First, let me make a disclaimer. I am not a physician, a dietitian, a therapist, a gastrointestinal physician, nor am I even a fitness trainer. I am someone that spends more time reading news about these topics and took responsibility for my own health and decided to change my life. I am merely telling a story from personal experience.

About ten years ago, I was diagnosed with level 3 hypertension. I was approximately 220lbs, 5′8″ and about 29 years old. I had no idea how to eat, nor did I understand what physical activity was. I was always the hefty child in school until my senior year when I weighed about 185lbs. For me, that was pretty decent body composition. With 30 approaching and starting a new chapter in my life, I learned that I either need to do something about my diet and exercise program, or begin to take medications.

For some reason, I chose the latter. Bad idea.

Working as a creative type, one must spend much of their time reading and researching for conceptual ‘art’ for clients. This causes one to eat poorly, get lack of sleep and more importantly, work more. A terrible way to try and stay alive. But there is a way you can prolong your miserable eating habits and poor physical activity– BigPharma!

Not understanding that eating well and moving more often can keep your aging body from becoming a pile of tissue suitable only for a coffin at an early age.

Could you imagine being dead at 55 because you wanted to eat lousy food and work a 60 hour a week career? Now that I have a family, this is much more important to stay alive as long as I can.

A year and a half ago, I decided to make a change. Here is a list of things I did to change my life.

1. Move more. Even as little as 2 generations before ours, we moved more. Roads and automobiles were pretty new and foot travel was widely used. Our careers keep us indoors, away from sunlight and in a chair for 10 hours a day. Since I am a designer by day, I discovered I was not walking as much and spending much of my time on my tush. I decided to add activity to my day. Walking more, climbing stairs, and playing more outdoors.

2. Eat less. Consuming more calories than you need can lead to stored body fat. Let me make one thing clear, I am speaking about a neolithic diet. One with lots of sugar and grains. Eating less food when you are just eating for comfort is what I basically mean. Now I stopped counting calories which leads me to my next rule.

3. Eat more. Eat more nutritive foods. Ever eat 3 bananas at once? How about one pint of blueberries in 10 minutes. It’s hard. It’s also hard to get lots of calories from real food. Processed foods are loaded with so much sugar and starches that 1 cup of rice or pasta has as many calories as 4 cups of blueberries; and has no nutritional value. Animal proteins seem to be an issue from a caloric perspective, but proteins and fat aren’t metabolized like sugars and starches so I don’t count calories when I eat a plate of bacon and eggs. It’s fuel.

4. Food is fuel. If you can get over that every meal does not have to be a birthday dinner or even Thanksgiving, you’ll stop obsessing about your next meal. I fuel for workouts every day. Popcorns, pretzels, even some nuts are nothing but habitual hand to mouth experiences and have no place in the lifestyle.

5. Ignore your doctor. Ok, I am kidding here, but my physician told me that my cholesterol was too high and I should begin a program of a statin. For me that was a wake up call. I was already on blood pressure medications and I was not about to add to the cause. Remember, when you take medication to help a condition there will be a side effect. If the side effect is not as serious as the condition, then great. But taking statins while on blood pressure medication simply means exhaustion. My heart was already compromised and now I was going to stop what my liver is supposed to do all because I decided to eat like crap and live a sedentary lifestyle? Yeah lifestyle. Those medications are prescribed for people with conditions, not for those who choose a lifestyle. High blood pressure can be a serious condition. There are needs for these medications, but unless you are fit and eating per my suggestions, you are simply choosing to correct a condition with medication. Again, I am not a MD, but my cardiologist told me at 29 years of age with a “normal” heart that lifestyle would NOT correct my high blood pressure. I am 10 years older today and I am off my medication. Coincidence? No, lifestyle adjustment.

6. Take responsibility for your own health. Tossing your self to another person will get you nowhere. You are the only person who knows ‘you’ and what better judge on what is making you alive is you.

7. Stop eating things that aren’t meant to be eaten. Without giving you years of research, we’ve only been consuming refined sugars, grass seeds (grain), and legumes for 1% of our existence on this planet. In the last 10,000 years we’ve become fatter and sicker and it is from the foods we eat. We aren’t dieing of disease like plagues and trauma anymore. Therefore we should live far longer than ever in our existence and we are only averaging at 74 for men. We should be doing much better. Especially since kids are seeing adult diseases because of how they eat. It’s sad.

