The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A friend of a friend works Rhythm health, which does mail-in blood tests, and I got a free test last week from her. Despite nearly passing out while collecting blood from myself (this is the #1 reason I am not a medical doctor), I managed to do the collection successfully, and got my results back on Sunday. Everything looked fine or even good except for two things.
1). Low HDL. This has been a problem for the past few years, and I think it is because I don't eat any dietary cholesterol because I'm basically vegan other than eating a small amount of fish and shellfish. I had a long discussion with my boss about this, and our conclusion is that this isn't really a problem. HDL is a cholesterol scavenger that brings back extra cholesterol from tissues to the liver. My tissues probably need all the cholesterol they have (/synthesize it through the squalene pathway) so that would explain why my HDL is low.
2). High estrogen. This one was more concerning to me. My estrogen was 38 pg/dL (normal is 20-30). I have two theories about this. Firstly, I eat quite a bit of soy, so the test could be picking up phytoestrogens from that, artificially inflating the reading. The second is that I unfortunately have gained a bit of fat since 2023, which could also be increasing the amount of estrogen in my body. In either case, I'm going to bring it up with my PCP during my visit next Friday.
N=1, but I've been a vegan for 27 years and my HDL has been around 90 mg/dl for as long as I have records for it.
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