Heart Lesson #1 HDL and LDL Cholesterol

Welcome to lesson 1 - I hope these will be informative, inspirational, and life changing snippets to get us all into a healthier lifestyle...that's our goal. We will focus on three main parts of reaching our goal everyday: Exercise, Eating and General Heart Healthy Knowledge. So dive in and enjoy the ride with me.


Exercise - First of all don't freak out...don't put all this pressure on yourself to go out and run a marathon the first day or ever. Most of this heart stuff is all about the mind...changing your mind to live a different way.
Homework: Just do something. That's it. It can be one push up or one sit up or 5 minutes of jumping jacks, even walk your stairs an extra time, check the mailbox again even though you know you've already brought it in....it doesn't matter...just so you get in the habit of doing some exercise everyday. There are many days I crawl in bed at night with no exercise done that day. I, then, make myself do a few sit ups right there in the bed. Cheating? Not for me...I did something. There are other days I do yoga or run 20 minutes or only do weight training. But, there are far more days that I just get by with the minimum. It's a process of changing your mind. I'm still working on it.
Bottom Line: Do one thing a day for exercise. Anything.

Eating - for now, let's take it slow and easy....just think God food. By that I mean, whatever you can get from the earth...God made, not man made. This will get you out of the processed food department. At the grocery, shop on the outside walls of the store...the stuff on the inside aisles is mostly packaged....but yes, you will need a little packaged food, not much thought. Mrs. Dash makes a great line of sodium free spice blends. But, for the most part, you'll buy fruit and veggies and meat, or fish.
Bottom Line: Think God, not man.


General Heart Healthy Knowledge - Today, let's talk cholesterol. Did you know that there's good and bad cholesterol. Most folks focus on the total NUMBER....anything below 200. That may be OK but if it's all bad cholesterol...that's not great. The real measure is the RATIO of total cholesterol to good cholesterol. I'll talk more about that later or click here.

For now I want to talk about trucks and trash. Good cholesterol is called HDL or I call it "Happy Cholesterol". These are your trucks...garbage trucks to be exact. Now, LDL is the bad cholesterol or I call it: "Lousy Cholesterol", the garbage. That's the stuff that clogs up your arteries and gives us strokes, heart attacks, etc. The trucks, the HDL, actually carry away the garbage, the LDL. Make sense so far? Your goal is to have more trucks than garbage. Thanks to my statin (cholesterol lowering medicine), I have a ton more trucks than garbage.
Are you with me, so far?
Bottom Line: Think Ford F350 when you're at the grocery store.

This is just the beginning of our heart adventure. There's more to come, recipes, things that work for me and others that didn't, thoughts on doctors etc. Remember, it's all a work in progress and changing the way our minds think about food, health, and how we relate to our environment. That's about how we handle stress. More on that later....for now...just enjoy!