My Pre-Primal Health Status

2 Replies

I’d made the decision to try to improve my overall health by adopting a new lifestyle. As I described in my previous post, I believed that a paleo diet made the most sense from a scientific perspective and that an overall lifestyle outlined in Mark Sisson’s “The Primal Blueprint” seemed practical and most importantly maintainable. However, before I started this new phase of my life I wanted to perform some tests to make sure I had a record of my health markers going forward.

I had a few existing health problems before starting on this journey, but nothing that I considered major. The most serious was related to Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) or reflux as most people know it. I also had a large bump on my upper eyelid that was the result of a blocked oil gland. Other than that I felt a bit tired from lack of sleep after having our baby girl join our family at the start of Janurary, 2012.

GERD/Reflux

My GERD symptoms are not that typical. I would only feel some acid coming into my mouth once or twice a month and had no heart burn problem. However, I had one big symptom that would occur at random intervals; my sphincter would close and stop food from entering my stomach when I ate. Often It would just be a slight delay before I could feel the food or drink entering my stomach, but sometimes it could take minutes or even get to the stage where my saliva would build up in my oesophagus and I’d have to depart to the toilet for relief.

My gastroenterologist did an examination of my oesophagus and stomach by shoving a camera down my throat on a long tube. Thankfully I was not awake when this happened! The results confirmed the irritation of my oesophagus and that I have a hiatal hernia. Apparently the acid was coming up from my stomach and irritating my lower oesophageal sphincter. Then when food came down the hatch it would sometimes cause the irritated sphincter to spasm and close.

Treatment was to take a drug called Nexium daily to lower the acidity of my stomach, thus allowing things to calm down and the sphincter to heal. Then I could gradually come off the drug and hope that things would return to normal. However, that plan never worked! I was fine taking Nexium every other day, or even every couple of days, but as soon as I stopped the symptoms would return in 7-10 days.

At this stage I concluded that I would have to take Nexium for the rest of my life.

Eye Chalazion

Chalazion on my EyeI must admit, being male, I don’t spend as much time as my wife in front of the mirror cleaning my face and in particularly my eyes. This fact has obviously contributed to me getting an eye chalazion twice in as many years. This occurs when one of the many oil ducts on your eyelid becomes blocked, gets infected and inflamed. A sty is a bit different from a chalazion in that the sty is obviously infected and quite painful. My chalazion was just an annoying bump resulting from inflammation that would not go away after months and months.

I’d been my GP and to see two specialists about this problem. My wife wanted it removed as she had to look at it, but the specialists insisted on leaving it alone and let it go away naturally.

I went with the specialists, so it was still there before I started on my new lifestyle, much to my wife’s dismay.

Health Tests

My gastroenterologist ordered a barrage of blood tests. I honestly didn’t feel like standing up after the lady had finished taking out all the blood needed. I think it was around seven vials! I also had to do a urine test and stool test.

I’ve never had to do a stool test before. They gave me an appropriately coloured (brown) plastic container, similar in size and shape to the one for the urine test, but the lid included a built-in spoon/scraping device. Not being an expert in these matters I asked for advice on how best to take a sample. The women at the counter seemed as perplexed as me and said “just use the lid to scrape a sample.” Oh really? Wow, I would have never guessed. Thanks for the help! In the end I managed to do the deed without contaminating other body parts, a miracle!

Test Results

The following day I received a call from my doctor’s assistant that I needed to come in to discuss my test results and that I had to see another specialist! The assistant was not able to tell me why I needed to see another specialist, saying that that I needed to see my doctor to discuss the matter. I was then told to come to her office in a week’s time because the other specialist was only free then!

I was slightly nervous (to put it mildly). Was it cancer, an infectious disease, something that required surgery. My mind was a flurry of activity covering all the hideous possibilities, so I called back and asked to see my doctor as soon as possible.

I went the following day to find out that my cholesterol was quite high, but that was not the big problem. I was told that I have a chronic, autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which is the result of my own body attacking my thyroid gland. With the thyroid under attack my levels of the thyroid hormones are often too low (hypothyroidism), but can spike to high levels (hyperthyroidism) when part of my thyroid breaks away because of the attack by my immune system.

