If you don’t want to know about my weight loss and/or current health battles, don’t read this post. You have been warned.
Emily and I have been doing Weight Watchers’ tracking since the beginning of the year. We did a really good job of closely monitoring everything for the first 7 weeks and we both lost over 5% of our body weight. Then we both kind of started tracking with our heads instead of on paper and kind of fell off the bandwagon, cheating more often than we should.
We’ve started doing a better job again and hope that the numbers continue to drop.
Last week, I went to the doctor for my annual physical. My blood pressure was okay, my protein urea was negative (for the first time in recent history!), my HDLs dropped from 21 to 19 (they want >40), my LDLs are still good, my triglycerides went up a little to 153 (they want <150), and my total cholesterol was still good.
I have family history with both low HDL and unexplained protein urea, so I’ve been working on both of those. My nephrologist has me on a plan for getting off of the medication to treat my protein urea, assuming that it is actually weight related, as well as my blood pressure meds.
As for the HDL, it sucks. Usually niacin helps increase HDLs, but I’ve been taking 1000mg/day for the past year and my level dropped 2 points. I’m making myself eat oatmeal for breakfast every day, though I get tired of it. Some days, like today, I take a second bowl as my lunch and supplement with whey protein and milk. I’ve added a 1000mg flaxseed oil supplement to my daily niacin. The next thing that I need to do is make sure to get my 30 minutes of aerobic exercise in each day. This is the hardest one for me…I hate to take away from the ever shrinking amount of time I have with my family each day to go do this, but I know that if I don’t invest time now, I’ll miss out on time down the road. *sigh*
My glaucoma hasn’t gotten any worse, though my pressures still aren’t below 20. The eye doctor seems to be content with them where they are, though, so we’ll see how that goes.