8. Laugh more. I keep telling myself that if I can laugh a few times a day, my heart will thank me and my family will love me. So far this has been true. I now have a son because of it.

Live!

Since there are not many varities of local fish I’d eat (thanks to the high mercury in Lake Erie), I head for the next best thing– wild caught seafood from the Atlantic.

My recipe here is really simple. A few limes, some red onions, a grapefruit, a red pepper, cilantro, garlic, chilli pepper, and about 1.5 lbs of seafood. Today it was ocean perch and scallops.

Juice the citrus, chop the peppers, mince the onions and garlic. Chop the seafood and cilantro. Combine. Crack some black pepper and coarse salt. Refrigerate for 30 minutes. Eat.

It can’t be more simple than that. Once I made a version using walleye cheeks. Incredible!

Here is what a typical week of foods look like on my table. Yes, all made by me. I’ll spare you the details on what or how to make these dishes unless you absolutely need the recipe. It’s pretty simple eating. Remember, the less you eat, the less time to prepare. Click on each image to get a larger view.

Real food. Cheers.

When was the last time you actually poured out a glass of liquid into a drinking glass? I remember about a year ago, sitting down to my first portioned breakfast. I had a measuring cup of a favorite “whole grain cereal” and my carton of soy milk. (Both of which I no longer consume!) I had my trusty stainless steel 1 cup measuring device and my glass liquid measuring cup near by bowl. The cereal box suggested that one serving was 3/4C to get 110 calories of that nutrition. The carton of soy milk suggested that 8oz was their version of one serving and that amounts to another 100 calories. (80 calories if you did the fortified with DHA organic). So I scooped; and then I poured. I was completely humbled.

The bowl I normally used is a colorful bowl with stripes. I used to pour this healthy organic grain cereal to almost the top of the bowl and drench this cereal with soy milk until I saw the white liquid reach the tips of the grain squares. This was a perfect breakfast and I was happy. Until that day when I realized that my now ‘one serving’ bowl of grain squares was only up to the first blue ring; the bowl has 3 series of stripes with blue being the last of the series. The one cup of soy milk barely covered the squares and it seemed I was going to be starving. I was very disappointed, but I persevered and ate my breakfast anyway.

Next came an afternoon snack. In this case, I was led to believe that almonds were nature’s perfect snack. I still do, but in moderation. Not so much the fat I am worried about, it’s the amount of Omega 6 FA that I am concerned about. However, since nuts are nature’s jelly beans, I figure they are still good to eat in moderation. The plan I was following told me I was able to take in 2 snacks a day, 200 calories each. I pulled out my scale, and weighed a serving of almonds– 1oz. That amounts to about 15 nuts.

15 nuts?! Are you kidding? I am going to starve, I thought. I placed them in a zipper bag and took them to the office.

Then came lunch. I needed to consume 6-8oz of protein and about 200 calories of vegetables. Since I had no concept of what that meant, I once again picked up a book, read the caloric weight of my lunch and began to measure.

“Field greens– 2cups is 60 calories!” I measured out 2 cups and placed into a bowl. “Wow, that seems like quite a bit of lettuce.” I thought. Well it was. 2 cups of spinach is also quite a bit. Ever see what 6 oz of chicken looks like?

8oz of beef? 7oz of pork? 14oz of fish? Initially it seems like a campaign for starvation and dietary failure, but I can assure you that these portions are all in favor of eating well and keeping full.

It’s almost like this; we are programmed to stay alive. We are not programmed to starve. Since we live lives now full of stress and anxiety (think careers, family, and finances which replaced famine, trauma, and being chased by mammoths) we are in constant need of calories “just in case.” If we leave our internal computer turned off for a moment, we can actually change that signal. Most of us know that our brains are always craving glucose, and fat. This is normal and quite OK actually. If we let our eyes measure our foods and consume what we only need by using measuring cups and scales, we will get what our brains and body actually want. If we measure by our psychology being conditioned that you are always hungry therefore you need to pour on the calories, you are going to take in a bit too many calories and if you are not burning them due to lack of activity. You’ll enjoy living with extra weight on you, and possibly even be obese.

