Nothing wrong with proper wholemeal or sourdough bread. Just eat it in moderation. Eat porridge for breakfast.
BMI doesn't help if your occupation means you have more muscle bulk compared to someone sitting down all day.
GP's get 'brownie' points for prescribing statins and a whole lot more so even if you don't need them, you will always be presurised to take them.
Drinking beetroot juice before doing anything exterting, like DIY or gardening will bring your BP down.
He's already told us exactly what the problem is -
4 stone overweight, no exercise and drinks his weekly 'allowance' every day. It's down to him to make urgent changes, not dump his self-inflicted problems on the Nanny Health Service.
That's as pointless as checking the value of your Share ISA and/or SIPP every day.
I thought I had posted my life on here for a minute, if you suffer from atrial fib. often the electronic BP readers do not give an accurate reading, so be careful of this little quirk.
If you suffer from atrial fib. often the electronic BP readers do not give an accurate reading, so be careful of this little quirk.
Losing weight is hard.
The weight comes back.
You will be discouraged.
What you'll learn is, some forms of exercise are great from a cardio point of view, but do nothing for weight. When I was younger, I used to stop off at the 440 track, and do sprints around the track (sprint - recover - sprint - recover). Great for cardio. Nothing for weight loss. You'll go home and eat back all your winnings, when you do that.
Weight loss requires "slow burn". You need an exercise you can do every day. Without fail. Most people do not have time for this. Since the bicycle (for the most part) doesn't leave aches and pains, you can do it every day. Adjust the seat height, so your knees don't hurt. (If the seat is too low, your knees hurt.)
For me, I bike seven days a week, two hours each day. For that fourteen hours investment, I lose one pound of weight. If I drive the bicycle for four months, I could lose around fifteen pounds of weight.
If you have the stamina, and if you drive faster than the posted limit on the bicycle trail, you can lose two pounds of weight per week. You'll have to wring out your shirt when you get home. I can't drive like that any more. The cardiologist gave me a pulse rate to stay under, and I'm trying not to overdo it. If I drove like that now, I'd be 40BPM over my limit.
When you exercise, your appetite picks up. This is just the feedback loop in your body, doing what it does best. This is why so many exercise ideas will fail. You have to test them, and see what works for you.
Back in university, playing two sports a day (a game in place of lunch hour, a game after classes), that really keeps the weight off. We would come off the sports field after "lunch", and be sneaking bites out of a sandwich during afternoon lecture. But that's just not a practical lifestyle except while you're in school.
Then the next issue, is designing these things for all four seasons. Part of the discouragement, is having a "sedentary season", ruin all your gains. Winters here are killing me.
You can try walking every day. I don't lose weight doing that. I've worn out a couple pairs of hiking shoes trying. That will make you feel a bit better. For me, for example, I have to do that to tame the angina. (Three weeks of walking is usually enough to fix me. Until the next time.)
I also tried buying an exercise bicycle, a "resistance" type with a variable resistance. What's the problem there ? There is no way I can put enough hours on that thing, to equal outdoor bicycle rides. It's just not possible. When you do exercise outside, and you get a great distance from your house, you have no choice but to finish the exercise until you get home. No shirking. It's too easy to get off the home exercise bike and go watch TV :-)
Anything that was cardio for me, I could only do every second day. And that's part of the reason there would be no net weight loss with that pattern. I used to be a runner, until my heart said I can't do that any more. I didn't lose any weight by running. But the bicycle has been pretty good to me. It's gentle enough, you can do it every day.
Another option is swimming. In a setup where there's the opportunity to do laps. Just "bobbing around" and staying afloat, will burn some energy. But some people like to "meter" their progress by counting laps. When you come back from swimming, the very first thing you do is... eat :-) I don't know what the net energy balance is like there, whether the eating will cancel all gains or not. That tells you the swimming is probably burning a lot of calories. And your body is then "desperate to get even".
Paul
Hello, We've had dogs for the last 15 years or so, our last beloved dog passed in 2019 and it hit us badly so we haven't been ready for another. I'd walk to work when the dog was alive and healthy, depending on route this could be anything up to 7 miles per day.
I don't overeat, salt and sugar intake is minimal and I don't smoke. My problem is alcohol and inactivity. I've walked approx four miles today though, work and back, need to get out of bad habits.
It is not pointless for those who stress about their blood pressure. It makes checking it an everyday (sic) routine event [yawn, this is boring] rather than a once in a while event [oh f*ck what's it going to be this time].
I recommend measuring it at the same offset from when you take your meds.
If I take BP at the same time I take meds, the systolic could be
20 points higher than if I wait two hours after the meds and take it then.Which raises the question of "what are you measuring".
These are just observations I've made by random sampling.
Then you have to decide what is a realistic sampling point. Do you want the reading to be 150 or 130 ? During most of the day, does it feel like a 130 day (a bit dizzy), or like a 150 day. You don't want the readings to be deceptive either way, if you can help it.
If you take the BP reading concurrent with the meds, it's likely the trend line will be a bit on the pessimistic side.
But you have to decide for yourself, what way of taking the reading is representative of where you're at. If you "feel all day like you're low-BP" and yet you take the readings and they're all 150, then I would be tempted to find a time of day (or time-after-taking-meds) that gives a better representation of your median pressure.
If the machine gave continuous readings, none of this would be necessary. One or two readings a day, you might not really be capturing how you're doing.
This is probably also why the doctor doesn't really care about the details, when you bring your log in.
I made a beautiful graph once on the computer, and took it to a new doctor at the clinic. He took one look at the graph and said
"ok, whats the average value"
And I'm thinking to myself, swear jar material.
