In Vein, Late Night

When I was a little boy, I was always amazed by my father's forearms and how strong his hands and forearms were.  He was not Popeye or anything, but a lifetime of manual labor. handling reams of paper in the printing shops where he cut paper made the veins of his forearms very prominent, and his grip tenacious.  As the smallest of his sons, I looked up to my father's physical strength in awe as a pre-teen, and as a goal to someday achieve as a teenager and college student. 

Since eliminating extraneous carbs and gluten from my diet 2 years ago, and adopting a daily routine of physical activity to accelerate heart rate and keep my veins clear of heart attack causing plaque, I've found that my forearms are now prominently vein-y, as much or more so than my father's arms ever showed.  As a "fat kid" most of my life, I resigned myself to the conclusion that I would never have actual veins showing no matter how much I worked out or didn't work out, due to the superfluous pudgy body fat cushioning all the skin contours - and lining the interior of my veins and arteries as well with flow restricting plaque.  That paradigm no longer is holding true.

This visibility is especially true during circadian evening rhythms where blood pressure and cortisone levels naturally increase.  As I was packing up my dirty laundry in Bangalore earlier this week after an intense 1/2 hour of upper body work out at the hotel's gym, I noticed this vein vanity, and snapped this image in the shaving mirror.  Such vein clarity has helped the blood donation centers find a vein more easily - it just sucks that since I've traveled to India, I cannot donate blood again for a solid year, due to the irrational fear of US blood banks who think I MIGHT have contracted malaria while I am there.   I was in an urban area, sustained no mosquito bites, and have no symptoms of malaria... but ok...  my progression from 6 gallons to 7 gallons (lifetime) of donated blood will be halted by another year.