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heart disease

Adventures in Heart Health and Diets – The Sequel

May 24, 2020 by holojacob Leave a Comment

Well, readers, it’s been a little over a year since chest pains sent me to the doctor on my 40th birthday. 😐 You can read all about that fun adventure here, but given that a recent cardiologist visit gave me some good news, I figured it was time for an update.

The good news? I no longer need to see him for heart issues! 😄

Gif by @nerdbugs.

While it’s possible that there’s still a blockage, my intense adherence to my heart-healthy diet, combined with regular exercise and my prescribed meds, reduced the issue so much that it’s no longer significantly detectable. He still kept me on some of my assigned medications due to my age and family health history, but even so—it’s a real relief to find that my heart trouble was more lifestyle-based than medically-based. A lifestyle, after all, can be changed easily. A physical heart problem is more of a challenge.

All that said, though I’m going to allow myself some occasional splurges—which will be so nice after a year of no splurges—I still plan to stick to some version of this diet. Heart improvements aside, I’ve felt a lot better while on it and have even seen some wholly unintended perks like clearer skin!

I have to give credit again to H.P. for helping me stick to it. Her fascination with all things food—and finding tasty ways to emulate the yumminess of high-fat, high-cholesterol foods—has been instrumental in keeping me satisfied enough to keep up with it.

On that note, here are some other tasty, diet-friendly foods we’ve discovered over the past year, for any of you readers who are also aiming for low-fat, low-cholesterol diets:

Everything MorningStar Farms – Since cholesterol is found only in animal products, it logically followed that switching to a mostly-vegetarian/vegan diet was the way to go. The challenge with vegan diets, though, is that a lot of vegan meat substitutes are nasty, or at least off enough in texture to make them unpalatable. Enter MorningStar Farms. While we’ve tried a few products we were indifferent to (The pizza rolls didn’t taste pizza-y enough), most everything we’ve tried tastes exactly like the non-vegan equivalent. It’s insane. And delicious. The corn dogs, chicken nuggets, and various veggie burgers are regulars in our freezer.

A note about eating out on vegan diets: One thing we learned early on in this adventure is that, while a vegan diet generally suits our purposes, vegan dishes can be designed for one of two types of people: 1) those who eat vegan for ethical reasons, and 2) those who eat vegan for health reasons. And most non-vegan-specific restaurants make their vegan dishes for ethical vegans. Which is to say, while they use healthy plant matter, they also use high-fat ingredients like coconut oil to give the dish flavor—and coconut oil is one of the fattiest oils out there. That said, even when eating vegan dishes at restaurants, I still had to double-check the ingredients to make sure they fit on my diet.

Vegetable Stock – One of H.P.’s best discoveries was the flavor vegetable stock can impart to even simple food, like rice. For many dishes, she’d previously just used water since the flavorful (i.e. fatty) items would counterbalance the blandness, but once I switched to this diet, we found that veggie stock contributes a surprising lot of flavor! Now we always make sure to have some on hand. (H.P.’s brand of choice is Swanson, but honestly she’ll buy anything that’s on sale.)

Spice Blends – One afternoon H.P. got bored and wandered into the local Spice and Tea Exchange, and it was life-changing (so she says). It doesn’t take much of a good spice blend to make a boring vegetable delicious, and after some impulse buys of the most interesting-smelling blends, H.P. discovered a whole new range of dishes to make. The Tuscany spice blend is our favorite, but Vik’s Garlic Fix, the Smoked BBQ Rub, and Onion Obsession blends are close seconds. Also worth noting is the Popcorn Seasoning. We didn’t even eat that much popcorn before, but H.P. tried a sample in store (this was in The Before Times), and now we keep a stock of Skinny Girl popcorn at the house solely for this seasoning.

Skinny Cow Vanilla and Chocolate Ice Cream Sandwiches – These are on the higher end of the amount of fat I’m comfortable eating, but they’re also a yummy treat for my sweet tooth.

Tostitos Baked Scoops – Tortilla chips and salsa was one of my favorite snacks before this diet, but most tortilla chips were no-goes because to the amount of fat content. Fortunately these Scoops (and really, most of Lay’s Baked line) fit comfortably within my diet.

Hello Fresh – This doesn’t apply to all their offerings, of course, but I thought it worth a mention. H.P. signed up on a whim when the pandemic started and we were trying to limit our going-out. We’d only intended to stick with it a short amount of time, but the longer we’re on it, the more we enjoy it! There’s such a variety of meal options each week that it’s surprisingly easy to find meals that are on my diet (or that H.P. can easily make for my diet by switching out a few ingredients), and we haven’t had a single bad meal yet. In fact, since each delivery comes with recipe/ingredient cards, H.P. has started working her own variations into regular rotation!

