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Sauteed Mussels, Clams, Kale, Bok choy, Pepper
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Oh my diet!
I am being approached by many co-workers saying, “You really lost a lot of weight.” I shrug the comments not because I don’t care but because my weight loss is necessary. And it is not 100 percent intentional. My diet is centered around diabetes and if the strict regimen of diabetic type 2 diet is followed, anyone can lose weight. The question is - is this diet applicable to those who are not battling diabetes? Maybe or maybe not. If you are the type who enjoys sampling restaurants and different foods with no holds barred, this diet will make you miserable. If you are like me who look at diet as a form of nutrition and not a source of pleasure, welcome to my world.
Let me share with you how I lost 23 pounds in 6 months. I went through stages I could attribute only to myself. It is what I call a path from ‘most to least resistance’. Yup, it is such a pain to wake up one day and look at the mirror and vow ‘I am gonna lose weight from now on and will keep it that way.’ It is not easy. The only thing that fortified my resolve is the power of ‘consequence’.
If I reason with myself that “I will die anyway so why do I need to deprive myself of the joy of eating and doing nothing?” Consequence: I will probably suffer years of complications before I die. “Who cares if I was fat?” Consequence: I won’t be able to climb Mount Everest and run Boston marathon(which are in my bucket list). “Why do I need to drink my meds?” Consequence: I will probably suffer the disease those medicines are for such as…. You get the picture. This is my approach to my patients as well. Sometimes it works, sometimes I just piss them. If a patient doesn’t want to move, he has the right to but it is my responsibility as a caregiver to explain why he or she needs to move. This will free me of the guilt of negligence. I don’t want to see a day when a patient suffered a blood clot or pneumonia or embolism because ‘nobody cared to explain to him the consequence of immobility’. Inflicting fear and alarm is dangerous though. I have patients throwing me out of their rooms for adding more reasons to their anxiety. That rarely happens but I am very careful.
We all have different approaches to life and I am not suggesting I have the best lifestyle to emulate. If you are the type who spends his Friday night with his computer, blogging about nutrition while the rest of the world is having fun somewhere, you need to seriously re-consider if that is something you want to copy. I am a busy with multiple nerdy interests, so do the math and I am ‘that one’.
Today, in compliance with “eat like a king in the morning, commoner at lunch and pauper at dinner”, here is what I ate: I woke up with a wonderful 97 glucose meter reading and felt hungry. I ate 1 pancake, scrambled eggs, 2 small sausage links, 1 pear for breakfast. Then 6 pieces of chicken wings and a serving of mixed veggies for lunch. Tonight (with my blood sugar5 at 120), I cooked a soup sauteed mixture of kale, bok choy and mussels, ate it with ¼ cup of bulgar and I thought that was good for me. I could not skip dinner even if it was late due to having worked the whole day doing some physical work. That was enough for my work out.
So the meal I have consumed tonight is sauteed mussels, clams, kale and bok choy. This is very quick:
Saute onion and garlic in olive oil
Pour a decent amount of water for soup
Pour a can of clams and a bag of mussels
Add 1 jalapeno sliced pepper
Add salt to taste.
That’s it.
The Quadrangle of Life
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There is no doubt about it. Computer programming renders me immobile for hours and I need to get away from my ‘learning’ momentarily (currently I am immersed in cloud computing via AWS and digital ocean) and focus on lighter side of things, like, life. Oh yeah, I need to get a life. I am a late bloomer in computer languages and sometimes I act like a freshly minted college graduate who just got his first job, and, well, that is basically true. I just graduated in I T last December. A few days ago I was offered days off from clinical work on account of having low hospital census (summer). That excited me. It meant I could work on my coding which I was dying to do. It doesn’t earn me a penny but wow, what I can do with it in my free time! But (despite pursuing my passion), sitting on a chair for hours can be dangerous to my physical health. Being old and wise now, I need to press the brakes when I get too concentrated. Prolonged immobility is no good.
I remember a patient who recently had surgery of a fractured hip asking me, “I am in so much pain, why must I sit up on chair? What is so important in sitting up?”
Obviously the patient haven’t had been in a hospital before or he subscribes to the old notion of bedrest in times of injury or disease. I said there are things that happen when you go vertical. You move the muscles, you inhale more air that expands the lungs, your circulation goes down the legs to be pushed up back, which makes the heart work more, gravity pulls down whatever needs to get expelled out of your system, you prevent hypotension, you prevent blood clots, all your organs will rev up and of course, you eat better when you are sitting and looking better when visited by friends and families.
I guess my answer did register something as he asked to be assisted to the bathroom. Yeah, unfortunately, I need to deal with THAT when people go vertical the first time after being sick. He just couldn’t wait to use the bathroom.
That is the reason why movement, no matter how little, matters to everyone. For seniors like me, it is much more important. There is a quadrangle of needs a person must meet at this stage in life, like 4 corners required to stabilize it.
Movement, Nutrition, Mental Stability, Rest.
We need to balance all these to maintain an optimally functional and good quality life. One should not be tempted to focus on one and ignore the rest. Too much movement or exercise at the expense of the other three leads to injury and depressed immune system. Too much dieting or the opposite will lead to starvation or obesity and related problems, too much stress or mental anguish will lead to stress hormones affecting the whole being, and absence of rest will lead to fatigue and again, compromised immunity.
These components of the quadrangle are very dynamic, much like setting up a pole supported by 4 wires. All those wires should be equal or at least each compensatory for the others as need be. The goal is perfect harmony and balance. Do not ignore any of them.
A lot of health care workers nowadays are looking more closely into the mental component since it appears it is the main driving force of all 4. If we seriously consider them all, the mental discipline seems to drive the resolve and concentration and consistency for the quadrangle. It is the motivation to keep us moving. It is the mental discipline to choose the right food. It is mental power for us to turn the light off at night so we can complete our daily sleep.
There are a few ways to address the mental component of the quadrangle:
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To keep motivated to exercise, read exercise books, internet blogs, health and lifestyle magazines. Spend time with people who are regular exercisers, talk to family about giving you space and time to exercise, keep a journal of your routine. Shoot for self-data progress. Data progress includes weight loss, improved sugar and blood pressure, feeling of well being. Keep these data so you can evaluate progress.
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Keep a journal of what you eat. Educate yourself on proper nutrition. If you have no time to cook healthy meals, subscribe to programs who can do it for you. Personally, I always look for natural cooking in my own kitchen.
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Make sure that no matter how hard working you are or how passionate you are with what you do, set a time to pause and stop to resume at another time. That applies well on me. It is important to mentally shift your gears to sleep mode, rest mode, exercise mode, meal mode. Don’t get complacent. When you say you finish work at 5 pm, try your best to finish at 5pm. If you determined sleeping 7 to 8 hours a day means retiring at 10, try to drop everything you do and sleep at that time.
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Again, it’s all about mental power.
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