When I started changing my diet a few weeks ago, I didn’t get on the scale because at that point, I had no idea what God had in store for me. I was changing it because in all honesty, I was feeling little nagging chest pains. As much as you want to pretend they’ll go away, you know darned well they will not, so I had to start changing my diet. I have no clue what I weighed at that time, either.

After I got “the call”, I stepped on my scale that measures body fat as well as weight; it tipped at 195.5 and 47% body fat. I’m not proud of to reveal this, either. Nine days into the diet, I have lost five pounds and I’m exercising with steady walking of five miles a day. The best laid plans of men sometimes have plans of their own and I have this nasty habit of forgetting that aspect of life.

Three days ago, I started to feel a minor pain in my left shin and I thought I could walk it off. The pain came on after I tried jogging a little bit in an attempt to shave off a little bit of time on my 1.5 hour walk. We’re all told heat and ice will do wonders for the pain; I wrapped it up in an electric heating pad and sat the walk out. Wanting to speed the healing process, I had also been soaking the ankle water as hot as I could stand. Nothing has worked to my satisfaction, so I decided to make a short hobble to the grocery store and purchase an ace bandage and some food.

A few days back I decided to make another change in my diet – I wanted to consume more raw foods. I got a taste for celery, baby carrot sticks, and small tomatoes; I wanted more than the processed foods I was eating. What was on the menu before? I tried to make it healthy with my budget: ramen noodles, Starkist albacore tuna, and Campbell ’s “healthy request” tomato soup. Recently I had cut out the cheerios and corn flakes because they were too carbohydrate intesnsive and switched to old fashioned long cooking oats and brown sugar. Even now, I’ve pushed the brown sugar aside and substituted it for pure honey, which is less processed.

Wandering through the grocery store, I decided to implement some changes in my diet. I decided to pass on canned tuna and opt for Gorton’s salmon fillets since economically they had less salt and cost about the same per fillet. Most appliances are packed up and ready for a move, but I found a stainless steel steamer I forgot I had in the bottom of the kitchen gadgets drawer. This gave me a healthy way to cook the fish and steam a cup of vegetables at the same time. I do have a big food steamer, but for a few veggies and a fillet of fish, it’s impractical.

I also gave up on the ramen noodles and Campbell ’s tomato soup for whatever reason; it was more of a taste buds and salt issue. One day I happened to notice I had figured the salt content wrong in both products. Ramen noodles had a whopping 1520 mg of sodium, so I started to think about how I could cut the salt down. There were insulated paper coffee cups in my cabinet with the two holes in the lid, which became what I thought was a good option: I used half the seasoning packet, cooked it to tenderness, and then put the lid on and used the hole to drain away the excess salt and fat. If anything, it was no longer swimming in salt. The Campbell ’s soup I also made a mistake by reading there was only 470 mg of sodium, but not noticing each can contained 2.5 servings, not two. The sodium went from 470 mg to 588 mg per 12-ounce cup, which is a lot of salt.

I made another mistake a few days ago that cost me some ground: Starkist albacore tuna has 250 mg of salt per serving, and I was ok with that before I realized I didn’t add the salt correctly. The can of tuna contains 2.5 servings, and the can normally contains 4 ounces of tuna and 2 ounces of vegetable broth, so they call it 6 ounces. Most people wouldn’t look at a 4-ounce can of tuna and think to be within the recommended portion, it would mean (2) 1.5-ounce portions and (1) 1 ounce portion. Most diets recommend at least 2 ounces of chicken or four ounces of fish (four times a day in a mini meal format) to be within an acceptable protein range that won’t set you up to fail from starvation. If you do the math correctly, a can of tuna which seems like it would be a healthy alternative, has 625 mg of salt – that’s almost as much as the ramen soup with only half the packet, and breezes past the “healthy request” tomato soup.

Sitting around and recovering from my walk/jog a few days ago, I happened to be watching the local PBS station. They had a diet guru on TV and I hadn’t thought too much about what I was watching because I was tired, but he said something that made me stop and think: “Are you getting high empty calories from any processed food you’re eating? Cut them out and replace them with raw foods and you’ll get more bang for your buck.” I’ve heard this many times, but this time I remembered something I had forgotten: it’s hard to overeat on carrots and celery because you feel full too fast.

I’d been thinking about the ramen noodles for a few days because I didn’t like the fact I was consuming 380 calories on this meal. I had mentally budgeted myself to be somewhere in the range of 800 to 1000 calories per day, and if I stuck to the low end of 800, nearly half of my “calorie budget” was spent on this meal. I didn’t like that thought at all because it meant I would be starving later on or exceeding the calories, so I wanted to replace it and use the ramen noodles as an occasional option.

All those thoughts received not a gentle wake up call, but a plowing over like a train. Going back to the grocery store, I happened to be looking for a nutrient in the vitamin aisle, which they didn’t have. As I searched the shelves, I saw a little old man sit down near me and the sounds of clicking and an electrical motor being used. I hadn’t noticed it before, but there was a free blood pressure machine and I decided I should at least have some idea where I was on the scale.

