Get­ting old­er (not old) means fac­ing moments of truth about health deci­sions made ear­li­er in life. What’s going on now with metab­o­lism, bones, and health may be the result of deci­sions made dur­ing the teen years, when plan­ning for the future seemed so far off!

Let’s look at my metab­o­lism. I assumed that it was pret­ty high – I am warm most of the time, I work on mus­cle build­ing at the gym, and I am a life­long fid­geter. What a sur­prise when I mea­sured my rest­ing meta­bol­ic rate (RMR), i.e., calo­rie burn­ing, using the pret­ty nifty BodyGem.  My RMR was at the low­est end of the nor­mal range for some­one of my age and size. Where did I mess up? Los­ing too much weight too quick­ly in and after col­lege, and caus­ing my metab­o­lism to drop? Main­tain­ing a body weight that is too low for where my body wants to be? Not build­ing more mus­cle when I was younger, before the inevitable post-menopausal mus­cle melt set in? I don’t know the answer, but it’s clear that I need to keep exer­cis­ing and tak­ing the neighbor’s dog for walks every day to be able to eat enough food for a bal­anced diet.

Anoth­er sur­prise was the result of my recent bone den­si­ty test­ing. My mom has osteo­poro­sis so I’ve been tak­ing cal­ci­um and vit­a­min D sup­ple­ments for the past sev­er­al years. My blood work looks good and I’m healthy. But I have low bone den­si­ty in my spine. The only expla­na­tion my doc­tor and I could come up with is that I didn’t get enough cal­ci­um to build up my body’s stores dur­ing the all-impor­tant teen years. Now, at an age when the body nat­u­ral­ly takes cal­ci­um from bones, I have too lit­tle on deposit and have over­drawn my cal­ci­um account. Short of tak­ing med­ica­tions that help rebuild bone, there’s no turn­ing back. Still, I have at least 2 cups of milk every day, along with one of my favorite foods that hap­pens to be high in cal­ci­um, cheese. And it turns out that cheese might not affect blood cho­les­terol, which is great news! Can’t wait to pick out some cheese from a favorite retail­er, DeCi­c­co and Sons in Mill­wood.

 

And now, my heart health. Heart dis­ease runs in the fam­i­ly so I do as much as pos­si­ble to keep my car­dio­vas­cu­lar sys­tem in good shape – main­tain a healthy weight, exer­cise, avoid smok­ing, eat health­ful­ly. What I haven’t been doing is tak­ing a fish oil or omega‑3 sup­ple­ment. Omega-3s ben­e­fit heart health by help­ing reduce serum triglyc­erides, main­tain func­tion of the arter­ies and heart mus­cle, and con­trol inflam­ma­tion. And sure enough, my blood omega‑3 index is in the “needs improve­ment” range. So it’s time to start. Because I am very ner­vous about the infa­mous “fish burps” asso­ci­at­ed with omega-3-rich fish oil sup­ple­ments, I’ll be try­ing both fish oil and an algae-based omega‑3 prod­uct to see which one gets along best with my stom­ach.