So getting back to the salad. Six ounces of chicken meat (white or dark) is a nice healthy portion of protein to enjoy. 7-8oz of pork is also a nice size of protein as well. It took some time for me to get used to it, but honestly as you begin to see how much you’ve been over eating in life, you’ll see that not much food is really needed to sustain until your next meal. That is unless you fast once and a while. But that is another topic.

Like I said, at first I was humbled. It took about 2 weeks for me to get used to using scales and measuring cups. I read labels, cartons, and books. I immersed myself into as much information as I could so that I learned a new behavior. The saying goes “Garbage in, garbage out.” Knowing how much is going in me will help the garbage come out. As for now, I can look at foods (not man made of course) and get pretty close to my serving requirements.

I think that is mostly where the problem comes from, is lack of knowledge about portion control and serving sizes. We think that a bowl of cereal, or a plate filled from edge to edge is going to give us enough energy to get to the next meal. This is incorrect. I hear most trainers say “each serving of food should be the size of a deck of cards.” This is pretty accurate, however there are some caloric dense foods and some are non-nutritive that are the same size. Think if we were to eat a pile of bacon the size of a deck of cards. I love bacon and I eat it once a week, but my portion size is 1-2 slices and it’s home made. Again, that amounts to about 140 calories almost all of which are from fat and it’s more for keeping sugar cravings down; I digress.

The nutritional label found on almost all foods is a great tool for the health conscious. I know, most foods that I eat do not have them since we eat fresh produce, but I can tell you that a cup of vegetables (almost all) is about 120 calories and a cup of fruit is about 200 calories. Seems like very little, but again, while writing this post, I consumed a 1/2c of granny smith apple which is about 1/2 an apple. I won’t need to eat the rest until much later and I feel pretty full. Sure, I could have eaten the whole apple, but it was not necessary. If I fasted this morning, then I would have.

My advice is simply this; know your portions. Knowing what a serving looks like is one of the best ways to keep weight under control. Obviously we are talking about nutritive foods. Keeping portions smaller and taking time to enjoy the fruits of your labor of cooking can help you lose weight and feel full.

For more reading about calories and portions, I suggest reading “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. Link to the book here.

We have become this way because our FDA Food Pyramid tells food manufacturers to load up a diet with 6-9 servings of “whole grains.” Sure you can make an argument that kids don’t eat whole grains, but stop by a Post/General Mills website and you’ll see that all kids cereals (and adult cereals) are fortified with grains which the body metabolizes the same as sugar. Ask anyone who wants to lose weight and the first thing they say is “I’m eating low fat ______ and eating healthy whole grains.”

That is why we are obese. I realized today one thing about the way most of us think:

When we are not dieting, we are eating carbohydrates, sugar and unhealthy fat (canola, peanut, omega-6 and the like). When we are dieting, we are eating low-healthy fats, and high carbohydrates.

In order for us to really get this resolved, we need to re-think the message here. Fat is not making us fat; it’s sugar. Jack Lelane said it in the 1950’s and we were just about ready to get it right. Then Dr. Keys came along and messed things up. Watch the link below, but do me a favor; when you push play, turn away from the computer screen. Do not view this, rather listen to it. Then re-watch this. You’ll be amazed that this was said over 60 years ago.

2T coconut oil (expeller pressed and organic)
1 cup of Organic Coconut Milk
2 cups water pre boiled
1T chillies or chili paste
1T Fish sauce (get it without sugar or syrups) -Optional
1/2t honey (opt)
1t tumeric
1T ginger (fresh and ground)
1 clove garlic
pinch of salt

1 carrot peeled and sliced
1/4 onion
4oz sea scallops (wild)
4oz prawns wild with shells

Heat a saucepan on med-high heat. Melt the coconut oil. Add onion and carrot. Sweat until softened. Mash ginger and garlic into a paste; add to pan. Add tumeric and season with salt. Add chili paste/chilies. Stir a bit. Add coconut milk and cook at med heat for about 5 minutes. Add the prawns and scallops and water. Add honey, fish sauce and if you want to get crazy, bruise a stalk of lemongrass and place in pan. (You’ll pull this out before you eat.) Add water. Continue to cook as you are making a quick soup. I let mine cook today for about 10 minutes more.

