Cardiac Screening
Yesterday my work offered free screenings to check cardiac health so I signed up. They took my blood pressure, pricked my finger, tested my blood glucose, HDL, and total cholesterol. I already knew my BMI was too high but that came in at 35.9, pretty squarely in the obese category, according to the person helping me I need to get to 169 pounds to be normal, seems pretty daunting.
Unfortunately they couldn’t test my LDL which is the bad cholesterol, I’ll be making an appointment with my doctor to do that. My total cholesterol was 148mg/dL which is in the desirable category (anything below 200 is desirable). My HDL, the good stuff, was 59mg/dL which is 1 point away from the good category which is anything above 60. Finally my Blood Glucose was 84mg/dL which is in the normal category.
My blood pressure was kind of surprising to me. She took it once with a fancy machine and it came up as 154/80 which puts me in Stage 1 Hypertension. She seemed a bit surprised by it for some reason and decided to check it again manually, it wasn’t much better, 146/86. Sometimes I get bored in the pharmacy and I use the machine there and it’s always a little high, say the pre-hypertension range and I just assumed that once I lost more weight it would go down. So that kind of scared me a little bit.
At the end she put all of these numbers into some formula and came up with the fact that my risk of getting cardiovascular disease in the next ten years if I keep doing what I am doing is 1.6%
What to do now, well I want to raise my HDL and get my LDL checked out and of course lower my Blood Pressure and BMI. Luckily it seems I should be able to feed 3 birds with one stone. According to the paperwork the lady gave me I will be able to lower my BMI and Blood Pressure in addition to raising my HDL by exercising more.
I have been really slacking of lately. I just can’t seem to get motivated, but I will keep trying. I will get back into the gym and get these numbers fixed, or at least more correct than they are now.
