— Monthly Review —

June Review

2017-06-30

Challenges

  • Potassium – getting over 50% is difficult for me, and I’ve never been able to reach 100% on any day. (As a side note, I do not understand all these sites and posts that repeatedly indicate it’s easy to hit 100% potassium per day with natural foods, since unless you fill up on foods beyond the caloric allowed amounts or fill up with huge amounts of carbohydrates, it is not in fact easy to reach 80-100% potassium intake. It’s actually one of the hardest things to reach 100%, so I think people are either delusional or don’t actually plug their foods into a nutritional program to see how difficult this happens to be. Rant over.)
  • Iodine – getting over 50% is difficult for me, although I have managed to get over 100% upon eating a lot of fish or shellfish

Discoveries

  • Apricots – Eating dried apricots severely spikes my blood glucose level. Despite having a lot of potassium, the risks aren’t worth it.
  • Avocado oil – This oil has many of the same beneficial properties of avocados and has a very high smoke point (570 degrees Fahrenheit). I’ve switched to using it most days when possible. It also does not appear to impact the flavor of foods unlike coconut oil, which imparts a coconut flavor to some foods. For the smoke points of various oils, see this site.
  • Chlorella Spirulina – Reducing the Chlorella Spirulina from 15 to 10 tablets caused slight hunger pangs to return. I bumped this back up to 12 tablets a day, and appear to be on track to eat but not be hungry most days.
  • Hazelnuts – Hazelnuts appear to have the most beneficial nutrient profile of the assorted nuts that I’ve been eating. The skin of hazelnuts also contains proanthocyanidins (PACs), a class of polyphenols. Other foods that have these beneficial antioxidant components are cranberries, cocoa powder (dark chocolate), and red wine. Reference this site for more details at https://draxe.com/hazelnuts/ location under 3. Filled with Antioxidants section. Due to these benefits, I’ve started eating more hazelnuts. Since this is my favorite nut anyway, and it only takes 12 to reach 1 oz, I’m pretty stoked.
  • Red wine – Drinking red wine has helped with weight loss and lowering blood glucose levels. I may add 1 glass of wine per day.
  • Walking – Walking for exercise is helping me feel better over using a stationary bike. I switched from the stationary bike to a treadmill for 35 minutes, 4 days a week, and while it shows less calories being burnt at the moment, I am sweating more and getting my heart rate up higher than cycling caused.

Plans

  • Cream of Tartar – I may try 1 tsp of this per day as it’s filled with potassium bitartrate. I am not certain this is an ideal way to bump up potassium, though, although a good discussion of potassium at this location indicates it may be all right to supplement with something that provides potassium, depending on the type of potassium and other ratios in the body.
  • Exercise days – I will bump up the number of days exercising at the gym to 5 days a week before the end of July.
  • Flaxseed – These are nutritional powerhouses that contain very high levels of omega-3 fatty acids. With the nutritional ratios being more important to me now (see that list point below), I am planning to add 1 oz of ground flaxseed into my diet along with whole milk plain yogurt for morning breakfast in the next 1-2 weeks.
  • Honeydew melons – These contain a reasonable amount of potassium, so I will be trying one wedge a day to see the blood glucose results compared to apricots.
  • HOW – I will work on my Healthy Over Weight (HOW) idea for the site I created healthyoverweight.com as I need to compare it to CRON and HAES ideas.
  • Nutrition Ratios – Now that I have a better understanding of the RDAs, I’ve begun focusing more on the four important ratios for daily nutrition. These ratios are omega6:omega3 (4:1 to 1:1 or less), zinc:copper (8:1 to 14:1), potassium:sodium (2:1 to 4:1), and calcium:magnesium (2:1 to 1:2). I have been forming some meal plans centered around hitting the ratios along with the RDAs, and those will start showing up soon.
  • Rowing machine – I will add 5 minutes on the rowing machine on the 4 days when I exercise in the company gym.
  • Ultimate Meals – I will create several ultimate meals that meet 100% RDAs so that I have a greater variety of choices, then post those to my new site ultimatemeals.com
  • YouTube – I will work on creating a video log (vlog) that has a weekly review of what I’ve done and what I’m doing. The generalized purpose to help others who might see the vlog and benefit in some way. To that end, I need to purchase a camcorder after researching the best one to use.

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