I went to see the doc this morning for my monthly (well...six-weekly) checkup. Somehow, I got away with not submitting a urine sample, but I did get the usual blood-sugar and blood-pressure checks. Blood sugar was fine; the doc smiled at the numbers and said I was good—much better than the previous checkup, anyway, when my HbA1c numbers came back looking rather poor. But the big news was my blood pressure, which was the lowest I'd ever seen it:
110/80
I did a double-take. A BP of 120/80 is considered "classic" normal. I have no idea whether I'll be able to maintain such stellar numbers over the next few months, but we'll see. I began exercising again a couple weeks before today's appointment, and I also did my usual cheat-diet* starting a week before today. If I stay on this path, that'll be a good thing, and I'm thinking that diet and exercise may have played a small role in my improvement.
But there's yet more great news: the doc no longer needs to see me every month: we're now moving to every two months. Eventually, if I get healthy enough, I imagine I'll "graduate" and will no longer have to visit the doc at all. That stage is still a long way off, but it's no longer unimaginable. In the meantime, I enjoy having a doc who acts as an externalized conscience. God knows I need one, given my general lack of self-discipline.
*You may think it's devious and wrong to do a cheat-diet instead of just changing my dietary habits over totally. But hear me out: all the doc sees are numbers, right? What he's looking for, from month to month, is a trend in those numbers. If I'm able to cheat-diet and provide the doc with that trend, then I'm actually obtaining real health benefits from my seemingly cheating lifestyle because, little by little, I'm shaving away the bad dietary habits and replacing them with good ones. It's a gradual process that mimics a graph's approach to an asymptote, but I'm going to stick with it for the time being, especially if I'm getting results like those talked about above.
Outstanding news! Keep it up. That blood pressure thing is huge.
ReplyDelete