They're not even willing to just draw their own line through the graph and say "about 150 I see". I can't get them to do that. They expect to be spoon-fed.
When I get prescription renewed now, I just take in seven days of readings, and that's it. No more charts and graphs for bozo. Not worth the effort.
Paul
That's good. How long did it take?
Fundamentally its energy in and energy out, with a bit of metabolic efficiency mixed-in. I'm reasonably active (although my running days are behind me) but the weight and BP weres creeping-up - I've found that a low-carb diet leads to the pounds dropping off in a sustainable way. I don't pretend to stick to a full-blown keto diet, but I'm optimistic that by the end of the year I'll have gone from 13st to 11st, and that's with a couple of months off earlier in the year. There's loads of info about it on the web. What's not to like about lots of fish, veg, salad, meat, eggs and red wine ;-)
(and now back to DIY - currently replacing the landing floor, which has narrow (3 1/2") boards that have been trashed by 80 years of electricians, plumbers, heating guys and alarm installers)
Oh, I know. The odd readings were what alerted me. My BP machine does detect arrhythmia, and it's also why I have the separate ECG thing.
That said, I don't get AF frequently, and when I do it's pretty obvious.
Same. I have stopped having bread, except rarely - once a month, perhaps, as it's full of salt too. I haven't had any potatoes for ages. My carbohddrate intake comes mostly from porridge, brown sugar on the porridge, and booze. I'm now down to just over 13 stone, which is just on the BMI border between "healthy" and "over" weight. I suspect that accounting for muscle, I won't be able to lose a lot more, but I might try for 12 1/2 stone, over time. I have a lot of veg., fish, fowl, sausage rarely, bacon & eggs with on!ons and baked beans (is Sn!pe still upright?), etc. "Little and often"? Yes, I'm just going to make a dinner, which will be fisf, mixed veg. stir flied or boiled, and some baked beans for "gravy". Oh, and a couple of glasses of my home-made "ginger drink" which will be 8 units minimum.
I find the most difficult thing is matching the thickness. It's often necessary to pad the top if the joist. Then theres's matching the finish...
The alcohol is adding calories which you arent burning off and keeping your weight high. Its good that you are walking especially back from work as it can be a good way of unwinding between work and home. When my BP started to go above 140/90 I went on medication - want keen but two things the nurse said made a lot of sense:
1) a generation okay high BP was considered just part of getting older and considered normal - BUT so was having strokes and worse before you were 65 ! 2) If you pass up on medication and are unlucky enough to have a stroke or heart attack you will feel very annoyed that you didnt opt for the medication. You are most of the way there is dealing with the issues as you have diagnosed the issues involved - Good Luck.
One concern with doctors, is getting a timely enough response to make a difference. I wouldn't rely on any health service to "get me out of a bind" even at the best of times. I'm just glad my current condition was "patient enough" to wait two years for answers.
The doctors may regale you with stories like "while you're in the MRI, if we see a problem, we'll run a catheter up your leg and put in a stent". Well, when you get to the MRI, the staff are in a big rush to get you out of the room. You can't leave fast enough :-) The odds of anyone stopping, looking at the screen and saying in a loud voice "that lad needs a stent" is virtually zero. Only in their most vivid imaginations, do things like that happen.
Now, one of the reasons they rush like that, is "not enough MRIs for the size of hospital, incoming emergency patient expected". And, to make matters worse, I could drive about 7 minutes from my place, to a private MRI and have a scan. But the hospital only accepts scans from their own MRI machine, conducted by their own staff. The MRI machine has a *lot* of scanning options, and I can see why they insist on that. It's not like ordering a chest Xray.
Where my sister lives, the small hospital there had only one MRI. And they were running it, 24 hours a day. You could contact booking, and be told "your scan is at 3AM on Sunday the third". The patients complained about this, so they had to back off the 24 hour operation thing. But it was one way, to make a single MRI machine "stretch further". Run three shifts.
Paul
If you can convince a person prone for these things, to even have a BP machine in the house, it helps.
When I had my hypertensive event, I said to myself "this headache isn't normal, and I haven't used that BP machine in ages, I should give it a run". That's when I discovered I was
200/100 and off to emerg I went. They didn't actually do anything for me, but did provide me with a script for a med to "tide me over". Which is almost like being treated :-) And I did get my Creatinine checked on the spot, which also cuts a week off the potential treatment time.It would have killed them, to give me a drug or a pill on the premises :-) That's what I found amusing.
Paul
Same with me on ACE inhibitor with diuretic, BP around 156/84; but occasional heartbeat at night for ashort period in bed, BP could be higher but never checked it.
I've found that intermittent fasting works for me.
I used to be over 14st. (for height 5'8" or so). From 2013, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday I restricted my intake to 600 kcal per day, and ate (and drank) as much as I liked on the other days. In a year my weight dropped to 12st. Since then I've changed to alternate days fasting and feeding and my weight fluctuates around 11.5st.
Obviously this method might not suit many.
I don't think that exercise is a reasonable way to lose weight unless done to excess. I exercise to a moderate degree - walks - but just to maintain my general health.
Last summer, I managed to take 2" off my waist simply by walking - certasinly not to excess.
Lockdown saw me lose 10% of my body weight without trying - I put it down to cutting out the work coffee/snack, and hauling myself out for daily walks (even though I did walk or cycle into work before it kicked off).
Doesn't seem to have affected my managed blood pressure - still about 140/90. While I'm now just within the 'normal' BMI range I could do with losing another few kgs, after which alcohol is the only other significant variable.
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