I was relieved to hear that it is not life threatening and that the medication is quite cheap. Unfortunately, I was told I would have to take a pill every day for the rest of my life.

Luckily a free spot came up with the other specialist, so I was able to go and visit him later that day. In my next post I’ll talk about the visit to my endocrinologist, more about Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and the treatment options.

Changing my Lifestyle to Paleo/Primal

1 Reply

I’ve been quiet lately, but I hope that is about to change as I share the information I’m learning about the new paleo/primal lifestyle I have chosen to adopt.

I made the decision that it was time to get healthier while contemplating if I would be able to keep up with my new born daughter as she grows up. I left things a bit late, being nearly 39 when she was born.

An email from my dad about the apparent benefits of coconut oil for Alzheimer’s kicked off the initial investigation into health. I thought it sounded like a bunch of bollocks, but some of the anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. That led me to think more about how diet influences health and to a TEDx talk by Dr. Terry Wahls about her transformation from being in a zero gravity chair, suffering from multiple sclerosis, to enjoying a normal life again through her special diet.

I started thinking about the different types of diets/lifestyles out there and just couldn’t contemplate going vegetarian or vegan, so I had to find something that still allowed me to have the meat that I love. Quite frankly when you read about needing to take extra supplements when on a vegetarian or vegan diet (unless you are very careful with what you eat) it is a complete turn off. What kind of diet can be good for you if you NEED to take supplements?

Eventually I ended up reading about the paleo (short for paleolithic) diet. That took me to a video by Mark Sisson who made a lot of sense to me, so I went to his website and was hooked on the Primal Blueprint. It’s relatively easy to follow, includes foods that I like and just makes sense. What’s more there is plenty of proof on the website’s forum of people having huge success in not only losing weight, but in general health improvements.

There are 10 key “rules of living” to the Primal Blueprint:

  1. Eat lots of animals, insects and plants.
  2. Move around a lot at a slow pace.
  3. Lift heavy things.
  4. Run really fast once and a while.
  5. Get lots of sleep.
  6. Play.
  7. Get some sunlight everyday.
  8. Avoid trauma.
  9. Avoid poisonous things.
  10. Use your mind.

I’m not too sure on the eating insects part, but the rest of it makes a lot of sense. The reason it seems to work for a large percentage of people who try it is that it mimics the lifestyle of our ancestors and is thus designed around what we have evolved to thrive on. The last 10,000 years or so of human existence have altered the way we live so completely that it could very well explain a lot of our health problems. Thus, to resolve that we just need to change some basic behaviour and get rid of a most of the processed food and drinks that we all too easily consume today.

Changing to a lifestyle like this does take a bit of commitment and requires some sacrifices. No pain, no gain, right? Thankfully the sacrifices are mostly those that you know you should be doing anyway, like more exercise and eating less junk! I’m prepared to make those sacrifices.

Before making such a drastic lifestyle change and to ensure that it does have some positive and measurable impact on my health I talked to my gastroenterologist in April, 2012 and we decided to do a lot of tests before proceeding.

In my next post I’ll talk about the tests, the results and my trip to another specialist! It wasn’t the start I was looking for, but things are looking quite positive now on a paleo/primal lifestyle!

Skinglow Australia – Distributors of Metrin Skin Care

2 Replies

My Mum and Step Father run a skin care business in Australia called Skinglow. They are the Australian distributors for a Canadian company, Metrin. I’d been meaning to write about setting up their new website with a store in WordPress, so here it is!

The product lines are quite straight forward with Metrin for Men, Metrin for Women and some professional hair and body products. Therefore, there was no need for a complex catalogue and shopping cart combination. This pushed me towards WordPress and a plug-in called MarketPress.

There was a bit of trouble getting the tax situation to work correctly, as the plug-in is not Australia specific. However, we managed to get a working solution. While not ideal, it seemed that the developers were not able to manage exactly what we needed in the time frame we had.

The whole setup of the site was quite straight forward apart from the tax problem. I had a graphic designer create the header and my Step Father entered the product information. The total elapsed time was about 3 weeks, but the actual effort it was more like 1 week. We hosted the site on Amazon Web Services with the server running Amazon Linux.

Overall, I’d say that WordPress and MarketPress provide an adequate solution to get a web store up and running. At least it is working quite well for an Aussie skin care company called Skinglow!