I left my doctors office two hours after arriving. I decided I would drive to my wife’s work and tell her in person the bad news and the good news about my health. Rather than just sitting around and talking we went for a walk and talk.
Honey I have some good news and some bad news, Let me give you the short version during our walk starting with the bad news;
I have high blood pressure that is off the charts.
My food consumption can not have more than 1500 mg a day of sodium.
Dining out at restaurants is history for me.
Dried spices have sodium so I can’t use them anymore.
I will probably have to take medication for the rest of my life.
This information explains a lot of things that were happening to me such as why am I getting headaches when I ate certain foods. When I looked back, my blood pressure had probably been high for some time and high sodium foods like wings, burgers with fries and meat lover pizza probably pushed my blood pressure to numbers so high I would dare not imagine.
As a proud man, I have never wanted to be told how I must live my life. Success or failure is something I want to be able to control. Now I must take medication everyday if I want to live. The internal argument was a short one. It was almost a monologue, take the pills and live.
Now for the good news.
I found out I have high blood pressure before anything really bad happened to me. This will be confirmed by a cardiologist over the next few days.
We can push away the silent killer many decades if we do this right.
There are many restaurants that serve crappy food now I have a reason not to eat at any of them.
I can continue running and working out.
When I was eight years old my mom went away on a girls weekend and my dad had to do all the cooking. It was the worst week of my life as it pertains to food. I begged my mom to teach me how to cook food. My favorite class during high school was home economics as all we did was learn about food and cooking. During my college days and working days, food was always on my mind and we ate some amazing meals. This was all preparation for this chapter of my life.
Cooking food without using dried spices will be a significant challenge. Food will have to be flavored with vegetables, fruits and meats. This will be an awesome way to change the way I eat and taste food.
Follow my life as I deal with being recently diagnosed (April 12 2011) with high blood pressure (224/109). I need to lose 100 pounds while changing my food habits to reduce my sodium intake to under 1500 mg and eat foods without preservatives.
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