Preliminary goals and disclaimer

Last winter, I got a bad case of what was going around. It had me in bed for several days and hobbling along for a couple of weeks. This, despite being relatively healthy, or so I thought. But I was tired, I was still getting headaches, and I'd gained a couple of pounds.

I quit alcohol and sugar for Lent, not as a particularly religious thing but because it's a good span of time -- long enough to make a change, short enough to see the end of it. My hope was to lose some weight, get more energy, and maybe, just maybe, cure my migraines. I also got a little bit competitive because my sister-in-law was doing a vegetarian version of the Whole 30 diet. So I checked out the library for some diet books, where I found two on eating for optimal brain health, Genius Foods and Brain Food. The first of these promotes a low-carb approach while the other touts the classic Mediterranean diet with a few modifications, but they agreed on many points. Reading those led me to looking into the Blue Zone diet – after all, it makes sense to look at what some of the world’s healthiest elderly people have been doing and eating. I recommend these books with some reservations. From there, I started reading articles, websites, blog posts, and dozens of bits and pieces on pubmed. I started keeping track of sources.

By the time I was a couple of weeks into this, I'd ramped up my ambitions to include:

  • lose a few pounds (about 10 -- I'm at 6-ish of those)
  • maintain good health as well as I can into old age/minimize end-of-life disability
  • have more energy
  • get sick less often
  • reduce or eliminate my migraines (a bit part of the "sick less often" thing
Those are still the main goals, but every now and then I check out a new one, like getting in good enough shape to do a triathalon (I'm not at all sure that's going to happen), or this blog.

As I mentioned in my re-introduction, I've taken a lot of notes. I'm sharing this information in part to solidify it in my own head and partly because I think it might be helpful to other people. It is not medical advice. Some things I recommend will not work for some people, for one reason or another, and that's fine. These are just simple things that support good health in the long term... simple, but not always easy. 

The easiest one, in my opinion, is walking. More on that soon!

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