Editor's note: This is the fifth in a series of articles about Kickstart Your Health Little Rock.
My eyes are dry and itchy as I type this: Could it be my vegan diet?
Dr. Christie Beck, who's directing the Kickstart Your Health Little Rock 21-day vegan diet, says it's most likely the cold, arid, Northern air. As a native Detroiter, I'm not sold on that hypothesis.
Well, she says, "I don't have any red flags going up for why a shift in nutrition status would bring on an acute instance of eye dryness," but she suggests I reach out to her son's basketball coach, ophthalmologist Dr. Ted Penick.
"It might be a lack of Omega 3 in your diet," he says. "Omega 3 is needed to help stabilize your lid oil which prevents your tears from evaporating too quickly."
He suggests flaxseed oil.
Lord, but had he suggested a half-pound burger I'd have called that script into Dugan's Pub. Doctor's orders, I'd tell my editor. Yes, mayo, too -- bitter medicine.
HOW THE BODY WORKS
You know those mouthwash commercials where an actor takes a slug and, suddenly, we're inside her mouth, we're swimming with the cartoon antiseptic suds, swish-swishing over a purple-pink topography, scrubbing squeaky clean the skyscraping teeth. See there? Shiny as a perfect pearl.
Feels awfully authentic to me.
I'm a smart person, but if not for that animated
sequence, I cannot imagine what could be happening when Listerine hits my gumline.
So when a doctor says my lid oil isn't fatty enough, I imagine a wave of smiling adipose bubbles rushing up the middle of me and up, up to my eyelids to lube my lids. Is that how it works?
Is that why, as of Day 15 of the vegan diet, I weigh exactly what I did before the diet, give or take 2 pounds?
WEIGHT LOSS
"The only obvious explanation is your calorie count, your calories-in/calories-out," said Betsy Day, clinic coordinator for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' Program for Weight Loss and Metabolic Control.
Weight loss isn't much of a mystery, Day says. People lose weight when they expend more calories than they ingest and gain it when that flips. The mystery is metabolism. Some folks burn through their calories quickly, and others painfully slowly.
"Yes, you'd think you would lose weight because you're eating primarily fruits, vegetables, nuts, legumes, that kind of thing, and not having the kind of high-caloric, high-fat meat items; but you're still getting plenty of calories from other sources."
It's true I've not been counting calories. The other night my fiancee and I enjoyed a heaping bed of spaghetti squash with a mango salsa topping and, yes, OK, black beans and avocados, but look, I was not full. That's gotta count for something, and by count, I mean count down.
"Have you increased exercise?" Day asked.
Not measurably, I admitted.
"Cut alcohol?"
Absolutely not.
"Your body metabolizes alcohol like it's a poison. It comes on board, and your body spends energy trying to get rid of it. Then you eat food on top of that, by the time your body's done digesting the alcohol, it's like, 'Oh, forget it, I'm tired.' So that food just sits there. That's why people who have trouble with alcoholism get fatty livers."
But Day is a big fan of veganism.
LABS
And here's why.
On Jan. 30, just two days out from the start of 21-day vegan Kickstart that a couple of hundred central Arkansans are trying (according to the count by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which is coordinating the effort with local Drs. Christie and Jason Beck), I had my bloodwork done.
Age: 38
Height: 5 feet, 10 inches
Weight: 182, for a BMI of 26.1 -- "overweight" begins at 25
Hemoglobin A-1-C, which measures the average blood sugar level for the past two to three months: 5.8 percent (where the range 5.7 to 6.4 marks an increased risk of diabetes)
LDL (bad) cholesterol: 123 mg/dL (where 99 is the upper threshold for normal)
HDL (good) cholesterol: 54 mg/ dL (where the suggested minimum is 39)
Triglycerides: 173 (where 149 is the upper threshold for normal)
I also asked for a C-reactive protein count. Measured in milligrams per liter, C-reactive proteins are an indicator of inflammation in the body and a dramatic measure of bad health for documentarian Lee Fulkerson in Forks Over Knives. His count was 6.0 before a 12-week vegan diet, and 2.8 after. A healthy range is 0 to 4.9, and mine is just 0.6.
In talking to Day about my disappointingly meager loss of weight, she said one of the most popular but least correlative measures of suddenly more healthful eating is weight loss.
"I would bet you if you redo your labs after three weeks you'll see a huge difference in your cholesterol, triglycerides. I think that's the important thing for most people.
"Look at your lab results from where you are baseline to where you are four weeks in. If you can see an improvement in your health -- your cholesterol, your triglycerides, your A-1-Cs -- you've already made huge lifestyle changes that affect your health."
Those results next week. Meanwhile, write to me at
bampezzan@arkansasonline.com
ActiveStyle on 02/23/2015