On the outside, my body has shown very little wear for the self-destructive eating course I've been on. I did gain 30 lbs Freshman year, which gave me a slightly chubbier appearance. However, for the most part, I have looked fine and healthy in spite of what I've been eating. Whereas much of our nation (and increasingly in the world) has shown signs of obesity and other obvious indicators of overeating and poor diets, I've been rather unaffected, on the outside.
On the inside is a different story entirely.
Health Problems
Headaches
Since Junior or Senior year of High School I've dealt with an issue of chronic headaches. In the beginning the headaches were so bad that I was getting them, quite literally, every day and of a severe intensity each day, usually 4 and occasionally 5 on my personal scale. During the summer between my Senior year of High School and my Freshman year of College I went to see my personal physician to see what the cause of my headaches were.
The tests were fairly inconclusive, but my detailed description of the pain and localization of my headaches convinced him that there was some sort of notable issue. He prescribed me with some fairly standard low-grade painkillers and a prescription of Oxy Codone for when the headaches got particularly bad.
The low-grade pain killers did nothing. The Oxy Codone made me sick.
Anyways, I went to college, still suffering from the pain of my chronic headaches. It was the physician at my college who suggested the headaches might be stress/blood-pressure related. He put me on a regimen of prescriptions: Elavil (an old anti-depressant more modernly used to prevent headaches), Wellbutrin (an anti-depressant, to manage the stress), and some standard blood pressure medication.
The medications did help to some extent. No longer was I receiving headaches every day, but I still received them frequently, and, there was an occasional doozy in there (level 4-5), roughly once a month. But I'm not on the medications anymore, as I'm not covered by insurance, and, to be honest, I don't want to be on medications for the rest of my life, so, even when I do get health insurance again, I want to explore alternative options.
Chronic Fatigue
This is another difficult one to explain, but I'm tired. A lot. I often find myself just feeling fatigued, especially in my limbs. I can generally function, but I don't have the good feeling that comes with being rested that one should usually have. It's one thing to be tired at the end of the day and quite another to be tired even after waking up. I can't pinpoint quite when I first noticed the fatigue, but it's been with me for a couple years at least, and got significantly worse over the past year (though it recently got a bit better).
The main issues with the fatigue are:
- My new job: When I finish training, I'll be working at a job which will, at times, be very physically taxing. If I have to restrain a patient in crisis, I need my full strength with me.
- Exercise: It's bad enough that my self-discipline makes it difficult to stay on task, but, if I'm tired all the time, I have yet another excuse to keep me from making this a habit.
- Well-being: I'm generally happy and content, but I don't feel "good", and feeling "good" should be something that's a part of living life. I'd like to feel "good" a bit more often.
- Other: There are some other issues which I don't have time to get into, but, in general, feeling tired all the time is a bad thing.
Sleep Apnea
"Sleep apnea (or sleep apnoea in British English; English pronunciation: /æpˈniːə/) is a sleep disorder characterized by abnormal pauses in breathing or instances of abnormally low breathing, during sleep." <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_apnea">Wikipedia (Sleep Apnea)</a>. It's easy to fall into the habit of self-diagnosing, as, with many things, most people tend to fall into a few symptoms from many things. I've not yet been diagnosed with Sleep Apnea, but, at present, it seems a likely explanation for the troubles I've had sleeping. I wake up frequently at night, which is quite bothersome since I have to fall asleep again and I might be losing out on valuable REM sleep which seems most important in getting that "rested" feeling from "a good night's sleep".
Sleep Apnea is a tricky one. I've tried different sleeping positions: left and right, on the side, legs tucked; On my back; On my stomach; and, most recently, "sitting up". And yet, in spite of all of my efforts, I still wake up at night and never feel rested when waking up. Obesity has been known to be related to Sleep Apnea, but I'm not obese. I'm a bit over my target weight, but not enough for me to think that it should be the cause. However, perhaps adjusting my eating habits will help.
Eating
So, where is this sudden self-consciousness about my eating habits coming from?
In my training at the JRC they showed a video which was, according to them, to explain the reasons for the food program they used for the majority of students at the center. I'll admit, I think they could have made a video to explain such without showing us a 2-hour video that literally proselytized the dangers of an "animal-based" diet. It was slightly taken aback by the severe bias in the video and was plenty skeptical of some of the points made when it was done, but being skeptical doesn't mean it didn't give me cause to think.
There were some decent points made that I'd like to find research to support. However, in the mean time, I think it's reasonable to change some of the more obvious eating habits and try to steer myself on a course of a healthier path in eating.
Immediate Changes
Some of the following are things that I'm going to change immediately, as there's already plenty of evidence to support them. If I find information which suggests or diminishes them though, I may reconsider as I go along:
- Whole Wheat: Whole wheat and other grains in general. Apparently the process for producing the common, "enriched" flour takes out a lot of the fiber, vitamins and minerals. They put a lot of the vitamins and minerals back in, but the fiber is lost and, in general, enriched flour mucks up your intestines. Unfortunately, finding things which have "whole wheat" without "enriched flour" is very difficult, so I'm going to have to do a bit more research and see what I can get away with.
- Less Salt: I love salt, and, in cooking, salt is a huge part of adding flavor to most things, especially meat. I've been more conscious of salt in general lately, but still been rather lax on watching the intake. I'm going to take a pretty decent look at the sodium of what I'm eating, and minimize salt where it's not needed. However, a good, healthy amount of salt to season various foods will still be a part of my diet.
- Less Sugar: My sweet tooth is crying. I love sugar, and I'm not sure if I can strictly keep off of my not-so-secret addiction, but I'm damn well going to try to be better about this. Instead of eating sugar directly, I'm going to try and find other ways to spice up my meals in a sweet manner like cinnamon, which, strictly speaking isn't sweet, but has a similar effect in small doses; also apples and other fruits make for a great way to sweeten things up without adding sugar.
