You Are What You Eat
and a lot of the stuff is tough to see through...
What's so funny about a colonoscopy?
About 3 years ago I adopted a new way of eating. I am a sucker for a book with a great title. I read the book ”How Not to Die” by Dr. Michael Greger. While I immediately realized the book was staking itself with an impossible claim, I decided to give it a try. I had not been feeling great and a bit wore down and thought maybe a new diet and exercise mantra might help. Besides, I was due for a physical and expected some “guidance” from my doctor. While I may write about my diet at some point, my greater point today is the unexpected guidance we get from medical professionals.
I have one of those periodic colonoscopies scheduled in the near future. In hopes of increasing my readership and likes from medical professionals, let me state that periodic checkups are the roadmap to a long life and you should never put off a preventative test. Now that my PSA is complete, let’s get back to the story. While a colonoscopy is a procedure that may seem like one to avoid, it delivers serenity and peace of mind on “the back-end” when you get your results. In preparation, I received a packet from my health plan about getting ready for the procedure. Many of us know the drill so I will not carry on. The part that made me laugh was the insert about what I need to eat as preparation. For three solid years now I have been eating a largely plant-based diet. My favorite mantra from the book is under a magnet on my refrigerator; “nothing tastes as good as feeling great”. The change in lifestyle has been largely successful and I am pretty satisfied once I adjusted to different eating patterns.
I happen to also have been diagnosed shortly after starting the diet (at that doctor's checkup) with Type-2 diabetes. The changes I enacted have largely mitigated the disease and so that is motivation enough to stick with it. As I said, I am not going to spend time talking about my specific diet here except to say that my clinic's preparation for my upcoming procedure is simply the opposite of EVERYTHING I would now ever eat! I included a photograph of the “things to eat” as I found them simply flabbergasting. I think that the recommendations could simply be to stop eating everything you eat today.
I have drawn a few conclusions from all of this:
My clinic could have saved a sheet of paper by just advising “eat all the things you know, deep down, that you shouldn’t be eating on a daily basis.
All of the foods I have concluded are bad for me seem to be transparent while in my intestines.
As with all generalizations, there are exceptions. The low-fiber diet recommends avoiding bologna. We all know that deep down without guidance anyhow.
Preparation for a colonoscopy will help me set a personal record for my blood glucose level.
In the future when it is time to check again, I will do the test on the Saturday after Thanksgiving and simply enjoy the following “guilt-free” : dinner rolls, mashed potatoes, turkey, pretzels as a snack, ice cream for dessert all accompanied by stuffing. Extra credit for cooking the green beans for an hour until they become “easy to digest”.
If the AMA wishes to increase the likelihood that Americans will get their scheduled colonoscopy they should highlight, perhaps with photographs, the food you get to eat during your preparation. It sounds like the classic American diet.
While they are rarely my tonic, parody songs are just right sometimes. If you see the humor in this Newsletter, we may have a future. This saga continues in