Hello all
 

Hi, i am new and happy to be here and hopeful it will be a good place.

Retired a year or so ago and got a complete physical with results that were kind of shocking to me. Doc wanted to put me on statins and when i asked about diet and exercise changes he said maybe if you were 20 years younger. That kind of was a challenge to me. Over the course of the next year i got all the ‘bad’ stuff down towell in normal ranges. I also decided to make some changes in nutrition and began exercising again regularly. I used to run marathons, triathlons, biathlons, etc and have started running short foot races again. Its enjoyable for me.

I did a lot of studying about heart disease, nutrition, and blood lipids and have neen ‘tweaking’ my nutrition plan and believe that low carb is, for me, the way to go.

I guess you could say i did ‘computer work’ for a living working on , for a time quantum computers. Very cool , oh they run at -458f.

I race cars for a hobby but am currently sidelines while i recover from surgeryon my right arm.

Thanks for having me.

Welcome to a happy low carb place.
There's such a lot of good information and anecdotes here that I'm sure you'll enjoy the support. I know I have :)

Hello Quantum,
You have found a good place for LC and General health information, their are a number of sub-forums including one on cholesterol and heart disease. http://forum.lowcarber.org/forumdisplay.php?f=48
Congratulations, you are already at a healthy BMI of 23. You may want to work on strength or other NSV rather than a goal that is underweight, especially if recovering from surgery. All the best,

Welcome Quantum.

Wow, looks like you've already figured things out! Bet your determination to get your "health numbers" into a good range without medication - and your success at doing so - really surprised your doctor! Maybe he/she won't be quite so quick to reach for the Rx pad the next time some retired person comes in who needs to lose a few pounds and get cholesterol, BP, and BG under control. We can hope! :D

Anyway, congrats on getting down to a very healthy weight for a 5'9" man. I'm guessing/hoping the 120 that you currently show as a "goal weight" is a typo as that would put you very much in the severely underweight category! 140 to 150 would make sense. 120 simply doesn't.

Healthy men do NOT get their bodyfat levels down to 12% or lower by starving themselves into skeletons. They do it by replacing bodyfat with muscle. Muscle is more dense than fat so, as you do that, you may actually see a very slight right in your weight. Not a bad thing if you're adding muscle mass and getting rid of fat mass.

Please don't take offense. You'll find we are all about GOOD health here. Members - at least those of us who've been around a while - do NOT promote or encourage starvation, anorexia, binge eating or any other eating disorder.... so when we see someone who seems to be setting unrealistically low goal weights, we tend to call them out on it, albeit as gently as possible. :)

Thanks for your good thoughts
 

Hi, first no offense taken. You seem real and genuine! I appreciate all good discussions and thoughts.

All good thoughts on bodyfat. I have it in the back of my crazy head that i would like to run one more marathon and am thinking that will be easier on my old bones and connective tissue with less weight.

Ive become convinced that carbs are really at the root cause many of the ills of modern society and am trying to really limit mine. I know this sounds like a huge overstatement on my part

Muscle has a role to play in shock absorption etc. Bones and cartilage aren't meant to drag you around on their own. Your stated stats and body fat given for each level suggests a loss of about 37 pounds of lean mass.

Welcome!!

I wish more patients had second thoughts about popping a pill to solve what is the result of poor nutrition and low levels of exercise.

I admire your enthusiasm for the marathon. Boston Marathon starting line is not far from here. My BIL photographs the event every year.

I personally am not a fan of repetative motions and hard core sports.

My mother at 80-something does a workout that builds muscle and core strength which gave her the independence to drive 700 miles round trip every 3 weeks when she needed cancer treatment..... and her dad in his early 90's was independent and driving his friends around until the end.

Welcome to the forum, lots of knowledgeable people here.

Ms arielle,
Thanks for the welcome. Boston is where i was born and raised actually, fun area. I really didnt know anything about statins or much about lipids for that matter but i thought it best to educate myself about them, i.e. statins, and lipids in geneal before taking one. The more i learned, the worse they sounded. I have come to believe that statins are indicated for middle aged males who have had a cardiac event . That is just my conclusion. Just describing ehat i discovered, not prescribing for anyone else😀

Your mom is most impressive, hopefully you got some of here genes!

Welcome, Quantum! I'm glad you're here. I'm enjoying your openness, and how you think, and how you put your thoughts into action. Can't wait for you to start a journal, to see more of how you do your plan and your life.

Meg

Melesane,
Thanks for your good words. A journal...hmm had not thought about that. Will have yo ponder that.

Welcome, and YOU RACE CARS??? I so want to leave my IT job to do something with cars sooooooooo bad, it's my passion. I tune and build cars and trucks. I hope you stick to it and you will do well. GL

Racing and low carb
 

Hi, yes i do race cars and if it intrigues you perhaps you should try it out. Depending on where you are most track have what are called track days where you can sort of dip your toe in the water before diving in.

Having said that most tracks are not what i would call low-carb health food mecca’s so plan ahead regarding food and drinks.

Thank you.

Quantum and Nrracing, since y'all have discovered a shared interest in race cars, I thought you might want to know that this forum has a feature that allows you to send private messages to other members who've set up their profiles to accept them. (It sometimes takes new members quite a while to find this feature!)

To send a private message, just navigate to any message posted by the person you want to converse with, click on their name at the top of their message, and a drop down menu will drop with the option of sending a private message. They will get an email notice letting them know they have a private message waiting for them on the forum.

Unless you support the forum by paying dues, I think you're limited to something like 10 or 15 private messages in your forum mailbox... but that's plenty to decide if you have enough in common to bother exchanging personal email addresses and take the chat entirely off-line.

Thanks bevangel, i worried it was getting off-topic. Thanks again for pointing that out.