#133 - Health + Other Stuff

Well, it has been an interesting month physically speaking. I found out, going to a completely new physical therapist, that my left leg is ever so slightly shorter than my right. I’m utterly amazed that none of the specialists I’ve seen in the last 30 years ever happened to mention that to me. I am now wearing a 6 mm heel lift in my left shoe and I am cautiously optimistic that it will bring around a sea change in these issues I’ve been having in my lower back. It won’t happen overnight, but already I feel like there is an improvement.

I got my latest set of blood test results back, and other than my usual sky-high cholesterol, I seem to be fine. Which is great news. Since I exhibit none of the other risk factors for heart disease that when associated with cholesterol can be dangerous, I am going to be doing something called a cardio CT scan for calcium. I’ve never heard of this before, but apparently, it’s quite common. It scans your heart to see whether you have any plaque buildup inside your blood vessels. If I do, I guess I’ll need to take statins ☹ … If not, this is just genetics talking and I should be able to get away without medications. But, we’ll see.

Health Tracking Website

I found a website called www.healthmatters.io – If you want to track your blood tests this is the way to go. I have a plethora of lab tests going back as far as 2010. Many of them using different units for the measurements. And from many different labs. I tried doing a spreadsheet and I tried a database so I could have them all in one place and graph them etc. That was quite onerous and I never really succeeded. This site made all of that just go away. I subscribed to the lifetime plan and they entered 10 of my reports for me for free. And everything is graphed and tracked. I’m slowly entering the rest of my data and it is quite easy. They will enter additional reports for $15 each. And I’ve found them to be very professional and responsive. If you want to track your bloodwork and general health markers – you should really check this out. Failure to track trends can be harmful as a friend of mine recently discovered when his Red Blood Cell count started trending down and he didn’t notice it right away. And look what happened to me with my thyroid issues.

This shows a sample biomarker. It explains what it is as well as having links you can click on for further research. NB. This appears to be genetic. Definitely not lifestyle related.

And here is one with good and high risk readings just to contrast

This is my goal by my birthday :-)

I am continuing with my foreign language program. My Turkish and Spanish I am still doing tutoring online and that seems to be going well. My French I am refreshing to a basic level using spaced repetition on BrainScape, and I am starting from scratch with Italian, albeit slowly. I’ve had two occasions where I’ve had a Spanish and a Turkish class the same day separated by only an hour. And I don’t appear to get confused. I seem to be able to separate the languages in my head when I’m speaking. Oh, there is no doubt that occasionally I do think of a word in a language other than the one I’m speaking in, but it is nowhere near as mixed up as I thought it might possibly be. Very cool, the human brain.

I have also worked on a custom keyboard layout for English QWERTY keyboards, that makes it easy to type all of the special characters needed in French, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish with a minimum of excess keystrokes. And also, one hopes, in a combination of keys that is more or less intuitive. On the off chance that one of my readers might possibly be interested in this keyboard, send me a message, and I can send it to you so that you can install it on your Windows 10 system. Unfortunately, I did not do this for an Apple operating system. Sorry.

Happy Chinese New Year to all. It is now the year of the Ox. I myself am an Ox, having been born in 1961 which apparently makes me Yin with an element of Metal. What that means, I have little idea. Not to mention being a rationalist it doesn’t really seem to make much sense for me, but, it’s fun to read about. I would say being identified as an ISTJ on the Briggs-Meyer index is more meaningful 😊.

I finally decided to do something more definitive about my body composition. It wasn’t that bad but I thought that it would be nice to have a 6-pack by the age of 60. 😊. I started using the MyFitnessPal (MFP) app again on the 17th of January. And it immediately had an effect. I am at 184lb (83.5kg) after just 4 weeks (lost about 8lbs). I only have about 6lbs more to go and one hopes I might be able to see the outlines of my abs. Based on my experience you need to be at under 8% body fat to see that, and probably closer to 5%. I feel I’m at around 10% right now. And I’m not feeling cravings for sweet food to any great degree. It has been pretty easy overall. MFP is an app that allows one to track calories and exercise. I’m not really tracking calories so much as macro nutrients. But if you don’t measure it, it is hard to change it. And I discovered that tracking my food intake with MFP changed my behavior within 24 hours. We’ll see how it goes. Behavior modification experimentation. What’s not to love?

I read two books this month on women and relationships. Why?

On the off chance that I ever travel again, meet someone, and possibly have a relationship, I thought why not do some studying. 😊

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus - John Gray.

The 5 Love Languages – Gary Chapman

There was quite a lot of stuff that was new to me. Even the stuff I thought I ‘knew’ … it was probably good for me to read and assimilate consciously. I really recommend these books very highly. Regardless of your gender and whether or not you are in a relationship. It is like a manual on how to treat your partner well. How can it possibly go amiss to study up on that? It applies to anybody you know in fact.