Plate in a bowl like soup. Keep a container to place the prawn peels when you are eating. You can serve with scallions, lime, and cilantro or Thai basil. I did not have any and since I was eating this on my lunch break, I figured it’s ok to skip. Enjoy!

When I was in China a few years ago on business, I discovered Shou-Mei white tea at one of the restaurants we frequented. I wrote it down and when I came home I discovered our local Asian markets had cases of the stuff for pennies and was indeed the same varietal.

My MD said to me that I should avoid salt and caffeine at all costs. He asked me to drink “decaf.” Now I won’t go into the process of making coffee and teas decaf, but I will mention this:

¹Indirect Method of decaffeination: “[Then] the beans are removed and either methylene chloride or ethyl acetate is used to extract the caffeine from the water.”

Wait, what?

So, I mentioned to him I was going to drink Green tea. He immediately said “No. I said none.” So of course I dug into this dilemma and learned that white teas have the least amount yet there is something else I liked about this tea.

²A 2009 Kingston University study showed that white tea had high anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, anti-collagenase, and anti-elastase properties which could potentially reduce the risks of developing rheumatoid arthritis, some cancers, heart disease & slow the enzymatic break down of elastin and collagen (ie wrinkles or sagging) which accompany aging.

Cool. So today I made a nice pot using 1 tablespoon of shou-mei from a box I had at home. My pot is about 24oz and with that single tablespoon, it yields a great pot of tea.

For further info on caffeine and contents I will post some info here on my discovery.

³Drip Coffee contains 145 milligrams of caffeine for 8oz (varies from 115mg-178mg)

Tea ( white) contains 15 milligrams of caffeine for 8oz (again varies based on brewing methods, and quality of tea.)

Tea (Green) contains 25milligrams of caffeine for 8oz (again varies here)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decaffeination
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_tea
[3] http://www.energyfiend.com/the-caffeine-database

Pretty simple recipe:

Soak about 1 lb of calves liver sliced in 1 cup of whole cream along with Rosemary, garlic and some pepper. Rest for a few hours.

Melt a healthy sized chunk of organic grass-fed cows butter in a cast iron skillet. Place liver in pan. Let cook over med heat until red beads form on the surface, then flip. Takes about 5 min each side.

Slice 1 large Spanish onion and place in pan. Sweat the onions until translucent. I added some white wine to de-glaze the pan. Serve over the liver.

Serve with a vegetable.

Last week as I mentioned, I was sitting in a cardiologist’s office. I was following up for my annual visit and that usually means more blood work and more blood pressure monitoring. I mentioned that I was now considered obese by the BMI chart and I was told to keep losing more weight. I’m ok with that actualy since there is always room for improvement. His delivery was lackluster and I was quite upset about it. I did what he asked me to and wore a 24-hour blood pressure cuff and fasted for 14 hours to get new blood tests.

Yesterday was a follow up from that visit. The results were in. Here they are:

Total Cholesterol: 232
HDL: 69 (should be >=40)
Triglycerides: 104 (should be <150)
LDL: 142 (Should be <130)
VDL: 21 (should be <30)

Now I know what you are thinking; “Dan, your cholesterol is 232! That is high.” Sure I can agree with you it is. Actually I gained some LDL since July of last year. Am I worried? No. Those numbers are just that– numbers. I aligned myself with the help of my MD and he said my Framingham score was 1% so I am happy with that. The Framingham system seems to be real data since the 40s and I love data, not marketing fodder.

Moving on, it was not my cholesterol he was concerned with rather my insulin resistance. Do I have Metabolic Syndrome (Type 2 Diabetes)? Probably not. I exercise way too much and my diet is so void of carbohydrates that I can’t imagine it would be. Again we are talking numbers again here. My Glucose number was 107. It’s been 107 ever since I can remember. They want that number to be at 100 or less. Again, I am not worried about this.

