developed cravings for strong dark (palaeolithic ) chocolate. I have to swap out meals to fit that into a dietary energy budget, so I did. I swapped out breakfast for pieces of fruit. Good thing I love the stuff (and it's so CHEAP).

It's easy for me. I am single now, so I only have to consider myself at meal times and when grocery shopping. So I simply don't buy anything I shouldn't eat, and allow myself to go nuts on fruit. (Watch out for nuts, as they are usually really energy dense). I'm also getting into the stew lately. MMMM - and don't hold back, it's MEANT to be satisfying and filling - so grab a pack of smoked bacon bones to throw in. Fat (evil piggy saturated fat) that melts off early on can easily be soaked up with some kitchen paper straight out of the pot, so I do. I also use guar gum if I need to thicken anything, but watch it. It thickens like 10 times as much as flour or corn starch and is tricky to get in without forming globs. Use an icing sugar shaker or old "small holed" spice jar to get it sprinkling very finely.

Now ... I was trying to get off dairy and greatly reduce my saturated fat intake, so why am I buying Romano Cheese? Because you HAVE to live. Romano is a hard cheese, and super strong in flavour. It's rather like parmesan cheese (another great choice if you get the block type, not the pre-shredded or in a shaker type), and has that wonderful "smells like spew" character that that awful shaker crap they used to put on the tables at the Pizza Hut a couple of decades ago did. MMMMM! Really strong means you don't use much. WHAT AM I SAYING! You own a pizza shop ... anyway, you get the idea. Low fat fetta is GREAT as well, as it crumbles up to spread out thinly easily, and turns into something perfectly GORGEOUS when grilled.

I also swapped sweet for sour and am loving it. It's not a dressing without fresh lime juice and a few shots of fish sauce (the Asian type that tastes like liquid anchovies). I use Squid Brand Green tea with a thin slice of fresh ginger or lime or lemon, instead of black tea with milk and sugar. It's a good thing I actually LIKE brown rice. All that fibre makes you expend more energy simply trying to digest it at all, and it's crunchy and tastes nutty ... MMMMMM ... and it leaves you feeling fuller longer than white rice in my opinion.

I know gluten isn't your problem, but I'll mention a few more things about it. A lot of the 'gluten free' alternatives really aren't alternatives. Gluten free pasta seems OK, but the wraps and breads have been a disappointment, and it's just as fattening as 'real' bread and pasta. Try to make a salad sandwich on gluten free bread and ... well just don't. Skip the bread and make the salad four times bigger and it's still got less energy in it than the bread had

Tinned salmon, sardines and tuna are convenient, and have EPA and DHA in the oils of the fish, so it's all good, but odourless fish oil caps are cheap and easy. Drop a couple a day for the rest of your life

I shy away from potatoes now - too much energy. A good guide is to find a list of foods with low GL, and low GI if you can and find ways to make them a much larger percentage of what you consume. Swap out potatoes for sweet potato if you can. If you must have potatoes, get the little baby ones. GI and GL are most commonly talked about in terms of your bodies insulin response, but it's also a cheap and shoddy and not reliable but convenient way of also reducing energy intake, and should reduce your after meal insulin response as well. (Put lemon juice or vinegar on potatoes if you are gunna pig out - I read a while back that that should also reduce the bodies insulin response to this horror food. Chips and vinegar and a wedge of lemon anyone?).

I have gone berserk on spices as well, to make less that interesting food far more of an experience. Now, as to how you might arrange that AND maintain feeding a family? Tell them to eat it or learn to cook.

The great blood test review should be in in about a week. Then we shall see how much rubbish information I've just dropped.

