A bit of vindication

Blood pressure, where "H=High" is now (H-22) mm/Hg.

Nasty little spike, there. Diet and exercise, people... that's the way to go for me. My goal is still to be at my wedding weight (F-31) on my 7th wedding anniversary. 28 pounds to go.

The things you find on the internet

As I was searching the Internet for ideas of things I may not realize in my diet are raising my blood pressure, becase (in fairness) I had never really though about it before, I came across a link saying "how much Liquorice is bad for your blood pressure?" A little health news article.

WTF, I thought. I had never heard of that kind of link before, so I googled that up. Found a bunch of medical journal articles from Scandanavia, where chronic liquorice consumption is an issue. Why do I care? I ate about a kilo of Liquorice Allsorts in about a week right before my blood pressure showed up suddenly high.

Turn out, large doses of liquorice (naturally flavoured - like the ones I was eating) contain a quantity of glycyrrhetinic acid that will spike your blood pressure - fast.

How large? I was eating them. How fast? The study tested pressure first at two weeks, at which time the healthy control group had spiked a mean of 14.4 points of blood pressure. It looks like they stopped the experiment for that group when they discovered this result.

I ain't saying that this explains anything, but if my pressure comes down a bunch and stays there as I stop eating a ridiculous quantity of liquorice, it may have had an effect. I'm going to play it safe and continue to exercise daily and lose 30 pounds, if you don't mind.

First check in

So after three days of doing the right thing here's the stats:

Weight: F minus 3
Systolic Blood Pressure: H (for high) minus 6

Neither great, but going in the right direction without drugs.

Never marry a woman with her own sphygmomanometer

So in order to do a good thing on Monday, I went to Canadian Blood Services to drop off a pint. As part of the deal there, they measure your blood pressure. Mine was high. How high? None of your business, but enough that when I mentioned it to my wife, she hauled out her own sphygmomanometer and had a look for herself.

Long story short, I be grounded. No salt, no grease, no red meat, lots of veggies, and exercise every day. Food Log. Concrete weight loss targets.

Here we go: Where my weight can now be defined as the variable "F" (for "fat") I pledge to weight F- 25 at this time next year.

I pledge to be active 6 times per week.

Dammit, this is going to suck, but I'm way too young to have high blood pressure without doing something about it fast.