From the Editor’s Desk: Healthy (Premium)

I’ve spent a lot of time at the doctor lately. There’s nothing wrong per se, just some overdue check-ups and vaccinations, and whatnot. But I also wanted to use this time to be proactive about my health and get ahead of a few things. And while I suspect not many people try to drag out their doctor appointments, I recently found myself doing just that.

Long story short, I’ve been overweight for most of my adult life, and, like many, I’ve tried different things over the years to fix that. More specifically, my blood pressure, (bad) cholesterol, and glucose levels have been at least a little bit high for over 20 years. And while I’m sure they’ve gone up and down over time, I was surprised to discover that each was down in my most recent tests, as it’s not like I’ve been particularly good about eating lately.

Less surprisingly, health care in my country is broken. I think I told the story about one of my previous doctor’s visits after the height of the pandemic when I told her that I was concerned about all the eating and drinking we had been doing to cope with the stress. Don’t worry about it, she told me, as everyone was behaving similarly. That’s not what I want to hear from a doctor.

And so it is perhaps not surprising that I am being seen by a different person now. And after doing a full blood work panel and going over the results with this new physician, I noticed something was missing from the otherwise rather complete set of tests. There was no glucose measurement. So I asked about that, and she brought in a nurse to prick my finger and run the test on the spot. And as noted, it was a little bit high but lower than the previous year.

Most people would likely have accepted that as a victory—and perhaps even stopped for a celebratory ice cream on the way home from the appointment—but I don’t like ice cream and, more to the point, I had an ulterior motive. I wanted to get a continuous glucose monitor so that I could see which food spiked my blood sugar the most so that I could avoid those foods. (I was reminded of this because Microsoft’s Scott Hanselman, a diabetic, was wearing one during his Build 2023 sessions. I’ve been meaning to try one for a while.)

Did I mention that health care is broken in my country?

Well, I can’t get one: they’re expensive and I don’t have pre-diabetes or diabetes, so my insurance won’t cover it. She agreed with my argument that it’s healthier and smarter to be preventative with this kind of thing, but that’s not the system. And so I was told that I could get an over-the-counter glucose test system, which involves a lot of tiny needles and test strips, and pricking yourself in the finger throughout the day. It’s not great, but in the interest of science—or, my own health, I guess—I’ve been trying to keep up with it. There are no surprises yet—things like bagels are very bad, things like steak not so much—and now my fingertips hurt.

I had other concerns that delayed my doctor getting to her next patient. I use a CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machine at night to combat my horrific sleep apnea, and at some point I seemed to drop out of the system, meaning that my prescription was no longer valid. So I would have to take another sleep test, which seems unnecessary to me. But whatever, I just need to get it done and so I went to schedule it. And was told that the next available appointment was at the very end of August. Again, broken.

And so l was left to my own devices, as we are in this country, and I realized that my health was my responsibility, and only my responsibility. And that left to the capable cost-cutters at my insurance company, I would need to slide into deep stages of diabetes, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure before they would deign to help me in the slightest. And that meant that I was going to have to fall back on the years of reading that I’d done with regards to healthcare and losing weight and, better still, my wife’s experience, as she speaks to doctors and people who have undergone their own health turnarounds and then writes about it for various publications.

I was always leery of giving advice in this area for all the obvious reasons, but now I’m even more worried about doing more than explaining what it is that I’ve done or am doing. But I will say this: my big learning in this area is that everyone is different and that any one individual’s method for losing weight or whatever will not necessarily work for others. This kind of inconsistency is problematic in our industry, but it’s a much bigger issue when it comes to health because you don’t want to speak confidently about the one thing that worked for you. It could harm others or worse.

This was my rationale for getting a continuous glucose monitor, of course: there may be certain foods that don’t impact, say, my wife all that much, but really spike my blood sugar. The reverse could also be true, I guess. But in the end, I decided that I need to move more towards a healthy low-carb diet with no processed foods and continue my current practice of intermittent fasting by which I skip breakfast on most days. (I also walk for 40 minutes every morning and go to the gym 4-5 times per week.)

I did this back in 2017 and lost a lot of weight before plateauing, as one does. And then I was pretty good for a while and the pandemic happened, and here we are. The difference this time is that I’m going to do what I should have done then and pay attention to the data. That is, in 2017, I was mainly going for feeling better about myself and not worrying about the numbers. This time, I will be weighing myself and watching my blood sugar over time.

To be clear, that’s not advice, it’s just what I’m doing. The only advice I feel comfortable giving others here is to be proactive with your health and figure out what works for you. And the best way you can know that is to find out what’s really happening in your body and to do so before something goes horribly wrong.

And that’s just the physical. The other side of this coin, so to speak, is mental health. I wrote before that I’m part of what I think of as the last “suck it up” generation, and so I’ve gone into this part of my care a lot more tentatively. But thanks to some help from my wife, my daughter, and a few friends, I’m finally taking steps to address what I now know is ADHD and try to turn that around too.

But it’s hard to overcome that generational thing.

“We’re always working on me,” comedian Bill Burr once joked on this topic. “I’m like one of those buildings that just has scaffolding around it for, like, six straight years. ‘Are they ever going to finish that thing? Is that some sort of insurance job?’”

This is exactly right. And yet what can you do? Just keep plugging away.