Sunday, July 15, 2012

This Month's Big Number: 5.3

I had a battery of fasting labs done late last month, with blood drawn Just Prior to the liver exercises we did in Vegas, and got the results from my primary care physician this month after getting back from Vegas.  My hemoglobin A1C was down to 5.3, a tenth of a point down from the year before, and trending away from the 6+ it was years ago.  HDL Cholesterol was a we bit down to 58, but so was the LDL, to 99 which made my doctor very happy.

So when you use bacon fat to saute organic spinach, organic portabellos, and organic bell peppers, and then scramble up 2 or 3 pasture fed non-factory hen laid eggs and cover all of it with black pepper when you're done, for breakfast 6 or 7 days a week, eat mainly ham, bacon, steak, and some chicken here and there and a cell phone sized portion of dark chocolate everyday, avoid beer, drink Irish whiskey or cognac, and snack on Marcona almonds, organic celery and almond butter, or organic celery & double or triple cream brie, these are the kinds of healthy blood tests one can get?  hmmm.  

I think vigorously swimming (not lazily) nearly every day for 1/2 and hour, yoga 5 or 6 days a week, and an hour or two of stationary bike riding at maximum settings when it's too hot to go hike up a desert mountain and lose 5 pounds of water weight are probably helping the HDL number.  All the fancy flavored vodkas Dr Desert Flower is getting are (I am sure) loaded with sugar and artificial sweeteners that are working against my insulin... so I need to avoid those delicious libations.   I know several French octogenarians who have consumed cognac or red wine ever day (or nearly every day) of their adult lives, and are pretty healthy - so that's a best practice I need to continue to adopt. 

3 comments:

  1. What were your triglycerides? LDL likely highly inaccurate unless you got directly measured, with particle size breakdown. And you want HDL to go *up*, right? But cholesterol numbers are mostly meaningless anyway, and you lead with probably the most important figure -- great to see your hba1c still trending down!

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  2. TrigG were 109 mg/dl, a good 20 points lower than last time. And YES, HDL needs to go UP! =)

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  3. Good trend on the trigs. You got liver function tests as well? I want realtime monitoring of all this, via implants, scrolled onto a heads-up display on my contact lenses whenever I think about it.

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