You Can Eat All the Green Vegetables You Want.....Gee, Thanks!

A big part of my wake-up call after suffering a stroke was having to accept the fact that I was going to have to change my diet. Fast food burgers, pizza, and the multitude of sundaes, sub sandwiches, etc, etc, that I dearly loved were now verboten if I was going to avoid diabetes.

Having high blood pressure, I also needed to eliminate as much salt from my diet as well, and I quickly became obsessed with reading food lables to try and find something that was good for me and also tasted like food instead of cardboard. Let me tell you, it don't come easy.

Nutrtion websites proclaim loudly that you can eat all the vegetables you want and still have a healthy body. Problem is, at least to me, is that I have yet to meet a carrot that tastes like french fries or a monster pizza. Even a bargain brand ice cream beats broccoli hands down, unless the green stuff is smothered with melted Velveeta.

Then there's the no-salt thing. I never realized how much of a salt-o-holic I was until I started doing without, and with the amount of sodium loaded into almost every prepared food, canned vegetable, bakery goods, etc, it's really hard to avoid overload. Even my favorite frozen pancakes hold more salt than the Dead Sea!

At the beginning of my quest to eat better, I thought the biggest challenge would be controlling calories. At 6 feet tall, I weighed 240 pounds the day I came home from the horse-pital (just some equine humor--it's close to the day of the Preakness), so to reach my ideal weight I needed to shed some 60 pounds of "relaxed muscle". After eliminating carbs (sugar and those foods easily converted to sugar in the human body), and salt, I wasn't going to have to do much calculating to control calories. In 3 weeks, I lost 8 pounds, and with what I've been eating, I don't miss food all that much. Eating to live is a great slogan, but a lousy aperitif.

All in all, I have to admit that my diet is a lot healthier today than it was before my brain exploded, but I'm hoping some lonely scientist somewhere is on the verge of discovering a pill that gives one the metabolism of a hummingbird and the blood vessels of a giraffe. You see tadpole, because of their looong necks, giraffes have very high blood presure to shoot blood all the way up to their pointy little heads.

In spite of all that pressure, they suffer no ill effects. Go Tarzan!!!!