Randox Health features in Sunday Times article
One writerās first health MoT showed her cholesterol in the red. It forced a dramatic lifestyle rejig, but the hard part was making the changes stick
In February my colleague Matt Rudd sent a pleading email: āHelp! I need volunteers for a blood health panel screening. Hooked on the fact that a million people in the UK have undiagnosed T2 diabetes.ā
My Italian grandmother had diabetes. I had never had a proper health check in my life. It probably wasnāt a bad idea to have an MoT.
By my reckoning, I was in reasonable nick for a 37-year-old mother of a two and a five-year-old: I cooked from scratch, didnāt eat red meat and cycled (occasionally and slowly) to work. I banked on getting the health equivalent of a B+.
But I very much did not get a B+. The results from my Ā£65 āvitalā Randox Health check were graded byĀ a traffic light system. Ten per cent of me was, firmly, in the alarming red zone and 13 per cent was amber. The (main) issue was not pre-diabetes, butĀ high cholesterol. My total was 6.22 mmol (millimoles per litre) when it should have been less than 5.
āIām really freaking out,ā I messaged my partner, Tom. āIām going to get heart disease. Or have a stroke.ā
Closer inspection showed that my LDL, which Google informed me was the bad kind of cholesterol, the kind that clogs up the arteries and kills you, was 3.56. It should have been below 3. My iron levels were also low, again throwing up more red. And I wasnāt fit. My body mass index was in the green but I had the metabolic age of a 40-year-old. āThis is really sub-optimal,ā I added to Tom.
But it was the high cholesterol, which is usually without symptoms, that bothered me. Nearly 50 per cent of the population is estimated to have high cholesterol and it often runs in families, explains Julie Ward, a cardiac nurse at the British Health Foundation. āItās really prevalent in society, but often people, especially younger people, have no idea at all until they get checked. The key is to talk to your relatives, to your parents. Ask them if thereās a family history.ā
I peppered my trim mum with anxious messages. Why didnāt I know about this? āI told you that I had high cholesterol,ā she replied. When? āYou were 14.ā Somewhere between the Smirnoff Ice and Marlboro Lights, that particular health concern apparently hadnāt lodged in my mind.
I told my twin brother about our genetic predisposition, which he seemed relaxed about. I was anything but relaxed. I think it was the recognition that I could no longer āwing itā that struck me. Call it my coming of age. And my worries spiralled from there: I wanted to be around and healthy for my children as they grew up. Which meant that as Sir Keir Starmer said about the NHS, I had two options: reform or die.
The question was: what to do about it? Changing habits, some of which developed in childhood, is extremely challenging. I took a hard-nosed look at my lifestyle. Exercise didnāt really feature, other than the 25-minute cycle to the office and a bit of tennis. None of which, Tom pointed out, made me break into a sweat.
I ate lots of vegetables, fish and pulses, but I also ate cheese straws, crisps and pasta. At restaurants, I was all about fried and/or beige: croquetas, any kind of tempura, burrata, tuna tostadas. The bread basket. Nor did I ever contemplate the long rigmarole of putting our kids to bed without eating a hefty wedge of toasted sourdough, butter and mature cheddar.
So what could I do? The answers were predictable: exercise, cut out saturated fats (found in cakes, biscuits, pastries, processed food), eat more pulses and vegetables, and eat plenty more seeds, nuts, oily fish and avocado, all sources of good cholesterol, the kind that takes the bad away from the arteries.
Letās retest in six months, suggested Matt Rudd. Here was a competition, something I could get on board with.
āIām making radical changes,ā I told Tom as I filled our online Sainsburyās cart with butter beans, chickpeas and beetroot (none of which I much liked). āNo more bread, white pasta, potatoes, white rice. No cheese, no deep-fried food. No moreTonyās Chocolonely. And Iām going to work out two mornings a week.ā
The first major test came two days later when we went on a rare childfree trip to Venice, home of cichetti and Aperol Spritz. At 6pm, drinking white wine beside the lagoon, I was presented with a (free) plate of tiny smoked salmon white bread sandwiches and bruschette piled with salted cod.Oh tentazione!
But I had decided to go cold turkey. Any other approach and I knew my willpower would evaporate before Tom could say āstrokeā. Dinner was torture: obviously I wanted the spaghetti alle vongole but instead I made myself order cuttlefish stew (no carbs!).
Back in London, I carried on. Toast with butter and marmite was replaced with chia and flaxseed-heavy oat bircher. My mid-afternoon snack of pop chips became walnuts and almonds. A salad for the old me was 60 per cent crouton.
Dinner became something like veggie chilli, no rice, or spicy butter beans with spinach and tofu. Biscuits, cakes and puddings were taken off my menu. As was my after-supper chocolate.
Classpass, a monthly subscription that gets you access to various gym classes, also worked for me. Mainly because its policy is to fine you for missing a class. Brutal but effective.
It takes 60 days to form a habit, Tom kept telling me when I wavered: donāt give up. A dogma confirmed by Jenna Hope, a nutritionist who advises her clients on how to break and reform habits. āItās hard, but there are tricks,ā she says. One is to focus on what is making you sit down on the sofa with a tub of ice cream after work. āIf that is what you do for relaxation, you need to replace the ice cream with something else, something healthy. Donāt just say, āIām not having ice cream any moreā, thatās much harder.ā
Each person is different, she says, some need to make changes slowly. Others, like me, need to go nuclear. Either way, the key is consistency.
Competitiveness also drove me. I wanted to beat Matt Rudd. Though when he opened his desk drawer to reveal a supermarket-sized stack of Jammy Dodgers, Mini Cheddars and Haribo, I realised heād given up.
By two months in, I was feeling a hell of a lot of better. I no longer had stomach aches and I was fitter and had lost weight. Iād also developed a taste for crouton-free salad.
Take the Randox test, my editor kept asking me. But I was worried: what if, after all this effort and self-denial, my cholesterol hadnāt changed? Can you even do anything about it when it runs in your family?
Last week, I caved andtook the test. The great news was that I had reduced my metabolic age from 40 to 23. And my cholesterol? Still red but definitely leaning more pink: from a total of 6.22 it had dropped to 5.6. And the bad kind was now at the healthy level, below 3, at 2.79 mmol.
āThatās a really good level,ā said Joanna Lilburn, a scientific consultant at Randox. āAnd I wouldnāt worry about the total level because a lot of that is good cholesterol.ā
Which is what I wanted to hear. Lifestyle changes were working. Albeit slowly. What I didnāt want to hear is that cholesterol levels increase as you age. Which means that now, warned Lilburn, comes the hard part. āItās about keeping it going.ā
Read full article here: I had high cholesterol at 37. The cure was tougher than I imagined (thetimes.com)
