04 March 2009

health, food, something

I can't remember what the book is called, and I'm too lazy to google it, but someone a while back traveled around the world and took pictures of people outside their houses with all the food they eat in a week. I thought about this a few minutes ago as I was making a week's worth of beans-rice-cheese lunches, and I wondered what my week's collection of food would look like. Considering that I eat the same thing every day, it probably wouldn't be that hard for me to figure it out.

What I really wanted to know, though, is how much of it would be processed and how much is made from scratch. I make rice and mix it with Trader Joe's Cuban Style black beans. Should I be cooking them from scratch? I make oatmeal pumpkin muffins, but with canned pumpkin. I guess it's always a balance. (Side note: why do the cans have to be 15 oz? I need a cup. One can should be two cups, but no. NOOO. 16 oz of pumpkin in one can is apparently too much to ask. Seriously. Just make the cans in multiples of a cup, please and thank you.)

I had a doctor's appointment today. My blood pressure was right around its normal, super-low, "um, are you sure you can actually stand up? do you need a transfusion?" level, and I realized that maybe I don't need to be the sodium-avoidance fiend I have become. I might actually need that salt to keep me upright. Theory of mine: the sodium in processed foods is more damaging than the salt that I put in the pan with the rice when I cook it. True or false? Or do they just cram more sodium in processed foods to give it flavor that is lost in mass production, so I just use less when I make the food myself? Or am I delusional altogether?

We also went over all the lab work I had done a few weeks ago. I forgot to mention that I think I forgot to fast before that lab work. I was suspiciously normal-feeling while at Trader Joe's afterwards, for someone who gets dizzy when they don't eat. But I think this is literally the first time in my entire life that my cholesterol has been "excellent." (Um, about those Doritos in high school...) In fact, everything was excellent. The general habit of doctors, beginning with my first visit to an "adult" doctor, which happened to be the gyno because I went to my pediatrician until I was 23, is to say things like (I quote the first gyno), "Well, you are just a nice, healthy kid." Except that now the doctor is approximately the same age as me. Which is awkward, frankly. I prefer age and wisdom in a doctor, but this is what I got, and she seems great. We had a nice conversation while she was feeling me up in a clinical way.

It's always good to know everything is running smoothly in the parts of your body that you can't see, that all your little blood counts and antibodies are chugging along as expected. I am a little hypochondriacal at times, so I like to have some confirmation that things are all ok in there. Although even people with allegedly perfectly functioning bodies eating allegedly perfect food seem to find a way to die someday. If it's not one thing, it's another.

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