Less Salt, Less Caffeine, Less Me

My history of weight loss and gain tracks very closely with how bad my depression has gotten. When I am really suffering from depression, my weight soars — I do not watch what I eat and predictably I do not move around a lot. I got down to 190 in the winter of 2022 after my heart attack and extensive cardiac rehab, but slowly it built back up until I was around 240 fairly consistently. Darn you, depression![spacer height=”20px”]This year I was getting a lot of throbbing unpleasant headaches of a type I wasn’t really used to (and I know my headaches). I decided to cut out caffeine to see if that helped (and I am still off caffeine) and while that did help some, my blood pressure was still consistently a lot higher than I wanted it to be.So I said to myself, “well, I’ve been telling myself that I don’t get that much sodium, but maybe I’m lying to myself.” I began tracking my sodium intake very carefully and trying to really limit it — cardiologists told me to aim for 2000 mg or less (less than the RDA for normal adults). I decided to aim more for 1400 mg per day to see what happened.[spacer height=”20px”]Three things happened: first, my BP dropped like a rock to a lovely 110 over 70 (sometimes a bit lower), second, those throbbing headaches went away, and third, I began losing weight. It turns out that paying attention to what you put into your body can have benefits in multiple ways. If you try not to run up your sodium totals, it turns out that you also wind up eating less food in the first place.[spacer height=”20px”]Today was the first day I scored under 220 in quite a while. I was surprised when I stood on the scale and got my numbers this morning, as we had a picnic this weekend and I certainly didn’t expect to have dropped since Friday. Be that as it may, I’m at 219.2 — which is all the more impressive to me since I was at 242 on May 3. And I did all this without Wegovy and without any significant increase in exercise. (I plead a very busy schedule and procrastination.)