[Mjt]

@Mr Cuttlefish thanks so much for that post and the link to the PAL diet. Both triggered memories of the type of diet I had years ago when trying to raise 4 kids on a very low income. We ate lots of unprocessed natural healthy food, it was the best way to fill them up. Since I took over the pizza shop and the kids left home I have fallen into the quick food trap, processed and high in fat sugar salt, everything.
So a lifestyle change it will be

[owheelj]

Michael Pollan has a very interesting book - "In Defence of Food" that has an interesting section on cholesterol. In particular he suggests that argument that there is a link between eating foods that contain a lot of cholesterol and having high cholesterol is not nearly as well proven as people think. I think it's definitely worth a read on the subject. His general theme is that our society is mixed between people too obsessed with food, and people who don't care at all. He recommends you eat; "Food, not too much, mainly plants." - But he then defines food as mainly whole foods, and with less processing - but one of the keys, and Rosmary Stanton in her book (Choice Guide to Food) backs this up, is eating a lot of variety. They both think not eating particular foods is a bad idea (or relying on diets of particular "superfoods") and that you should aim for variety. Pollan says that you shouldn't worry about calories or fat content or things like that - you should mainly worry about whether you are eating a satisfying and tasty meal or not (as long as you eat "real food").

My understanding is that PAL diet is not viewed particularly well by many experts. There's an obvious problem with using weight as the main indicator of health. Rational Wiki has a page on it;

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Paleo_diet

Note that while aspects of the diet are good, you don't need to confine yourself to the imaginary diet of palaeolithic humans to get those same benefits.

[simonecuttlefish]

Originally Posted by owheelj

Note that while aspects of the diet are good, you don't need to confine yourself to the imaginary diet of palaeolithic humans to get those same benefits.

If anyone who knows food science and/or has training in nutrition, please pour boiling acid over anything I mention here, should it deserve it.

Absolutely. You have to live, and we live in a world where we have the most wonderful selection of foods available to us. The main thing I got from the Palaeolithic diet, was the ability to look at a fridge full of raw salad items, vegetables and plain lumps of low fat raw meats, and then make something yummy out of it. I use the term 'palaeolithic' very loosely, but the overall principles of the diet are still good ones. It's a guide for me, not a cookbook.

When I make a "palaeolithic pizza", it most certainly should not be looked at as 'diet food'. By the time I've applied the palaeolithic tinned crushed tomato that I've mixed with chopped garlic and herbs and chopped palaeolithic bottled anchovies to my palaeolithic gluten free pizza base, I really have altered some of the original intent Add to that the layers of palaeolithic roast zucchini and eggplant that has been coated in olive oil and chopped oregano, alternating with layers of baby spinach leaves, lightly pan fried capsicum strips, then topped with prawns, palaeolithic Portuguese chicken seasoning sprinkles (I cant help myself when it comes to lime and chilli powder ), sliced mushroom and sliced semi dried tomatoes and crumbled palaeolithic low fat fetta and thin slices of palaeolithic Romano cheese, well, it's not very palaeolithic any more, and certainly not very 'diet'.

This is a splurge food. The thing I'm trying to do with this meal is not avoid fats, but rather to revel in them, and enjoy the richness you get from oven roasted olive oil. The zucchini and eggplant were lightly pressed between kitchen paper to soak off most of the oil, but it's well and truly still there. I'm saying, I want it and I'm happy to go with it as long as it's olive oil. Just as fattening, but I have just arranged a major pig out containing exceptionally low levels of saturated fats, and tons of omega three oils instead. It's no 'diet' food.

For what it's worth, I avoid products with added salt if I can. I like to feel that I'm in control of how much salt I eat, and the warm satisfaction of using iodised salt in case my IQ is decaying from lack of iodine. You don't need to have goitre or children with congenital cretinism to be experiencing a negative effect from lack of Iodine.

Consuming cholesterol I believe is another red herring. From what I've read, the main culprit is saturated fats increasing the bloods ability to hold bad fats in it. It is I think a side effect from most foods with high cholesterol levels generally tending to be relatively high in saturated fat - an enemy of good lipid blood work results.

