By Brett Yokley
In my 40 years as a personal trainer I have always conducted a personal fitness assessment on all of my personal training clients prior to training them. In my assessment there is a section on “medical history” which is vital to understand the individuals overall picture. The assessment covers whether or not they are taking medication for:
· Blood pressure
· Cholesterol
· Heart meds
· Pre-diabetes or type II diabetes
· Other meds for pre-existing conditions
The one thing that that I have seen in all my assessments is that at least 60% or more of the people over40 and 50 are indicating they are on some kind of statin drug to help lower their cholesterol levels.
Statins are a prescribed by doctors to help lower cholesterol levels in the blood. This can help prevent the possibilities of heart attacks and stroke. Studies show that statins can help reduce the risk of heart attack, stroke, and even death from heart disease by 25% to 35%. Statins can also help to reduce the chances of recurring strokes or heart attacks by 40%.
Ronnie’s Story –
Ronnie is a personal training client of mine for the past 13 years. Yeah, I know... 13 years is a heck of a long time! Back in approximately 2007 Ronnie came in and was freaked out – his Doctor had just told him his cholesterol was in the 220 range. He had a prescription for a statin drug but he said he said there was a lot of “bad side effects” and he was freaked out about taking statins.
I told Ronnie about red yeast rice and that a constituent of red yeast rice contains monacolin K which is lovastatin and this is where the drug companies isolated the monacolin K and reproduced it into a drug which they can patent and sell.
Ronnie bought a few bottles of red yeast rice capsules, started taking them and doing cardio exercise 20 minutes 5x per week (100 minutes per week). 3 months later he went back and did his labs and his next Dr. visit the Dr. told him his cholesterol was down to 181! The Dr. was pretty happy and said “I told you those statins would work”, when Ronnie told him he never filled the script for the statins instead he took the red yeast rice and did moderate cardio exercise 5x per week. The Dr. was pretty surprised.
Now I’m not saying quit your statins and go on red yeast rice, I’m just telling you what one of my clients chose to do instead of automatically start statins and it worked for him.
Obviously in a perfect world we all would exercise regularly, eat a sensible somewhat healthy diet and keep our weight down to a healthy level, then the need for all the meds for blood pressure, cholesterol and others would be greatly reduced. After all we are responsible for our own health and we can’t blame anyone but ourselves when things start going bad with our health.
I do get a lot of feedback from my Betterbodies clients that are sticking to my programs and they tell me that over a period of time they not only lost a lot of weight but their Dr. has also lowered their dosage of blood pressure meds and cholesterol meds. I love hearing this from online clients and clients I train personally in my gym. It legitimizes what I do for a living and makes me feel like I’m making a difference.
Whatever you do, start an exercise program, include lifting weights to exercise your muscle and do some cardio training (walking 15-20 minutes is fine) for your heart health. Start eating a lower calorie diet that contains a higher amount of protein.
If you want to get started on a personalized weight loss program call us and find out how easy we make it to get started. It would my pleasure to help you achieve your weight loss and fitness goals.
Brett Yokley
Certified Personal Trainer
Certified Nutrition Specialist.
Owner/BetterBodies Fitness Personal Training Gym.
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