This thread caught my attention since it’s something that I’ve experienced in my family and in my own personal life. I was an active kid/teenager/young adult all my life and grew up racing Motocross and BMX. After racing racing both for 10 years (12-22 yours old) I quit cold turkey to jump into the schooling/working life. After of a few years of treadmill running and lifting weights with a poor diet I found myself overweight and unhappy about it. So I read a few things and decided to try the Keto type diet at the time. Mind you, this is 2001 and many more diets have been introduced.
In my Keto diet, I lost 40 pounds and I thought I was healthy again. I got back into riding MX again and was doing ok with my endurance, minus the forearm pump. I was eating this way for just over 6 months and I thought I would get my bloodwork done since High cholesterol runs in my family along with high blood pressure and my father has type 2 diabetes. To my surprise, I had high blood pressure when the nurse checked it prior to my blood work. The Dr. talked to me about all the ways to try and lower my blood pressure and lets see how the blood work comes back
Whoa, not good. I had high cholesterol, high sugar levels that were type 2 diabetic level, hypertension (high blood pressure) and I just developed kidney stones. This was 19 years ago and I can’t remember the exact numbers, but I thought I was good and healthy with my weight loss and I was active. The real crazy part was my high blood sugar level since I wasn’t eating any sugar except for some fruit here or there.
So my journey to eating healthy, or what I thought was healthy, and not have to take any medications to control these health risks. After 3 months I had it checked again and it was still at the high levels across the whole panel. I was bummed and started taking Statins to lower my cholesterol and hope everything else comes back down and surprisingly the cholesterol did. I say that they came down, but my levels were still high in a sense that they were in the good range but at the high border of the good range. Total cholesterol was at a 196, blood sugar was at a 120 and blood pressure was at 140/90 (which was actually high but much lower).
In my statin journey I felt sluggish and unmotivated, but my blood work/ was just fine. So I thought. I stopped riding MX, stopped working out and became sedentary outside of my job as an Electrician. I gained the weight back and was not eating healthy at all since the statins could allow me to make poor eating choices. But hey, my blood work looks good.
Fast forward to 2014 and I picked up a mountain bike from an old BMX sponsor / friend for super cheap. As I’m building the bike I started to day dream about how I’m going to tear it up again!! My “now” physical state was no where near ready to tear anything up. I made it 2.5 miles and the last 1 mile was a climb to a spot where I thought I was going to die and have a heart attack. I was seeing spots and felt like I couldn’t catch my breath. Completely out of shape, well round is a shape so I was in shape. I was not physically ready for this and not only did I not do any real exercising, the statins I was taking, actually weakened me physically (after future research).
The point to all this previous warmup is, controlling medical issues with medication should be a last resort and I learned that genetics plays a extremely SMALL part in my bad cardiovascular condition. Since my mother and father have all of these same issues, it has to be hereditary, I now call BULL. It was my poor choices in what I was bringing into my mouth and life. In addition to that, there were a lot of Doctors I was going to who were giving me bad advice on diet and how to control these risk factors. Come to find out, some of them are not dietitians or cardiovascular experts and even some of them are influenced by money and numbers…just saying. Not all of them, but the ones I visited misguided me down a medical path that was more beneficial to him and not me.
I found some real information by a few Doctors that are not influenced by big money and only use research and studies that are not funded by a corporation that will benefit from it. I’m providing this because I have reversed all my bad and poor choices by changing what I eat and seeing for myself that my DNA has a very very small part in this. Now, it still can but is less likely to be influenced if you are WILLING to do what it takes to change you habits. Doing what it takes is the hard part and my parents are not willing to do it after I’ve proved to them how to do it.
I’m not a doctor or cardiologist, just this is my experience with what I learned about myself. I went whole food plant based for 2 years and the results were amazing. As a disclaimer, I’m not currently and completely plant based, but I’m still 80-90% plant based now. FOR ME, the two years was needed and got me on the right track on how to really eat healthy and how things influence our bodies. High levels of cholesterol has such a negative affect on so many area’s of our health. I no longer take statins, my blood pressure is ideal at 120/72 (taken on 9/4/2020) and my blood sugar is lower than it ever has despite eating more sugar than ever have. Since I started back riding and training for racing at the ripe ole age of 48 I take GU, tailwind, and other kinds or sugars to fuel my rides and training and my Doctor is amazed at my results. There is so much more to this, I’m just running out of time and probably boring anyone who reads this.
Now I’m just improving my physical capacity since this transformation and I’ve gotten to a CAT3 top 10 finisher and a top 5 in Rock crusher in MTB racing along with learning how to run correctly and getting a second place in age group in a 5k race, completed a 10K, 15K and Half marathon along the way. Steps in the process to get to where I want to go. I’ve jumped back to riding bikes 80% of the time and after joining Trainer Road, I have a journey to accomplish. There is so more work ahead but I feel better than ever and I can elaborate on more later.
The two area’s I trust and get most of my factual information is https://nutritionfacts.org/ and an author who prescribed plant based from decades ago, http://deanornish.com/.
Got to go and jump on Kaweah!