As a recent post indicated, I have been doing a lot of reading around health these last few years. I have primarily concentrated on literature pertaining to metabolic health and literature pertaining to the microbiome. This is all in addition to practising a healthy diet and lifestyle. The more I read, the more I became interested in learning about my own health markers beneath the visible or easily discoverable. This is mainly due to knowing I have a sweet tooth, knowing that when I do gain weight it is largely around my abdomen, and learning about the phenomenon of TOFI: thin on the outside, fat on the inside. As the health tests you can get on the NHS are sorely limited, I recently went private to get some more thorough tests through Medichecks. In particular, I was very interested in learning about my HDL:Triglycerides ratio as a more meaningful cholesterol test, and,
Many things in life baffle me. Things like: why do people participate in a global capitalist system doing shit jobs they hate for a system which does not benefit them? Why do so many people wear such ugly shoes? Why are there no truly revolutionary people living in the UK? Why do so many women look like drag queens nowadays? Why does no-one care about (data) privacy? All baffling stuff. However, the Truly Baffling Thing which has occupied my thoughts most frequently over the last two years is: why, in the midst of a global pandemic which is disproportionately affecting the metabolically unhealthy, are people not making an effort to get healthy? Genuinely and truly baffling. It’s almost like people want to be ill and/or at risk.
I recently watched this fascinating lecture on the relationship between Vitamin D deficiency and severe Covid-19 and thought it well worth sharing. I am a very strong proponent for supplementing your diet with Vitamin D and have been doing so since 2010. In the UK, the guidance is that you should do so between late autumn to early spring if you are white, and all year round if you are black or Asian (i.e. have melanated skin). I currently supplement during the winter with 3 x 1000iu D3 tablets a day, spread over three meals, although when I lived in Scotland, I actually took 6 x 1000iu tablets a day. I have tried various different brands and definitely notice a difference between the cheapo brands and the better ones, and now use Solgar. I say notice a difference because the reason I started taking Vitamin D was to help with
As I have said elsewhere, and as should be evident from the fact that I am also a Personal Trainer, I care very much about my health and have approached it proactively since I was young. Thankfully, I seem to have some kind of innate orientation towards wellness and have always understood that to be well meant to actively work towards health in a continuous sense. Wellness and health have always been a journey for me, something I seek, and in seeking, largely achieve. In large part I think this orientation is because I have several chronic diseases – asthma, a very serious and rare form of eczema, and hay fever – which modern medicine can’t really do anything about. As such, I have had to learn how to minimise and control the symptoms of the diseases I am forced to live with. I have tried to do this, as much