One evening about a decade back, my father had a heart attack. Fortunately our neighbor took him to the hospital in Chennai within 20 minutes (within the golden hour). My father received angioplasty with stem implant to cure his condition. Since then my father has been on stricter diet and medications. This was a wake up call for our entire family. I was around forty years then. Over the past decade we had significantly changed our diet and eating habits. I discuss several steps in the Step up and Care for Heart article from the past year. My wife discovered and suggested several alternate diets for us to get better. There is a lot we had learnt to help us.
Healthy Eating is very essential. Eating delicious food is also equally important. We made a few adjustments in our food cycle to help
Steps to Consider
- Be thoughtful about what we eat and drink
- Drink a LOT of water
- Less sweets and snacks.
- No potato chips or cola drinks. (occasional cheat days are okay)
- Very limited store bought fruit juices (these have added sugar)
- Limit intake of white rice (we cook white rice for kids); substituted with brown rice or Quinoa
- Be thoughtful about what we get as ingredients
- Buy organic fresh vegetables and fruits (yes grocery bills go up!)
- Purchase from mid-end (QFC or PCC in Seattle) to high-end (Whole Foods) stores to ensure freshness and quality
- Buy variety of food items to expand the taste profiles (ex: celery, lettuce, raspberries, kiwi fruit, lemongrass, etc.)
- Buy from farmers market for freshness and not for waxed look on vegetables
- Make time to cook
- Fast food is nice, but not great all the time
- Make food from scratch most times (ex: make idli maavu at home all the time, make chapati flour for fresh chapatis)
- Use variety of spices (common in south Indian cooking) – added more ginger, garlic, and herbs
- Freshly cut vegetables is better than frozen vegetables
- Be thoughtful about when we eat
- predictable eating times keeps our rhythm going better
- keep small packet of salad type food to eat instead of any processed snacks (ex: carrots, lettuce, spinach, fruits)
- Never let stomach go too hungry, that will make us want to eat more
- Never eat too full, that is not great either
- Sound body and sound mind go together
- Murali goes for regular runs for most part of the time; it allows me to get outdoor air as well as reduce stress
- Murali also does exercises daily when not running. (a bit of yoga, but not regular at it; have to improve it)
- Ranjini goes on walks and does home workouts regularly
- Ranjini practises regular meditation
- Laugh and be Merry
- Enjoy what we do, that opens doors for what may come in the future
- Find ways to laugh and be happy; all the issues in life will fade away gradually
Recent Changes
We continued with more indoor exercises during teh past two years of COVID situation. In the past 3 months, I had been part of the CEG Healthy Eating social group. Through the forum I learnt a lot more about plant based foods. The group has helped me to learn about vegetable juicing. I had tried a variety of juicers and juicers. We intend to do more juicing in the 2022 onwards.
- less commute and lower intake of coffee / tea
- regular intake of fruit smoothies and recently vegetable juices
- afternoon tea with ginger and cardamom – entire family will have this drink
- eat more salads
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