- No High-Fructose Corn Syrup: We'll see how this goes, this shit is in everything. It's like big corporations just don't care about the crap they're feeding us (big surprise, right?). I've known that this stuff was bad for awhile, but sort of shrugged off how prevalent it was. I'm going to earnestly try and avoid it as much as I can while doing some research into just how bad it is.
- Less Oils: Apparently a lot of vegetable oils are very cholesterol-inducing, and not necessarily good. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find a lot of research on this one, but, for the time being, I'm going to try and shy away from the oils (with the exception of olive oil) until I can find something more definitive and cave in. This means that most peanut-butters are off limits at the moment! :-l, help me find a new peanut butter?? Between high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oil (apparently the worst), peanut-butter is full of bad juju.
- Less Chocolate: Strictly speaking, Chocolate actually isn't that bad for you. However, since it seems to maybe trigger headaches for me, I'll have to back off until I figure it out more.
- Less/No Dairy: This one is rough: Butter, Cream, Eggs, all of these fall under dairy and under things that I'm going to be trying to replace or limit in my diet. Eggs are actually supposed to be pretty healthy (in moderation and predominately with the whites as opposed to the yolk), but, as I'll talk about later, I can't necessarily trust what I've been fed in the mainstream. Butter and Cream are huge in cooking and also major losses, if I don't find suitable replacements for them I may cave a bit.
- Less Meat: *sighs* This is going to be one of the hardest bits. I love meat and I have few moral qualms with eating it (Factory Farming is pretty cruel, and I hate it, but I've turned a blind eye to it as best I can for my love of meat). However, meat was one of the biggest targets of the film, and while I'm skeptical of many of the points made, a lot of them did make sense and seemed to have some decent support. One thing the film seemed to suggest was that "no meat" was best, and, for now at least, that's not something I intend to do. Our bodies were made to handle meat, whether or not it's supposed to be the dominant portion of our diet is certainly up for debate, but I like my meat and my body can handle it, so I will keep eating meat. However, I will be trying to eat less meat. It's going to be rough, but we'll see if limiting the meat helps.
Being a Psychology major with an emphasis in research for my training, I'm very skeptical of many of the claims made by the video, which definitely had a heavy bias. There are things I need to look up, but it won't necessarily be easy to find the answers. According to the video, even our own "diet recommendations" by the various health associations are off, and deadly, fueling the high rates of heart disease and cancer in our country. They claim that while exercise helps, and should be something more people engage in, that with even the recommended diet allowances, exercise is not enough to prevent the damage done to our bodies on an "animal-based" diet. What are their claims to this fact specifically?
- Immune System: According to the video, one of our best methods of fighting common cancers is our immune system. They claim that with such a heavy emphasis on meats and other animal products, we deprive our bodies of having the strongest immune systems they can have, and, as a result, our bodies can't fight off cancers as well as they have in the past, leading to a surge in the number of incidents of cancer. Problems to Look Into: The high rates of cancer in our society are often linked to an increase in the number of carcinogens introduced to our bodies through technology, to our increased lifespan which lets us live well into the years when our body naturally begins to fall apart, and other external factors. Researchers have been looking frantically into finding cures for most cancer, which makes it seem odd that a few people would have found that our immune system was the best cure and yet no one cared to listen. Then again, with all of the money being poured into "research" for a cure, it might not be all that ridiculous to imagine why someone might willfully ignore what is presented to them as truth.
- Heart Disease: Cholesterol has been a big topic for awhile, with doctors talking about good and bad cholesterol and how we have to be careful on overdoing the red meats, since they can cause heart disease later as our arteries choke up and clog. The video, however, takes a far more radical angle to this. According to them, there's no effective difference between "good" and "bad" cholesterol. According to them, we get whatever cholesterol we might need from a plant-based diet and the meats are just a bad idea that will leads to the inevitable clogging of arteries, which leads to heart disease and then subsequent health problems. They also mention that even "light" meat, such as white chicken breast, carries nearly as much cholesterol as red meats, which makes them equally as distasteful. Problems to Look Into: It seems weird that researchers would just "make up" stuff about "good" and "bad" cholesterol if it didn't hold any truth. Clearly research supports something on the matter, which the video seemed to gloss over in its broad-brushed hate of "animal-based" diets. However, the video did bring up a good point that the meat industry lobbyists might be having a say in how the American Public is being told about the "benefits" of eating meat. They stand to lose billions in subsidies, which makes it worth their while to keep politicians close.
- Health Benefits: Anti-oxidants and other powerful things were promised by the video from the fruits and vegetables and other foods that stand to be eaten from a plant-based diet. What I want to know are the specific benefits and how much of what needs to be eaten in order to gain them. I don't want to just be told "eating this is good for you", I want to know the limits surrounding it so that I can plan my diet accordingly. I have a feeling that the benefits of eating more plant-based stuff will counteract some of the negatives from eating animal-based stuff.
- Other: The video mentioned things like the High Fructose Corn Syrup, enriched flours, and vegetable oils. The claims mentioned are worth investigating since these things make up much of the food sold to us currently. It's actually very difficult and expensive to get around buying stuff without these supposedly "killer" ingredients.
In the end, I just want to know more. I'm going to try and make some changes. Snack on healthier stuff, cut some of the crap, and eat more veggies and fruits, but, before I make any major decisions, I'd like to make sure that I'm taking a more nutritionally sound route. I'd also like the go-ahead to add some of my more favorite things into whatever I'm eating from here on out, even if in limited amounts.
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