Category: health
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What’s Important?
My mother was fat, though she lost weight shortly before she died. My father, by contrast, was always thin and muscular. Yes, he drank like the Navy seaman he’d been and smoked 1-2 packs a day, but he was strong and healthy. He gained some weight when he retired and quit smoking, but not much. Heck, he’s lost some in the last few years. Why? He wasn’t…
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Head, Meet Desk
A friend tells me that he’s been diagnosed with hypothyroidism (TSH 7.5) and he’s starting on Synthroid (Levothyroxine). Google takes me to the NIH page on Levothyroxine. Right at the top is the following offset warning: Thyroid hormone should not be used to treat obesity in patients with normal thyroid function. Levothyroxine is ineffective for weight reduction in normal thyroid patients and may cause serious or life-threatening…
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Medical Insurance Helps People Feel Better!?
On the one hand, it’s good to have actual research backing this up. On the other hand, it’s insane that this didn’t exist before. From the NY Times: When poor people are given medical insurance, they not only find regular doctors and see doctors more often but they also feel better, are less depressed and are better able to maintain financial stability, according to a new, large-scale…
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Research on the Health Benefits of Moderate Exercise
From an article on “what’s the best exercise” comes a concise summary of the benefits of moderate exercise: The health benefits of activity follow a breathtakingly steep curve. “The majority of the mortality-related benefits” from exercising are due to the first 30 minutes of exercise, said Timothy Church, M.D., who holds the John S. McIlhenny endowed chair in health wisdom at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in…
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QOTD: Fitness and fatness
From Reuters, on a study in patients with coronary artery disease that looked at fitness levels and BMI: [Heart specialist and study leader Dr. Francisco] Lopes-Jimenez said, the lesson for patients is clear: try to improve your physical fitness. “It is much easier to become fit than it is to become slim,” he said. “Anybody who has gone into an exercise program would agree with that.” While Lopes-Jimenez…
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Some things I’m glad about today
1) Riding the bus to my new job means I’m walking daily again, at least on weekdays. Funny how walking even a 1/2 mile or so every day can feel good, even if it’s spread throughout the day. 2) Yes, I have a temp gig. At the moment it’s a better fit than the old place. 3) The commute is a short bus ride and a…
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Heart Risk – BMI Not Useful
Or as Reuters put it: “[T]he best predictors of future heart risk are measures of blood pressure, cholesterol and history of diabetes.” According to a paper in The Lancet: BMI, waist circumference, and waist-to-hip ratio, whether assessed singly or in combination, do not importantly improve cardiovascular disease risk prediction in people in developed countries when additional information is available for systolic blood pressure, history of diabetes, and lipids.…
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New HAES Study
Science is not a sacred cow. Science is a horse. Don’t worship it. Feed it. — Aubrey Eben The new Health At Every Size paper, by Linda Bacon and Lucy Aphramor, is titled Weight Science: Evaluating the Evidence for a Paradigm Shift. From the abstract: Current guidelines recommend that “overweight” and “obese” individuals lose weight through engaging in lifestyle modification involving diet, exercise and other behavior…
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Disease Doesn’t Mean You’re A Bad Person
Very early in my career, I participated in a study of young women who were hospitalized and awaiting the results of biopsies to determine if they had cervical cancer. While I was interviewing one of my patients, the biopsy results of the woman in the next bed came back to her — negative. The fortunate woman’s father, who was there with her, said in relief: “We’re good…
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You Know You Have Dust/Pollen/etc Allergies When…
…you feel like you might be getting a cold (congestion, headachy, coughing, tired). Do you drink tea and put your feet up? No, you spend Sunday dusting and vacuuming the bedroom, changing the sheets and mattress cover, running the pillows and comforter through the hottest dryer setting to kill dust mites, washing your CPAP mask and hose, swapping in a clean CPAP filter, and otherwise doing your…
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A year ago: Exercise Progress
…I started a program of walking every day. I didn’t keep up with it being a daily walk, but I did get consistent enough in walking and strength training that I did not have to use a cane since … last January?* I’m considering this a victory. Two things that helped: 1) Focusing on the exercises I thought would give me the most results. I had…
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Poverty’s Link to Diabetes
[C]onventional wisdom about Type 2 diabetes would suggest that once obesity, lack of physical activity and other lifestyle risk factors were taken into account, diabetes incidence rates would even out between lower- and higher-income groups…. [A recent study found that] for men, being in the lowest-income category (earning less than $15,000 per year), doubles the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes compared to being in one of…
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Note to Self
Dear Self – Yes, if you are going to spend your weekend wandering around a warehouse helping to make a music / circus / vendor event happen, then by all means, take an extra B12 if you think it will help. Even an extra 2500-iu, if that’s what you have handy… But don’t be surprised if you are totally dead in following days when you drop back…
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Exercise and Reinforcing Spirals
I’ve written about my mother being self-conscious about her fat. Afraid of other people thinking she was fat, afraid of not being able to walk far enough, of not being able to find a chair that fit, of being unable to defend herself if physically attacked. Mom was also self-conscious of being out of shape and having an “ignorant-sounding” accent.* Mom broke her leg when I was…
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Thankful Thursday
[a not-always-weekly exercise in gratitude] The man of the house baked a chicken with some rosemary this evening. He accompanied it with broccoli with cheese sauce, green beans steamed with red potatoes, corn cooked with onions, cold sliced beets, and French bread. As we were eating he said, “So did I make the Thankful Thursday this week?” So. Um. Today I’m thankful for: The man of the house…
Living ~400lbs 