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.
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I am worried about my heart.
I'm in a well compensated but demanding phase of my career. A promotion is on the cards, but hours are long. I have a chip on my shoulder, so the promotion is as much about career advancement as much as proving something to myself. It has taken a toll on my body. My weight has gone past 200 lbs and stayed above 200. Workouts, sleep and diet are all suffering. I don't like it.
I have a benign heart condition (Mitral valve prolapse) and South-Asian fat distribution puts me at elevated risk of heart disease. Then last year, my cholesterol went past the normal range. I've ignored(with her knowledge) my doctor's precautionary recommendation to use statins. The idea of a 30 yr. old being on permanent medication scares me.
For a bit, I put health first, and it worked. I lost 10 pounds and reached solid conditioning. Since then, my weight & conditioning have suffered as work has piled up. I have delayed my most recent blood test because I am worried the numbers spell disaster for me. Not a good look.
That brings me to last week. I have felt some tightness in my chest. Now, the location switches between the left and right side, so I'm sure it's some combination anxiety (too much coffee) and bad sleep & diet induced digestion issues.
But it scared the living shit out of me. Man, what am I doing ? I'm a grown man. I worked this hard to get to enjoy life and escape my 3rd world hell hole. I have my whole life in front of me. Need to get my priorities straight.
Oof. For what it's worth, I wouldn't jump from "twinges of pain in my chest" to "oh god I've got a cardiac problem" given your background and age, and it's a very good thing you know it's most likely due to anxiety and stress.
That out of the way, I do not think there is anything wrong with being a 30 yo on permanent medication. You need to eat food and drink water anyway, a small pill or two has... negligible effects on your QOL, and the main reason you end up wanting/needing to take one is to improve or at least maintain your health. If you live long enough, you'll acquire a list of mandatory medication, though at that point it's more likely to be your doctors headache than yours.
Statins are not bad drugs. I am not a cardiologist, but I strongly suspect you'd benefit from taking them, and apparently your doctor agrees too. You shouldn't expect side effects more significant than muscle aches for a few days, and they're cheap. Go for them. They have my endorsement, and you can stop if you can't tolerate them.
Ffs, I'm getting a migraine while typing this. There's a hole in my vision. It's not fair to blame you, so I'm joking when I say that you've made this more of my headache than your own. I'm not sure which one of us has it worse, what I'd give to be 25 and free of anything but ADHD and depression (sad haha).
Then there's the GLP-1 stuff. Wrangle yourself some semaglutide or the new stuff, they'll keep your weight down, help with the cholesterol too indirectly, and just keep you in better health overall.
I quickly looked up statin side effects, and I know they tend to exaggerate in a lawsuit-happy society, but liver damage, muscle damage and type 2 diabetes do not sound like nothing. Most of currently available medicine are kind of blunt tools, which mess with many extremely complex chemical processes in the body, some of which may be beneficial for us, but other may be not. So I think being careful about messing with one's body chemistry is a prudent approach. Sometimes you don't have a choice - if somebody has cancer, mediterranean diet and exercise is not going to save them, but modern drugs might. But there are costs to that. I think we should not be dismissing those costs lightly.
There are many types of statin. Japan certifies I believe six, one of which is rosuvastatin, which I have been taking (one small pill a night) for about three years, due to elevated serum cholesterol. The standard dose in the US is about 5-10mg.
My pill is 2mg, well on the low side. But the lowered serum cholesterol levels are clear. I have never had any side effects that I noticed. Zero. My HbA1c is and has always been within healthy zones. My liver values (AST/ALT, bilirubin, albumin) are within healthy zones and haven't changed in any significant way since I began keeping close records of yearly health checks (about 12 years).
I have also started drinking 5mg of psyllium husk dissolved in water twice a day, though only for about a month and that's not long enough to see the possible effects (at least in terms of cholesterol levels, the digestive effects were pretty clear almost immediately.)
I get that people are wary of drugs. I personally have doubts about semaglutide, which has not had the long-term testing of statins. (roughly forty years for statins with hundreds of randomized controlled trials and meta analyses. Less than 10 years for GLP receptor 1 agonists like semaglutide). But statins are among the most studied of drugs. This doesn't guarantee complete safety for everyone, but then neither is aspirin safe for everyone.
The good news is that low doses to begin with can do a lot of work toward detection of side effects, if they're going to occur.
I am not a medical doctor.
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