I figured my blood pressure was going to be a little high since I hadn’t been taking care of myself prior to this point. Sitting down, I forced my sleeve up and slid my arm down into the mechanical cuff. The last time I had checked my blood pressure was a few years ago, and I remember the systolic number was 93, which wasn’t that great, but it wasn’t classified as high blood pressure (according to the doctor who wrote me up, I had high blood pressure over “90”). Quietly waiting as the machine did its thing, I noticed the “high blood pressure” chart on the label in front of me was at 140 on the systolic, and that’s as high as the chart went. The cuff hissed as it released and then the moment of truth flashed on the screen: systolic was 152 and diastolic read out at 101.

How high my pressure was, I didn’t know, but I’d never seen my pressure that high before. Was I five minutes away from a stroke and a heart attack since I passed the highest marker on the machine, and did it automatically dial 911 with a pressure like mine? One can’t help but be full of questions, and even if the machine wasn’t 100% accurate, I knew even if it was off by 10%, my readings were still too high.

Walking through the door, I called my friend Laurie and asked for her advice. I thought I was doing the right things with vitamins, diet, and exercise, but now I wasn’t sure. She has been out of the cardiology field for a while, and although she said I was doing the right things, it might be a temporary spike in blood pressure that sometimes happens with the start of an exercise program. This was something I hadn’t heard before, but it was nice to know it might be a partial contributor.

Once I hung up the phone, I sat down and started to pen a quick email to another friend, elaborating on my dieting mistakes with the sodium monster that I thought I had in check. It wasn’t until I started to think about my current diet during this email that I decided to find out what the daily recommendation for sodium intake was, and it turned out to be 2400 mg a day, but they were actually recommending 2000 mg for most people. I started to add up my mistakes and realized even with cutting out half the salt in the ramen noodles, I was still registering 2600 mg of salt. This is when it hit home I wasn’t as diet and salt savvy as I believed I was.

This realization scared me enough to change a few more behaviors. I went into the kitchen and started stripping it bare of salty foods. All unopened food went into plastic grocery sacks with the full intention of giving it to a friend’s kids who could “afford” to burn off the high salt by simply breathing. In the end, I filled up eleven sacks. Where did I find the salt?

• Salad dressings, pickles, mustard, seasonings, packaged seasonings (taco, chili, stews), marinades, barbeque sauce, hot sauce, hot dog relish, mayonnaise, gravies, dip mixes, bullion cubes, shaker style seasonings, bread crumb mixes
• Hush puppies and corn bread mixes
• Cocoa mixes
• Canned beans, canned chili, canned diced tomatoes, canned tomato sauce (the last two had on the label front “no salt added”).
• Packaged microwave rice, boxed and bagged rice mixes
• Cake mixes, cake frostings, peanut butter cookie mixes
• Soups, canned tuna, oriental noodles, biscuit mixes

This isn’t a complete list of what I bagged up, but it’s enough to get you thinking about what’s inside your cabinets and where the salt is lurking. In the case of one of the salad dressings, for example, one tablespoon had a whopping 600 mg of sodium. The easy mac and cheese microwavable bowls that gives you a small snack size has over 660 mg of salt – that’s a huge amount for a kid or adult to ingest! The microwavable rice weighed in at almost 1000 mg for a half a cup serving size. Also watch soft drinks, which often are loaded with salt and sugar.

The other good thing about cleaning out the cabinets and refrigerator is that I know there will be no unacceptable foods entering my mouth and nothing to sabotage the diet. Not having a vehicle means I have to walk to the store a couple of times a week, and it means I don’t run out for fast food or sweet snacks on a whim. I think about not only about the food I’m choosing, but the amount of space in the backpack as well as the weight I’ll have to carry home.

I may not have been able to control my dieting before, but now I have no choice but to do the right things and eat properly. It’s certainly not practical or even an option for a family with kids, but at least watching what actually comes into your house is achievable.

Here’s one tip that can help in ridding your food of salt: place the food in a bowl of water and rinse it a few times, then let it set for a half an hour. Salt “holds” water in the body, and since it’s naturally drawn to water, it’s drawn out of the food.

Of course this won’t work for soups, but I find with packaged veggies that have added salt, and even fish fillets, it works pretty well. I also give it a hand by steaming the fish and veggies, knowing the dripping water will carry away some measure of sodium. If you choose canned tuna, you can try and rinse the excess salt out, but I will warn you the flavor is a bit “lacking” after this. I’ve tried the lower sodium options, and they were awful in my opinion, but they might taste great to you.

If you don’t like trying to find all the segments of this series, you can locate the links to them here and they will return you the exact spot on the socyberty.com site.

quazen.com articles by this writer can be found here

socyberty.com articles can be located here

relijournal.com articles are here

picable.com photographic images are here