Reducing Blood Pressure Naturally – The Journey Begins Right Here!

I’ve been diagnosed with high blood pressure into high levels of hypertension. My doctor has prescribed drugs to do my job and I’m challenging myself to see how much I can improve without them. So far the progress has been very encouraging!

Blood pressure, reducing naturally.

I wanted to check in and talk a little bit about reducing blood pressure naturally. High blood pressure is a disease that affects a lot of people and many are unaware of it. In fact it was something I was unaware of.Well in full transparency it’s something that was brought to my attention twice and I ignored. I’ve just not found a need. But at 42, peers encourage me to go and get checked out and make sure that everything’s alright. Probably good advice. The reason that I tend to avoid seeing doctors is, I don’t like them prescribing things and this and that, I think there’s an explanation of cause to every symptom. And I don’t like people look at symptoms and prescribe things for them. I’m slightly overweight, other high stress factors, things like that.

But to rewind. I do visit an optometrist and I do see my dentist, and each of them has performed a blood pressure reading that I pretty much was dismissive over. They were high but I put it in at, you know what? It was a peak time of day or it was white coat hypertension. Which is a term for people getting a spiked blood pressure reading because of their anxiety being around medical professionals. I wanted to share a couple of best practices I’ve learned with reducing blood pressure naturally, as I’ve successfully made some tremendous gains in just 2 months, making some minor changes that resulted in major shifts in reducing blood pressure. Naturally.

Anyway so I get to the doctor 2 months ago and go for a physical, they do blood work and all this other catch up stuff, and comes back and tells me that the blood pressures very high and he wanted to also talk about cholesterol. But that blood pressure is a priority, that I was averaging 191 over 118 and this is a stage 3 type of hypertension. And I still didn’t really take it that seriously a couple of months ago.

Doc asked me about caffeine and stress and any other factors that may be contributing, and I do drink a lot of caffeine. It’s just, you know, it’s a good drug. I love my coffee and I drink a lot of it. Especially throughout the day constantly fuelling and re fuelling to a ridiculous amount. And I agreed to cut back on the coffee. And I cut back, and I go in a month later, and I’m still in the 160ish range over the 109 range. Still in a very unhealthy point as far as things go blood pressure wise. And he tells me that he wants me to make additional changes, drop some pounds, I’m right around 200, continue to reduce the coffee down to 1 cup a day, crazy.
But I wanted to start doing my readings too.

So the first thing I did was picked up a little meter and I showed the doc at the visit, hey look I’ve got an invested interest in this, I’ve picked up a meter and I want to start checking some of my readings as I suspect there are they are higher at the doctor’s office, I’ve been coming in early Monday mornings as the work weeks beginning, and other factors that may be contributing towards it being high during the readings. And something I started to really realize I had to take seriously.

And these wrist readers are relatively straight forward. You generally put it on your left wrist and that’s something I want to get into as well and why different things are the way they are. And you put this thing on, you push a button, and it will come back and will tell you your blood pressure and your pulse. Now the caveat is this. It has to be held at hearts level and you’re best off being at a table with both feet on the floor and making sure that it’s held upright and using your left wrist. Anyway, that’s not always straight forward. When I initially picked it up, there’d be times I’d attempt to use it in the car while driving, or just on the road, sitting on a plane or what not, and you want to make sure you do keep the arm elevated at heart level for this to be effective. I noticed too when I was looking online and doing some research, that people commented that the wrist monitors may not be as effective as the type of monitors that actually would wrap around your arm. And I ended up picking up this Omron unit which got great reviews everywhere. And this thing is pretty cool, it can store, just like the wrist one, can store different readings and you can either do this with somebody else, or if you wanted to keep your left and right readings separately with this, well you have a button just for that. You can slide and store those separately.

So that’s one of the first things that I invested in to actually take an active interest in my blood pressure awareness. And the reason for this is I’m a big believer that if you want to actually manage something, you need to be able to measure it. And that way you can see results. So for the past month I’ve been using this blood pressure log on my android phone to keep track of where the blood pressures at, as it allows me to conveniently put different times throughout the day. I’ve been shooting for 4 times or more throughout the day, sometimes it’s not practical but for the most part you can see where I have done that. I thought it would also be important to make notes as far as what I was doing, what time of day. Was I using the wrist or the arm reading? Was I doing it on my left or my right arm? What was going on you know, what did I just eat? Just little notes like that.