Fellow heart-healthy dieters, what are your favorite diet foods? 😀

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: diet, dieting, heart disease, heart health, heart healthy diet

Adventures in Heart Health and Diets

May 16, 2019 by holojacob 2 Comments

background-balloons-birthday-1415557
Well, H.P. and I expected this spring to be an exciting one, what with the release of The Gordian Protocol. What we didn’t expect was excitement in the form of spending my 40th birthday at the doctor with chest pains.
Heart disease runs in my family (as it does in so many)—it’s one of the reasons why I’m attentive to working out and eating healthy—and given that my own medical history involves a regurgitant mitral valve, we’d feared this was a harbinger of heart surgery to come.
Fortunately, after a few weeks of cardiologist appointments and uncomfortable waiting periods, we learned that while I do have a minor blockage, it’s not severe enough to merit immediate surgery, and the effects can be thwarted by a cocktail of medications and a change to a diet that emphasizes low-fat and low-cholesterol foods.
Happy Birthday to me! 😐
On the bright side, H.P. is getting a kick out of the culinary challenge. I’m lucky that I have a wife who not only loves to cook but looks an unappetizing diet in the face and says “I bet you this wind chime that I can make it work.” (She’s really into this one fancy, expensive, tuned wind chime. I don’t get it either.)
The single most unnerving part of the whole experience was that, despite my dedication to my health and diet, the blockage had still grown large enough for me to feel its effects, and so comparatively early in my life at that. For me, this was a wake-up call, so being the engineer that I am, I decided to research potential diets and go all in.
I know I’m bound to have readers who are going through something similar, so I wanted to share my findings and experience here in the hopes that some of you will benefit from it, too.
By far the most intriguing information that I found was that from cardiologist Dr. Dean Ornish, who has published a variety of books on both preventing and reversing heart disease through diet and lifestyle changes. When I read that some heart patients who followed his Reversal diet improved so much they voluntarily took themselves off the heart transplant list (and then researched that claim a little more because really), it didn’t take long for me to go “Sign me up!”
ornishprogramThe book H.P. and I first went by was Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease which, among a host of exercise and lifestyle recommendations, lays out what is essentially a vegetarian diet with some additional restrictions, mainly against high-fat plant matter like nuts, avocados, and oils. Non-fat and low-cholesterol animal products like milk, yogurt, and egg whites are allowed, too. Given that cholesterol is found exclusively in animal products, the vegetarian-leaning diet didn’t come as a surprise, but I was definitely surprised that fish—generally regarded as a healthy meat—was excluded. This meant I couldn’t have sushi, which is basically a food group at House Holo. 😢
But I was determined to see this through.
Fortunately, the wide availability of heart-healthy foods on the market made it fairly easy to find foods that fit my new diet. There’s a trade-off, of course—nearly every low-fat version of a food compensates with increased sodium—but though I missed sushi, I discovered a whole new love for beans, pasta, berry medleys, and Greek yogurt.
And when I went for a checkup after a month on the diet, I found that my cholesterol had absolutely cratered. It was the lowest it had been in my entire adult life! Some of that can be attributed to my cholesterol medicine, of course, but it was also a sure sign that the diet was working.
There was another trade-off, though. A few weeks into the diet, my body began to feel the effects of such a dramatic dietary change, manifesting in the form of awful, persistent nausea. It was then that I thought it wise to take a step back from that extreme, to allow my body time to adjust.
ornishspectrumeverydaycookingThus I picked up Ornish’s The Spectrum and Everyday Cooking with Dr. Dean Ornish. These focus more on his Prevention diet, which is less extreme and allows for a moderate amount of meat and fat. I’m still being cautious about the amount I eat, but now that I’ve put fish back on the menu (mostly in the form of sushi and canned tuna), I’ve begun to feel a lot better and think I’m on my way to figuring out a diet that’s more sustainable in the long run.
I’ll probably go back to the Reversal diet once my body has adjusted to the Prevention diet, but until then, here are some of the tastier low-fat, low-cholesterol foods H.P. and I have discovered.
Post Great Grains Cereal – H.P. and I weren’t big cereal eaters before this, but these cereals quickly became a new staple. They include nuts, so they’re a no-go on the Reversal diet, but they make a delicious breakfast/snack/dessert on the Prevention diet.
Daiya Cheddar- and Mozzarella-style Cheese Shreds – We’ve had some some disturbing experiences with vegan substitutes before (vegan sausage—NEVER AGAIN), but were pleased to find that this plant-based cheese substitute tastes convincingly like actual cheese! It’s on the higher end of the fat limits we’re trying to pursue, but it’s still excellent for satisfying cheese cravings.
Lightlife Black Bean Burgers – We loved burgers prior to this diet, too, and though this is too clearly bean-based to be anything like a good ol’ beef burger, it’s super tasty on its own merits. Franklin Farms’ Portabella Burger is a nice burger substitute, too, if you like mushrooms.
Skinny Girl Salad Dressings – Finding a suitable salad dressing was one of the hardest challenges of this diet because we eat salads all the time, and even the healthiest common-brand dressings are loaded with oils. These dressings, then, were a godsend because they’re the only ones at our local grocery store that are low enough in fat to satisfy our dietary requirements. (As an added bonus, they’re also sugar free!)
Yasso Chocolate Fudge Greek Yogurt Bars – We have to be careful with this brand because, though it’s generally healthier than other frozen dessert brands, some of its treats are higher in fat than we’d like. This particular bar, though, checks all our boxes while also allowing me to get a chocolate fix (something I can’t get with my beloved Ghirardelli chocolate bars because of the fat content 😔).
Oikos Triple Zero Greek Yogurt – I’d known about this from before my diet because H.P. practically drinks it, but once I started watching my fats, I found that it made for a nice healthy dessert, with a variety of flavors to keep it from getting boring. A lot of heart-healthy recipes also substitute mayonnaise with yogurt, so we keep a large container of the plain flavorless version for cooking, too.
Readers, what are your favorite heart-healthy foods?
***
Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.

Filed Under: Adventures Tagged With: dieting, Dr. Dean Ornish, happy birthday, heart disease, heart health, low-cholesterol, low-fat, vegan, vegetarian

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