So why don’t I like sugar? Well for starters it’s a pretty useless fuel for your body. When you eat there are 2 scenarios happening in the brain. You are making a decision if you are eating for entertainment or if you are eating to fuel your day. Entertainment should be very selective and less than 10% of your week if that. Remember, if you saw the same play or the same type of movie every day, three times a day, it would no longer be entertainment. It would become habit. So that big slice of chocolate cake or that pint of ale, should be held at bay until you are ready to enjoy it for its entertainment purposes. These pseudo foods will indeed give you energy, but it’s non-nutritive.

A body can’t survive on foods that are simply non-nutritive. Hence why we use drugs and medications to stay alive. Call it what you want, but I don’t believe we should be evolving like this. Are we? Sure. Will we survive as a civilization? Sure. Look at the plagues of the middle ages. We survived that with no medicine. I digress.

So when I am eating something that is for fuel, I try to keep the nutrients high, and the carbohydrates low. My goal is to regulate insulin and keep excess weight off. Fats and proteins along with dense vegetables are great sources of fuel. So are nuts and their butters. These foods will keep you satiated and full for longer periods of time instead of a higher carbohydrate type meal. (Think rice, pasta, grains, and beans.) When we are full, we won’t need to be eating every 2-3 hours to chase after blood sugar. Think about the crash most of us feel when we skip a meal. Dump the excess need for sugars and you will notice you can go without food longer. This also leads to less binging when you are ready to eat.

My point of this is that we seem to think of foods as something we need to entertain us. Our ancestry (I am going way back here) hunted and gathered their foods. If they missed some berries or nuts that afternoon they missed a meal. If the hunt was not successful, then they ate forest greens or other found plants. If we shut our televisions off, and tossed out the coupon section of the news paper, we would not be so forced to have the desire for mass-made non-nutritive foods.

It’s the reason why we are so overweight.

Not overweight are you? Good for you. Some of us have to work twice as hard to keep excess weight off. Others have biology against them. For me, it’s going to be about trying to keep insulin at bay.

I almost forgot, the visit was not all humbling news. I’ve never convinced my MD in 10 years to ever lower me from my blood pressure medication. Well, yesterday was the day. I was asked to reduce my intake of my blood pressure medication with the intention of finally getting off one of them. I had a tear in my eye.

Chalk that up as a point for Dan. Nice work. Now keep going.

Today I made an appointment to see my cardiologist to see what is going on. I asked to see someone else in the practice since my current MD never really gave me the attention an MD probably should for a 30 something with elevated blood pressure. Today was my 10th anniversary of being sentenced to taking meds to correct my blood pressure.

The meeting was terrible. Not the situation I expected. I thought for sure that since the last time I was there I was tipping the scale at 247lbs and out of shape, that seeing me having lost about 40lbs and being able to hold a conversation about nutritive foods and movement he would be proud. Today I am able to run a 10K if I have to, I swing kettle bells, and I love doing sprints. I perform yoga at least twice a week. My diet has been very good for a while now even thought I gained some of my weight back since I kicked the low-fat-high-carb life back in April of last year.

He says “Daniel, you are still morbidly obese. You need to still lose 46 more lbs.”

WTF? Really? Today I weigh about 200 give or take 5lbs. I dropped almost 4 pants sizes in my waist. He wants me to lose 4lbs a month for the next several months in order to rule out that as a cause for my HPB. He also accused me of having sleep apnea and asked me to pursue testing. Those of you that have seen me on Facebook would agree that I am not at my ideal body weight, but 46more lbs? Wow. Have I just been a blob of crap all this time and assumed I was not overweight? I amaze myself that I can walk into any yoga studio and keep up with the pros; I lift heavy and I am really quick on the sprinting movements.

How is this possible? So today he asked me to take a lipid panel (here we go) and to check out my liver. Great, what will be next– statins?

We began to disagree about a few other topics at which he began to beat me up with medical jargon and tossed out a bunch of words to his assistant which I think was in the room to scare me a bit. Not being paranoid, but I once called the manager at that office about 6 months ago and and complained about a few things they did that I felt was in poor taste for a business. Not to mention the person in the room with him I complained about because she never made eye contact with me ever and asked me to remove my shirt a few times. She never addressed me by my name and asked me to pay my co-pay before I even saw anyone there. I am beginning to think this relationship needs to happen with an alternative physician.

Wish me luck.