I found a cool android app too There’s a ton of apps for pretty much every mobile operating system. You don’t even need an app, you can use paper, you could use a spreadsheet. But track this stuff so then when you go into your doctor and he says hey what are your blood pressure readings, then you can say hey my average in the morning is this, afternoon is this, etcetera. Anyway. Hoping you can learn from my lessons here. And this app is pretty cool, it shows you what your last reading is and you can enter in like you can do a drop down if its left arm, right arm, everything I’m looking to track and it connects online too. It was a free app and I brought the paid version to get rid of the ads. What it gives you as well, is the ability to go through and do a history. And the history will show you where you’ve been throughout the time clearly, and what I really dig is the analysis. What this gives me is an overall kind of a peak into what’s going on. A lens so to speak.

The morning, afternoon, evening and night time, and then the overall for 30 days. So keeping in mind that I was starting off at the 191 over 118, then I get to 168 over 109, and then I get that a little bit lower. I’m more in the 140 range to over the 108, 109, this is not a healthy range and I began putting each of these in. In fact, I was measuring 8 times a day at first just to make sure I got enough data. To make sure I got enough data in here to be able to do some accurate measurements. Now what this allowed me to do, and I’m going to do a close up of the phone so I can show you everything that I’m talking here. As I’m sure just waving it in front of the screen is not super effective. But what I like is the ability to take a look clearly at where I’ve been, where I’m going, I can measure at 30 days. You know what?

I’d like to show you and walk you through right now, what I’m able to do with this app and the progress I’ve made in the past 30 days of tracking. Keep in mind things are relatively high even at that 30 date mark, I was still at that 191 over 118 just a month ago. Now let’s take a look at what I’m tracking with this app and the progress I’ve been making so far. I wanted to really take a closer look at what I could do with just some basic changes with nutrition, supplements, exercise, lifestyle change and all that. So this application allows me to not only keep track of what’s going on here, but put notes next to everything such as what I’m doing that day and all that good stuff. The other graphs allow me to take a look deeper, for instance, I passed one of them that I wanted to show you here.

Over here’s kind of cool, you can zoom out and let’s see, I get a little range here of what’s been going on, so there’s a big cluster initially where I was real concerned and checking it quite often, as it was in that super high range and you see it starts to go lower here. And we’ll go into a tab, we’re just looking in, you see the different levels here and this is finally looking at the graph. So here is looking at the 30 days that I put together and what’s cool is you can actually go back and take a look at the history. So the history you see that several of them that were hitting the 191 over 118 range, and that’s relatively consistent throughout the day. Over here, I have averages where I can see that things are dropping along the way morning, afternoon, evening, and I’m just going to take a look of where things are at. So the average that we’re going to take a closer look at right now, is going to be the overall 30 days.

And as you can see I began at a rather high average to begin with, which is the 191 over 118, the lowest it’s been and this is through some deep relaxation on the weekends, is 100 over 60. Or actually over 50 at one point. We will get into that, but the overall average is what we’re going to look at out of 200 plus readings, the new average in 30 days is 137 over 90. That’s getting closer to healthy range. And I want to delve a little bit deeper into these graphs here too so let’s take a look here further. And we go back to the little graphs and so for 30 days you could see that it was kind of crazy. Well there’s a little bit of mix of everything.

So there’s the nice pre hypertension but there’s more than 50% is obviously in the danger zone and that’s kind of crazy. So to zoom in a little bit and go to a 14 day we can see that, well it’s still in the danger zone more than half, compared to the previous average, it actually is moving a little bit more of the stage one away into where the stage 2 and 3 are. So going back to the 14, that continues to reduce, we look at the 7 day and that’s finally dropping below 50% and you’ll see the majority of the danger zone is in the stage 1 as the pre hypertension’s beginning to take over. We get into 5 days, and look at that. Things are already beginning to change up over here were there’s a significant reduction of the danger zone over here, otherwise known as severe stage 3 hypertension and getting more into the, you know, mild stage 1. And let’s take a look just on the past 3 days, keep in mind this is including the weekend, and this is fantastic disconnecting and relaxing and this is fantastic. This is looking closer to pac man every day. And what I need to do is increase that normal number and let’s see here zooming in to today, not too shabby.

And I’m kind of proud of this as it’s taken 2 months to obtain this without medication, with just some nutrition and supplement changes and life things.