On ANOTHER side note ... anyone tried the kangaroo meat that's about these days? One of my indulgences is kanga bangers or roo mince ... MMM! Check out the fat content and types in it if you can still find it. I've also heard that women can find the smell a little off putting, but I'd love to know if anyone else has noticed this. My suspicion is perhaps some just people hate the idea of eating kangaroos.

p.s. hint ... fish oil caps. If you are after EPA and DHA, hoping your body can efficiently convert alpha linolenic acids in olive or flaxseed oil, into the more complicated forms of EPA and DHA is a little dodgy and unpredictable and dependant of various other factors to occur. EPA and DHA exists naturally in some fatty cold water fish like sardines, tuna and salmon because it concentrates up the food chain into these fish (and some others).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-Linolenic_acid

α-Linolenic acid can only be obtained by humans through their diets because the absence of the required 12- and 15-desaturase enzymes makes de novo synthesis from stearic acid impossible. Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA; 20:5, n−3) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA; 22:6, n−3) are readily available from fish oil and play a vital role in many metabolic processes. These can also be synthesized by humans from dietary α-linolenic acid, but with an efficiency of only a few percent.[11] Because the efficacy of n−3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acid (LC-PUFA) synthesis decreases down the cascade of α-linolenic acid conversion, DHA synthesis from α-linolenic acid is even more restricted than that of EPA

An incredible source of EPA and DHA can come from farmed fish, as they are often fed with fish meal made from other fish, and so can have comparatively very high levels of both. So next time you see those large frozen packets of ocean trout or salmon fillets that only work out to be about 5 to 6 bucks each, indulge

[Mjt]

Originally Posted by simonecuttlefish

On ANOTHER side note ... anyone tried the kangaroo meat that's about these days? One of my indulgences is kanga bangers or roo mince ... MMM! Check out the fat content and types in it if you can still find it. I've also heard that women can find the smell a little off putting, but I'd love to know if anyone else has noticed this. My suspicion is perhaps some just people hate the idea of eating kangaroos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha-Linolenic_acid
An incredible source of EPA and DHA can come from farmed fish, as they are often fed with fish meal made from other fish, and so can have comparatively very high levels of both. So next time you see those large frozen packets of ocean trout or salmon fillets that only work out to be about 5 to 6 bucks each, indulge

I love roo, and hadnt heard that the smell if off putting for some women, but whilst I love the taste, I cant abide the smell of it raw or while its cooking. So I have it when I go out, when someone else cooks it. I would love to put it on our menu, but I wouldn't be able to stand having to cook it.

[BlueDevil]

While you are waiting to see your doctor add some oats to your diet (eg porridge, or sprinkle some extra onto your cereal).

Also include some psyllium. Cereals with psyllium may have very little psyllium in them. You can buy psyllium very cheaply in the health food section of a supermarket and sprinkle it on your cereal etc. Also comes as Metamusil which is a bit expensive but tastes ok when just mixed in water.

Tapatalk 2

[Darwinsbulldog]

Feeling pretty smug at the moment, as I just did 90 mins forced march with my backpack. The grim reaper is pretty slow, so you don't need to run. Running just ruins my feet and knees in any case. The backpack is low impact, but it gives your heart a real workout. Fuck, I hate hills though, as they bugger up my enjoyment of smoking. Dunno what my cholesterol is, but the last test I did years ago was high.

Basically, I am an ape that evolved on the pleistocene plains, which means I should only eat sugar when I am prepared to fuck with bees, eat meat intermittedly, eat lots of fruit, an only enough carbs to maintain a lean frame. Not there yet! Oh, and Savannah apes did not smoke neither! Fuck, fuck fuck. Which means about 2 hours walking for every fag!

I don't drink, except maybe once a month at a PIL, otherwise I would probs be dead by now!

[Mjt]

Hope it is all still going well Puppy. I think I have an allergy to exercise, it makes me all red and i sweat and get short of breath, so I avoid it mostly.
I went back to my doc with my modified diet, and she was most impressed.
I have lost about 6kg.
Blood test booked for next month so I will find out my levels then.
Mr Fishie has gone out in sympathy and is eating what I eat, and he's lost 5kg, which sounds good, but he was only 65 to start with. So now we are feeding him UP.
So soon I will be so healthy I will be dangerous



If I can get off the fags all together that is

[Voltairine]

Originally Posted by Mjt

I think I have an allergy to exercise, it makes me all red and i sweat and get short of breath

That happens to me too. Hmmm... an allergy.

Originally Posted by Mjt

If I can get off the fags all together that is

That's the easy part!