Changing My Health For The Better

-August 23, 2017-🌿

That was the date I stopped eating meat.  Surprisingly it wasn't that hard to do as I had more than enough incentive to at least try to make the change.  I am by no means going to tell anybody how to eat or what to do with their life, but the change I made worked for me.  Let's start from about February, 2017.  

Courtesy of: worldkidneyday.org 
As a nurse on a cardiac step-down unit, I have treated my share of individuals suffering from hypertension, diabetes and heart disease.  In most cases, all preventable by changing ones diet and lifestyle.  Many of my patients were on blood pressure medications and I had a first class seat to the myriad of side effects many of those medications caused.  Kidney failure, swelling of the hands, feet and face to name a few.  Add to that list dehydration, nausea, diarrhea and rebound hypertension.  Rebound hypertension occurs  when someone has been taking blood pressure medication for a time and stops abruptly.  This results in the blood pressure going much higher than it was prior to initiating the medication.  This can and has led to heart attacks and strokes.  This is not the road I wanted to travel.  Who does?  

 Routine physicals are important......

During a routine physical, my family doctor told me my pressure was a little on the high side and we would begin to watch it.  Here I go with the eye rolling.  Mostly because I knew better than to put myself in a position where hypertension could find me.  Being the nurse that I am, I left the appointment and purchased a home blood pressure monitor.  By the way, do you know how hard it is to try to use a manual cuff and your stethoscope to check your own blood pressure?  Ambidextrous I am not.  By my third appointment my doctor gave me a prescription for Lisinopril which is known as an Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme Inhibitor (ACE Inhibitor).  Medications in this class lower blood pressure by preventing the conversion of an enzyme that causes the blood vessels to tighten.  Thus, relaxing the vessels and decreasing the amount of pressure on the walls of your arteries. 

I battled between increasing my risk for stroke due to my high blood pressure and the side effects of taking blood pressure medication.  I held on to the prescription slip for about two weeks before deciding to get it filled.  I had a plan though: take the medication to quickly get my blood pressure, start loosing the weight and taper myself off of the medication.  Besides, how hard could it be?  He started me on the lowest dose possible.  I started taking the Lisinopril with very little to no side effects except, my pressure wasn't responding.  As is the course of action, my doctor increased my dose.  Now I was on 10mg instead of 5mg.  This really upset me because I came to the realisation that I failed myself.  I didn't want to be part of the over 1 billion people suffering from high blood pressure.  Yes, that's not a typo, I said BILLION!  Either way, I began to reluctantly take the increased dose.  

Let me come clean here.  I worked 12 hour midnight shifts on the weekends and my commute was a 3 hour flight.  My Mother, however, lived right down the street from the hospital.  So, I would fly in on a Thursday and work Friday, Saturday and Sunday 7pm-7am and catch the Monday morning flight back home.  Eating for me was fast food, frozen dinners and airline food.  Who has time or energy after a 12 hour shift to cook breakfast in the morning.  I had to get to bed and prepare my mind and body for the next 12 hours.  Dunkin Donuts was my friend and Texas Toast sandwiches with bacon and at least two donuts was the order of the day.  Oh the shame!  During my midnight shifts I would religiously pop open a Pepsi to make it through the night.  So much so, that my midnight crew would ask me, on occasion, if I had my Pepsi yet because my face was all screwed up.  I was not a coffee drinker so Pepsi did it for me.  So let's add that all up shall we:  poor diet + 210lbs + weekly flights + raising four children sometimes from a distance x stressful job = HYPERTENSION.

My breaking point was June of 2017 when the dose of Lisinopril was no longer working and my doctor switched me to Metoprolol.  Oh crap!  Now I have graduated.  Thank goodness the Metoprolol was short lived since I almost passed out while taking it.  Back on the Lisinopril I go with a 20mg dose this time.  My doctor even started to talk about adding another medication!  Also, I began suffering from gastric reflux.  The whole thing made me feel older than my age, sluggish, and just overall blah.  One weekend, I ran out of Lisinopril and just didn't have the time to refill.  No problem, my pressure was stable.  One week after not filling the new prescription, I started having headaches.  I knew exactly what was going on.  I was floored when I checked my pressure and realised I was in the stroke zone.  We're talking diastolics 170-180 (that's the top number) to systolics 90-110 (that's the bottom number).  I even ended up in the emergency room with complaints of chest pain and a massive headache.  This is not where I wanted to be at all.  Needless to say I went back on the Lisinopril and set my mind to make a change.

How I Changed My Health For The Better

Change can sometimes be difficult.  Strangely enough this change came easy for me.  I work alongside  a few nurses who are vegan and they talked about their reasons for making the switch.  I decided to try it.  Surprisingly, not because of my blood pressure, but because of the heartburn I was suffering from way too frequently for my liking and just the general unwell feeling.  A fellow nurse who had been vegetarian since she was 15 told me about a documentary on Netflix ("What The Health").  Whether propaganda on one side to further their cause or not, the documentary changed how I thought about eating meat and consuming dairy.  Being the Capricorn that I am, I decided to challenge myself simply for the hell of it and go all out vegan.  I went hard.  Completely cold turkey....well, almost.  Cheese was an issue for me but I got hip to vegan cheeses and life was all good.  

The first thing I noticed was that I started to feel dizzy.  Of course people around me started saying I needed go back to eating a "balanced diet with meat".  Actually my pressure was extremely low.  Remember I was still taking the Lisinopril.  The diet change and weight loss helped to lower my pressure and the Lisinopril was driving it even lower.  In an effort not to repeat an episode of rebound hypertension, I began to taper myself off of the Lisinopril.  Half a pill instead of a whole.  Then every other night until the bottle was finished.  Before I knew it, my blood pressure had normalized and I began seeing a new doctor.  After a few check-ups he agreed that blood pressure medication was no longer needed.  Overall I began feeling more energetic and started to enjoy better sleep.  I've removed many things from my diet and added loads more.  It has been a beneficial change and I absolutely have no reason to go back to eating the way I did almost 3 years ago.

Later I'll discuss some of the challenges I faced and what I eat now.  For now, eat healthy and be well.

 






Comments

  1. I'm thinking of starting with no meat one day a week then slowly increasing

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Kirk. Try it and see how you feel. If it works for you then run with it. I'll also add that if you start the journey be patient with yourself. Trust me in the early stages the smell of meat cooking was a killer. Thanks for reading and commenting.

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