Grocery Store Tour

Okay, so I guess it's been a little while since I last posted.  I've been a little busy trying to get into the driver's seat myself as a patient.  In order to try to achieve a healthier weight, and a cheaper life insurance premium, I've been running (a lot) and trying to improve my diet.  I've also been tracking my weight a lot more closely using my Withings Scale and using a Stiiv pedometer.

But despite running 4 marathons, and thinking I had improved my diet, I still had a BMI of 27 and my fitness age was greater than my chronological age.

So tonight I decided to really try address the final frontier so that the six pack that I know is there and is dying to show itself can hopefully land me that elusive water slide modeling contract I have long dreamed of.  That's another way of saying that I went around the grocery store with a registered dietician who gave me some helpful feedback on the food choices that I've been making.

Although I already had a sneaking suspicion that I was eating too much sugar, I had come up with many ways to rationalize my food choices so I could continue this pattern.  Erin Dubich, RD convinced me that the price I was paying for the sugar I was consuming in massive amounts coming from salad dressings, peanut butter, and that oh so good vanilla chai tea was too high to continue this pattern, and as of this writing, I have not had any of these since the tour!

If you are finding not sure what to eat, or not motivated to eat the foods you suspect you should be eating, consider taking a grocery store tour with a dietician.

“If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health.”  


(stated by a Greek physician who lived 460 years BC and whose pithy statements have survived the test of a long time)  


Have modern physicians missed the boat in terms of prescribing exercise and dietary changes to patients in an effective manner?  


Has exercise and diet been one of the ways you used to optimize your health, despite a chronic medical condition like diabetes or hypertension?  


Did your doctor point you in the right direction about how much exercise to pursue, how often, and how intense?


I would greatly appreciate it if you could weigh in on these questions!

Do mandated disclosure forms like (informed consent, Truth in Lending Act etc) work?

Watch this video, and you might think that helping patients better understand if a coronary stent is going to benefit them might be best accomplished by mandating a better informed consent process.

The use of patient specific, tailored informed consent forms might indeed improve the process of helping patients making treatment decisions that are better aligned with their preferences.

But before you write your congressman requesting that the informed consent process be improved, you might want to consider this interesting paper  from University of Chicago that explains what the informed consent process shares with the Truth in Lending act (hint--mandated disclosures frequently fail miserably to achieve their intended purpose, and have many unintended adverse consequences).

How to address this problem today, if you are having to make a treatment decision?  The DSP blog still thinks this approach is not a bad place to start.