Health vs. Sanity

A few serious but not immediately life-threatening health issues have come down the pike for me as of late. I quit smoking a month ago and now I find myself having to make other major life changes to try and ensure that I live past 35 unless I'm hit by a truck, eaten by a bear, or some other unavoidable calamity stumbles into my path. (After all, I came down with the flu the day after my wedding, and came down with pneumonia the day after I quit smoking. I try to be a realist.)

One doctor told me last week that I needed to eat plenty of Omega 3 fish oils, take (or eat) cinnamon, and load up on fiber. It's all good for your heart, and supposedly your cholesterol. Well, because I'm a realist, I decided to buy all of these things in the form of supplements because I knew I'd never eat much cinnamon in a day's time, even if if I tried to be deliberate about it, and the same goes for fiber. I love seafood and would have no problem eating it on a regular basis but my husband hates it, and - once again, being a realist - I knew I would never make two separate meals in the evening. I also started taking a multivitamin. Nobody told me to do that, it just sounded right.

The cinnamon capsules... no biggie. According to the bottle, I can ever swallow them or open them up and sprinkle them on food. You're supposed to take 2 capsules a day, though, and that would be an awful lot of cinnamon to dump on anything. Spicy overkill with an aftertaste you'd never get rid of. So I swallow the capsules instead.

I'm happy to say the fish oils have no taste, aftertaste, or after-burp taste. They do, unfortunately, have quite a unique and nauseating aroma. Upon opening the bottle, I immediately turned to my husband and said, "These smell like fish-flavored brownies." Yes, fish-flavored brownies. As in... grind up some sardines and add them to your brownie batter, and that's what a bottle of Omega 3's smell like. They look like honey caplets. You'd never guess some machine squeezed the snot out of some cod and sardines and put the results into pill form.

There are a lot of options when it comes to fiber. There are flavored drink pouches you can add to a bottle of water, chocolate snack wafers, and tablets that look like Tums. I'm cheap frugal so I went with the enormous Equate brand bottle of "fiber therapy." The instructions say to use it 3 times a day. I can't help but think those instructions are for people who either can't go potty, or they are capable of reading 3 large magazines back-to-back while they go. I decided I would only use one dose. My bowels might just be the only 'regular' thing about my life!

Wal-Mart's "fiber therapy" smells really good, but it doesn't taste so good. It doesn't taste terrible, but I wouldn't purposely go to the kitchen to mix up a fiber therapy cocktail, if that makes sense. It takes like very watered-down Tang, actually. The problem isn't the taste, but the texture. When I was growing up, my grandfather had serious heart problems and there wasn't much that poor man could eat. His breakfast every day was shredded wheat. Back then, it didn't come in little squares. It came in huge bricks, which you poured milk over and waited for it to get soft enough to eat. No added sugar, no added salt. It looked like this:

But it always reminded me of this:

As the milk seeped into it, the Shredded Wheat eventually turned into this:

That, my friends, reminds me of the consistency of "fiber therapy." Watered-down Tang...with some of that stuff thrown in.

The good news is that it didn't send my bowels into turbo mode, but I can't say it didn't affect my, uh, digestion. Now, I'm a lady and I don't want to go into details or gross anyone out. All I'll say is... you could strap me to the back of a motorboat and I'd be able to power you all the way across the lake. And if you strapped a bubble wand to the back of my jeans... oh, nevermind.

It works.

When my diabetes nurse looked over my food journal last month, she commented, "You're not really salad people, are you?" (Subtle.) Not that we don't eat veggies... it's just that we're really mostly green bean/carrot people. So after that, I made a decision to start including salads into our diet several times a week.

Don't increase your salad intake while you're taking "fiber therapy" unless you want to go up a pants size. That's my best advice to you. Whenever I inject my insulin, it amazes me that I don't deflate like a balloon.

The other day I was sitting here working on a few of my freelance assignments. I had to report on this article. Talk about being deflated.

Popping vitamins may do more harm than good, according to a new study that adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting some supplements may have health risks.

Aw crap. You serious?!? The people in the study who took vitamin supplements actually had a higher death rate than those that didn't. Do you think Wal-Mart will give me a refund? "I need to return these. I have a more than two-percent increased chance of dying in the next 19 years if I take them." 

My friend, Reba, said it best: "I saw the news on it. Everything kills you...so let's not worry about it and just live."

Good advice. 

I wonder how "fiber therapy" would taste in a 2-gallon bottle of Mountain Dew?

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