So Eat It, Just Eat It

In my youth I ate anything that wasn’t good for me. And if something was good for me, I would even try it going so far as to routinely refuse salads that would come with entrée’s at restaurants. I had to save room for some grease covered main course. And this all took place under the supervision of my parents. When I move off to college, thing would get worse. Well balanced breakfasts were replaced by Pop Tarts and the occasional glazed doughnut. On the weekends, the campus McDonalds ran a special foe the 20 piece McNugget and that would suffice for a meal or two each weekend. Plus my dorm room would constantly be stocked with Gummy Bears & M&M’s although the dorm mates ate their fair share of my stuff. Although in my defense, it wasn’t all bad, I long ago cut carbonated drinks (sans beer while in college) out of my diet and only have two cans a month

Then a couple years ago, I was getting my eyes checked when my eye doctor gave me a weird prognosis: I had high cholesterol. You may be wondering, like I did, how an eye doctor can give such a diagnosis. Apparently the body leaves cholesterol deposits in your eyes that cannot be removed. This happens to everyone and it not at all harmful. My problem, as the doctor explained, was I had the cholesterol build up of some one almost three times my age. At that moment, I sensed my own mortality for the first time.

So I went on a health kick after that. I routinely ate salads and avoided fast food except for picking up the occasional salad there. I even started reading labels for the first time in my life and even learned the difference between good cholesterol and the bad kind. I would only splurge on special occasions like holidays and cook-outs.

Then after about two months on the health kick, I saw an ad for free cholesterol screening. After hearing that my cholesterol was so high from the eye doctor, I figured I’d check out exactly how high the number was. Granted I had to be dragged there due to my overwhelming fear of needles, but free helped ease the tension a little. So after the test, I waited patiently for a couple weeks eating my salads until the results came back. And when the results finally arrived, I found something shocking: not only was my cholesterol wasn’t high, it was abnormally low for someone like me according to my mom, who happens to be a nurse. So that day, all the salads, and other health foods went in the trash and diners was catered by McDonalds for a week straight.

But once my cholesterol high went down, I realized that someday my cholesterol will rise considering my family tree is littered with such problems. So today I find myself in a happy medium between my eating habits of my youth and the months I was a health nut.

That leads me to today (wow, that took a while, but anyways). Recently I have had some digestive problems and realized that I needed to get more food with antioxidants. Last week, as I was at the grocery store, there was just happened to be a display of green tea with antioxidants. Ask and you shall receive. So I picked up a box. The only problem is I’ve never drunk tea before, nor have really been around people who drank it aside from ice tea. So not knowing any better, I took the tea bag and put it in a tall class of water and let it soak for a couple minutes. And when I drank the tea, it basically tasted like water. I was later told that you are supposed to use hot water unlike the strait from the refrigerator like did. It would have been nice had they put the intrusions on the box. (Granted upon further inspection, there were, indeed, intrusions on the box. What can I say, I’m a dude.) So on the second try the other night, I went ahead and boiled some water and poured it over the bag. But there is one major problem with that, It’s (expletive deleted) hot. It was an hour before it was cool enough to drink. Then when I drank it, I started to sweat profusely and had a feeling I hadn’t felt since the last Santana concert I attended. I even ended up chasing the green tea with a can of Dr. Pepper. And that lasted all night as I woke up a few times in a puddle of sweat multiples time.

So the moral to this story is 1) never trust your eye doctor when he gives you his diagnosis of your cholesterol level and 2) to all the kiddies out there, never grow old. Seriously, where Ponce De Leon when you need him?