Coping: With the Ongoing Personal Chemistry Experiment

It’s not going in the Guinness book of whatever, but Ures truly is making considerable progress on my slow-motion road to seriously improved health.  Thought you might appreciate an update.

The first item of the agenda this morning is to state emphatically that THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE and I might even go so far as to say you’re a dang fool if you don’t involve multiple healthcare types in a consultative role.

Recapping the Experiment:

If you’ve just tuned in to the craziness around here,  the Great Personal Health Experiment is a semi-organized way of optimizing how you feel.

Core to the idea is that your body will give you all the feedback you need – provided you give it a chance to tell you.  That means becoming aware of your body’s signals.

Everyone lives in a water & bone bag of some sort.  The awareness part is learning to recognize the feedback at something other than “emergency medical” times.  Which means listening to your breath while stressing, exercising.  Feeling your heart and being able to pretty accurately peg pulse rates and so forth.

Then there’s the chemistry angle.  The six most important additions to nutrition – for me – have been the addition of:

• Magnesium
• L-Arginine
• Very high quality Men’s multi-vitamin
• Eye supplement
• Large doses of Vitamin C
• …and Apple Cider Vinegar tablets

There are also two important deletions from my nutrition.  Except for the occasional cup of cocoa, sugar is gone, and along with it: Wheat.

Update on Results

One part of this operation has been managing blood pressure – which was kicked off three or four years ago when I went to the doc for PVC’s due to too much seriously strong coffee.  In the process of doing the 12-lead, I was found to be 156/90’ish on the blood pressure which was too high.

The medical response was HZTZ (or some such) which dropped about 10-points instantly.

My objective now is to reduce the BP far enough that I can wean off the prescription meds.

119/67 pulse 73 was the blood pressure as I began writing this morning.  And that was after spilling a cup of coffee on the rug and cleaning that up.

Last night, after the “adult beverage” at about 6 PM, my BP was all the way down to 93/53 which frankly, is too low.

Being a data-driven guy, I found the single most useful thing to do was set up a log in Excel of each day (or two) messing with the treadmill and making careful notes when I go through extreme exertion.

The most useful reference data I’ve found is Vaughn’s Summaries Systolic/Diastolic Pairs Chart.  Pasted into Excel and massaged, I’ve got increments of 5 instead of 10 and it’s a great training guide.  Did I mention Free, too?

The hardest workout yet was no on the treadmill, but mounting a tractor tire that weighs some incredible number (like 130#) which is no mean feat because they are devoid of handles and such.  That got me up to 119/97 pulse 119 which is admittedly was pushing things.

The Weight Loss Side

Ending sugar, wheat, no alcohol from grains (Viva los Sanchos is great) and confining eating to an 8-hour period has reduced weight consistently.

Down 24 pounds in 38-days so far, I should be more than ready for the flight physical due in early May.  Two years ago I tipped in at 226 and I’m already below that.

Although it’s an expense, the airplane is actually the best personal training device I have. Not only is the airplane performance better when I weigh less – there’s an actual improvement in rate of climb.

Plus the routine maintenance of washing, waxing, lubing, keeping the hangar clean – it all adds up.  It’s as much work as 3 cars or 2 SUV’s  to keep up with.

Personal Life Extension

This is a key one.

Go over here and put in your data.  At 220 pounds, my life expectancy is 85-years as a middle range number and 91.22 at the high end.

The shocker for me?  Discovering in multiple runs that a couple of drinks a day is a good thing – adds time to the clock. YMMV.

There’s a shorter version of the calculator here.

What’s important about this one is that it shows the effect of exercising.  If I only exercise 3-hours a week, I’m expected to hit 84.5.  On the other hand, with an hour a day, life expectancy rises to 86.5.  But get this:  If I work out 2-hours per day, the life expectancy jumps to 89!

The biggest killers turn out to be things like not wearing seat belts, not smoking, not driving legal speeds, and so forth.

For what it’s worth, I figure I can live another 20-years with a chance at 30.  And that means “retirement” could be nice and long.

And that’s a good thing because there’s a ton of things left I’m planning NOT to do.

Meantime, you saw where the world’s oldest documented human – a 116 year old woman  – has passed away?

Takeaways

These are the things I’m finding interesting:

• When the body is weaned off caffeine the jitters that go with weight loss are reduced.
• Similarly, taking out sugar and ESPECIALLY banning any intake of high fructose corn syrup is good.
• Blueberry extract (2 grams/2000 mg) per day and policosanol seem to help with leveling energy.
• The 2-drinks a day no penalty (in the calculator, YMMV) was a surprise.
• The real knee in the curve for return on exercise seems to be around 1.5 hours per day.
• Diet cravings with lots of supplements don’t seem to exist – at least for me – but you have to be off sugar and wheat and manage blood sugar.
• Getting too thin invokes a penalty – those calorie restricted diets may not have such a high payoff after all.  But the evidence is inconclusive.  One thing for sure:  Eating less saves money.  And the penalties for some calorie restriction may be related to certain nutrients falling below the RDA – so supplementation is still likely a solid investment.
• Women still outlive men – by a LOT.  Elaine’s expectation is somewhere north of 96-years…
• Manual labor ain’t a bad thing.

But the SINGLE most important thing I’ve done is walk on the treadmill.  Nothing violent – a mile or more per day at 2.5- miles per hour.  The combination of exercise AND diet is what kicks the body into high gear.  I started off slowly – like anything else.

Having a television or a Kindle handy on the treadmill and a cordless phone with speaker turns treadmill time into useful time.  I doubt that I will run out of books, motivational talks, TED Talks, training videos, news channels or phone calls – so staying in motion is what pays off.

I’ll post notes about one a month on how this is going, but it’s all been a very interesting journey.  I figure if I can do it, anyone can.

Deep Ocean Obelisk?

Interesting story over here about a [purported] obelisk which has been found under the ocean using Google Earth.

I think it would be just dandy to find more of those supposed underwater antennas, too, that made the rounds about 8-9 years ago, too.

One thought on the obelisk:  Wouldn’t it be cool to find a 4,100 foot tall Tower of Babel and evidence of a past global subsidence?

A radio tower atop 4,100 feet, says the calculator over here would cover roughly a 150-mile diameter area…

Say, you don’t think the Tower of Babel was a G4 project gone bad, do you?

Write when you break-even

George   george@ure.net