Getting Old

I've shied away from talking about getting old because it always sounds whiney. I remember certain aunts and uncles doing complaining. I thought it was a lot of crap. Dad, for one, does not complain about it. I like his attitude toward age. He's just 29. Maybe that's a little bit of denial but it seems like a more positive view than just getting old.

However, sometimes it's good to share these things for the sake of broader health concerns. I lived with my own denial that I wasn't a tub of goo. I didn't have any other health concerns when I had the heart surgery. I was made aware of my weight in a very real way for probably the first time in my life. At the end of my stay in the hospital, I weighed 248. You track your weight every day after surgery like that to make sure that you are not retaining fluids, which is a sign of something bad. By the end of that summer, I weighed 208. Prior to that, we didn't even have a scale so it was easy for me to think I weighed 195 - but clearly that was denial.

Since then, my weight has been around 215 but it started creeping up again this year, according to my cardiologist's records of me. Also, since then, my doctors have been tracking my cholesterol. You should all get yours checked. Mine appears to be getting worse. In particular, the HDL (good, or Happy) is low, which tends to be genetic and not easy to change.

My overall numbers were not bad, until this year. I hovered around the top end of normal, at 208. This year, they seem to be creeping up. I think it was 224 with elevated triglycerides. Not good.

Worse yet, I changed my diet this year, in January. I'm turning over a new leaf, I told myself. I didn't like the trajectory of my weight and neither did my doctor. He says, "because you have already had an invasive heart procedure, we might give a little more weight to some of these numbers." Translation, we already cracked you chest once so don't be an idiot.

I changed my diet in accord with the realage.com guidelines. I eat more fruit and less starch. My gut (measured at my navel) has gone from 45 to 40, I'm happy to say.

You, siblings, should get some base line numbers, if you don't already know your numbers. We could be genetically okay with below average HDL. The fact that our grandparents did not have heart problems is very good news, too. And while you don't want to overreact and get anorexic, you don't want to live in denial like I did. Facts can be just facts, I suppose.