Sh*t Just Got Real

with my health...

If you’re not in this for your health, you might want to skip this post, because it’s all about the health.

So, here’s what happened

I had to have a chest CT scan to check something unrelated. The notes on the report afterward said there was subtle calcification in my coronary arteries. And I freaked the F out.

Me? Healthy, vegan, nutrition student me? How was this possible?

How this was possible

I’ve been following a usually whole food, always plant-based diet for nearly four years now. It’s been an evolution. First we didn’t know what to eat, so just ate plants and got healthy. Then we discovered the fake “plant based” foods and got unhealthy. Then we got really good at it again and got healthy.

Then I started taking classes and hubby’s work picked up, and I slid into the habit of a couple “convenience” meals per week. Frozen curly fries or tater tots with a plant-based burger or a couple of chik’n tenders. Two little plant-based sausage patties started showing up on my plate most Sunday mornings.

It creeps up on you.

Besides that, I’d taken to subbing dairy-free chocolate chips for the raisins in my oatmeal raisin cookies. I make a batch a week “for my husband’s lunchbox.” I eat as many as he does.

We also discovered dark chocolate-covered almonds in a bin at the health food store. I mean, you just scoop them out. As many as you want!

You probably noticed even here on the blog, I’ve been getting lax in some posts, suggesting a frankenfood meal wasn’t the end of the world every once in awhile, unless, of course, you’re trying to prevent or reverse coronary artery disease. Well, now I am.

I’ve been sitting a lot more and exercising a lot less. Everything I do is on my laptop. Three blogs, all my classes, writing novels, updating my website, publishing my newsletter, all of it.

I have a stand-up/treadmill desk. It’s just so much more comfy on the sofa.

That’s how this was possible.

Now what?

Now, I get to apply what I’ve learned.

My first step was to purchase PREVENT AND REVERSE CORONARY ARTERY DISEASE by Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr. I got the audiobook, only 4+ hours long. I listened to it in two days. It manages to be a gripping page-turner, at least it was to me. I about to start a second time through. I also made an appointment with my cardiologist.

My second step was to stop eating anything containing a drop of oil. I put the raisins back in my oatmeal cookies. I also started exercising seriously.

My third step was to see a cardiology specialist. While there we scheduled a blood draw in mid-November, and a calcium score (a special CT scan) in January that will give us more info. She did say my last echo and stress tests were outstanding, and that a regular CT scan is not the ideal way to diagnose calcification.

My cholesterol has been high for a long time. Since going plant based, it’s been going down steadily, but slowly. Every time I get it tested, it’s a little bit lower. In my head, I think I was sure than in the next year or three, it would be where it was supposed to be. Now I’m coming to suspect that this entire time, it’s been depositing plaque into my blood vessels. I need to get it down further, faster.

Here’s how I’m going to do it

The medico challenged me to see how low I can get those cholesterol numbers all by myself, without a statin, before the November bloodwork. So now I have to do this thing 100%.

Dr. Esselstyn was given 26 patients his study on diet and heart disease. Most of them had been told there was no more that could be done for them. They were all on statins, and it would’ve been unethical to take them off, as near death’s door as they were. He put them on a diet of purely whole plants.

This is the menu: whole grains, whole fruits, whole vegetables, legumes/beans, berries and some seeds.

Any bit of fat can be a problem. According to the book, fat is like gasoline and when you ingest it, you’re throwing it onto the existing fire. Any bit makes it worse.

Moderation, he says, will kill you.

The plants and grains we eat have their own fat content, and it’s the perfect amount for the human diet. Same as their protein content and carb content. They all have it.

Here’s what’s strictly forbidden on the Esselstyn plan.

• Oil, including olive oil, spray oil, all oil

• Any food containing oil

• Nuts

• Avacado

• Animal products (meat, fish, poultry, dairy/cheese, eggs)

• Refined sugar or refined flour or products made with them.

So really and truly only plants. Nothing packaged beyond like tofu, tamari, balsamic vinegar.

In more recent years, Dr. Esselstyn has added to his cardiac diet, the recommendation of five servings per day of green leafy and/or cruciferous veggies, “…and six would be better.” He says these vegetables release nitric oxide into our bloodstreams, and that’s is the stuff that expands arteries and heals the epithelial cells that line them. Those cells are damaged by plaque and calcification.

In short: My eating plan is to strictly, 100% follow Esselstyn cardiac eating plan, whole plant foods, not one drop of oil, no added salt, nothing ultra processed.

Supplements

I’ve always taken a B12 and a vegan probiotic. More recently I added a D3 from fall through spring. In summer I get enough sunshine. And now, I’m adding red yeast rice, which, anecdotally, has helped people get their cholesterol numbers down. It’s made much like nutritional yeast, which is allowed on the Esselstyn plan, so I’ve added that too.

In short, my supplements are 1000 mg B12/wk, daily probiotic, D3, red yeast rice. Oh, and an aspirin a day, until further notice.

Exercise

I can’t leave the dog. She cries and howls the entire time –we have verified this on a nanny cam. And I think working from the treadmill desk while walking, even walking fast, even with handheld weights, is not getting my heart rate up sufficiently. And I’m not consistent with it. I wanted a real program.

So I dug through my 150 different exercise DVD programs –yes, I’m that old –and I settled on Power 90. I’m on week two, and I’ve moved up from level 1-2 to level 3-4 and it’s hard as heck, and I might be getting abs.

It’s very low impact. My joints like that. It’s super challenging. Instructor Tony Horton brags he’s forty-two (twenty years younger than me) and is drenched in sweat by the end, as are the two students who are twenty years younger than him. I’m mostly keeping up. And because there’s no impact, no injuries so far. I’m doing it 3 to 4 times a week and on days when I don't, I walk at least an hour on the treadmill, which is gentler on the old bones.

In short, I’m exercising 6 days a week, doing Power 90 3-4 times, and power-walking on treadmill with handheld weights in between.

So now, we’ll see….

If I can’t get it down quickly enough with these lifestyle changes, I’ll have to go on a statin.

But I bet I can.

Here’s the thing

Ingesting fat causes coronary artery disease sooner or later. Every bit we imbibe is just layering into our arteries. During the Viet Nam war, autopsies on soldiers revealed early coronary artery disease—layers of plaque in those arteries—of 17- and 18-year-olds raised on the standard American diet.

I know you probably won’t go all in until you get a diagnosis. Most don’t. It’s hard to get motivated. It’s easy to think a little bit here and there can’t hurt, and easy for the little bit here and there to add up to a whole lot.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said, “I don’t have to be that strict. It’s not like I’m one of Dr. Esselstyn’s cardiac patients.”

Well, now I do have to be that strict. And if I had been before, this could have been prevented.

Most of us can prevent coronary artery disease.

Do what you will.

I’ll keep you posted on what I’m eating, and how it’s going.

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Sorry there was no post last week.
It was because my brand new novel came out!

A small-town rom-com that’ll make you feel good again!