History is shaped by our hands.

At the end of February, my father had a mild heart attack.  He just had a doctor's appoint went with a heart specialist yesterday and he was told he was in excellent condition, all remaining physical restrictions have been lifted, and he doesn't need to come back for another checkup until October.  He is doing amazingly well.

My dad has heart disease.  My grandmother had heart disease.  There is about a 100% chance that I have heart disease.  My dad could have avoided his heart attack had he adjusted his diet 25 years ago when he first learned that he may have heart disease.  I'm 26 years younger than my father.  Some quick math shows that now is the time for me to make some adjustments to my diet to hopefully prevent heart disease from ever having a significant effect on my own body.

Even though his dietary recommendations were much more drastic than the preventative ones that I should be taking, I tried to follow my dad's new diet as closely as I could, error heavily on the side of caution.  This meant removing as much sodium as I could from my diet, reducing my portions by half, and cutting back on red meat and potatoes.

Some of these were easier than others to accomplish.  I don't eat too much red meat, so that was a simple one.  Ditto on potatoes.  Sodium is in so many things, so it has proven to be a constant battle.  The hardest one for me was portions.  I had been eating a normal breakfast and lunch, but many snacks a day, as well as a very large meal at night.  Generally, I have done well with my portions over the last 3 months.  I have eliminated most snacks from the day, replacing the remaining one with healthy carrot sticks.  I have also cut back my dinner meal to about 1/3rd of how much I used to eat.  I'm now eating the amount that I need to eat, not the amount that I want to eat.

It is paying off.  It is a little chilly in WI today, so I had to break out some fall/winter clothing.  I'm wearing a shirt that I wasn't able to wear this past winter.  In fact, it was so tight, that I probably shouldn't have worn it last winter, either.  I'm also wearing a pair of jeans that I haven't been able to wear for almost 4 years.  They are still a little tight in the junk, but they are certainly wearable.

Last night when I was getting ready for bed, I had my shirt off when I noticed myself in the mirror.  For the first time in years, I didn't look at my reflection and think, "Ugg - what happened to me?"  Instead, I saw my reflection and thought, "Wow.  I actually look pretty decent without my shirt on for a change."

My original goal was to eat healthier and nip this heart disease thing in the butt before it gets a chance to cause some serious damage.  That was all I really wanted.  I knew that I would lose a little weight in the process, but that wasn't something I was necessarily trying for.  It's an unintended, but amazing, side effect to get my old body back, as well as find some self esteem that I had assumed was long gone.