Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Cholesterol and Running

I had my annual with my cardiologist on Friday, and that made for a very good day. It was nice to see some confirmation that all the health benefits that running, exercise, weight loss, etc... are supposed to give you are occurring.

I can only quote the doc on last year's number (after only a few months of running) but then my HDL (good cholesterol) was 139 (> 140 is desired). This time it was 54!!!! Running and 6 Fish Oil horse pills a day, apparently total cholesterol was 145 (well under the 200 maximum), and LDL (bad cholesterol) was 79. Admittedly this is with the help of Vytorin, but I've got some pretty crappy genetics to fight here.

This stuff will save your life. I got off blood pressure meds after 6 months of running. Hard to argue with that. Hard to argue with the following numbers, too.

The numbers are before I started running and losing weight ((8/27/07), and Friday (9/11/09), both with Vytorin.

target 8/27/07 9/11/09
Total Cholesterol: <200 148 145
Triglycerides: <150 146 63
HDL (good) >40 37 54
LDL(bad) <100 82 79
Risk Ratio <4.0 4.0 2.69

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