This is a lifestyle disease. So why not fix it by making changes to lifestyle? Anyway, I wanted to share this with you all, thanks for taking a look, it’s a pretty cool app and I’ve learned something in life that you can better manage things that you can measure. Thanks for tuning in. Soy milk. I was reading about some studies that were from over 10 years ago, that over a course of a 3 month period they had individuals who some were in a group who were drinking just regular cow milk, and the other group drinking a liter of soy milk a day. After 3 months there was significant declines in both the systolic, the top number, and the diastolic, the lower number, over 15. I mean a drop of 15 in each. That’s significant. Why don’t people talk about soy milk more. Anyway, I thought about it. This is nutritious, it’s good, the soy milk that I have here has very low carbs as well so this entire container has about 20 grams of carbs and 20 grams of protein. So it’s kind of good for you. There’s some nutrition, it tastes good and I thought, why not? Put at least one of these a day. And that’s just one thing. It’s also got a tremendous amount of magnesium. In fact it tells me that there’s 10% of the US RDA magnesium in one, and there’s 4, so 40% in just one of these. Hey maybe I should drink 2 a day.

The other thing I’ve been eating a lot, where are my props, a lot more of are sunflower seeds. Sun flower seeds also high in magnesium and just the practice of snacking throughout the day makes us less likely to binge on snack foods and junk foods later in the day. So those are a couple of things I’ve added to the diet.

Other things diet wise, I’ve been cutting back in the salty foods, I still have my steaks, but I’m eating a lot more chicken and salads and fish and cooking really healthy stuff and trying to eat better on the road. Not trying to but doing. And there’s times that you only have an opportunity, there’s a boxed lunch provided at a conference or what not, you go with it. And there’s times that you’re travelling and you can make a conscious choice of what you’re going to eat. You want to have some steak, you can have one of those steak salads. It fills you up and it’s good for you. But just being aware that I’m monitoring this is making a difference. I’ll tell you what really scared me. Here’s what’s scared me.

So I return to the doctor, so doc writes out a prescription, tells me it’s critical that I take this drug, it’s called a beta-blocker and doesn’t tell me much about what it is but I got to take this thing and I should come back in a month, make sure I consistently take this beta blocker and he’s going to measure the blood pressure at that point.

Being honest with you friends, I didn’t really take the BP things as seriously until this prescription was written. And it’s because of these side effects that I just wasn’t able to take this thing. This is Toprol. Metropolol, whatever I can’t even pronounce this thing. And common side effects or possible side effects, constipation, diarrhea, dizziness, dry mouth, gas, headache, heartburn, light headedness, drowsiness, muscle aches, nausea, stomach pain, trouble sleeping, unusual tiredness or weakness, vomiting, if they continue or bothersome, check with your doctor. I looked online too.

The main top 5 I was getting was the nausea, the anxiety, weight gain, depression, and ready for this? Erectile dysfunction? I mean seriously. I understand some people have to take this medicine, but when you’re at a crossroads with a drug that can cause you to gain weight, get depressed, be nauseous, anxious and not be able to get a hard, on perhaps it’s time to take a more serious look at your life. Wow. I mean what’s next? Is he going to prescribe some Viagra to counter that effect?

You know I was actually reading about a lot of, well that’s a digression but I’ve been reading this book about different things that have happened over the years of medical science and Viagra actually is a side effect of a drug they were designing for heart medication. So I’m not saying all medicines are bad. But I’m saying that I would prefer to take a look at what I could do with my life being that blood pressure is a disease of the lifestyle, and I’d rather look at treating the cause, than treating the symptoms. Because otherwise it doesn’t make sense.

It’s a self-perpetuating, downward spiral and I don’t want to be part of that.

I also don’t want to be part of that statistic of people who are supposed to see the doctor the next day and had a heart attack. Or the people who were written a prescription and didn’t take and had a stroke. I don’t want to be that. And I do take this seriously. But I don’t want to have all these side effects because that just freaks the hell out of me. It goes on and on and on. I went back to the doctor, I said doc listen. I’d like to talk to you about supplements I take. And you know, possibly they’ve been causing some blood pressure, possibly there’s different things I should be looking at ,but number one doc, I want you to be aware of the supplements I take in case there’s any type of interaction with medication. Who knows if there’s some type of weird combination with taking a traditional supplement and taking the Toprol beta blocker. I don’t know. I don’t know what a beta blocker is. I know I’ve looked on the internet and it does something to reduce the adrenaline. Don’t we like adrenaline? I guess there’s sometimes we have to much of it. It’s a, performers sometimes us this to get rid of stage anxiety. Some other performers don’t use it because it’s that adrenaline that drives their performance. Either way, the idea of being on something that you have to be on, is what really got to me.

Everything I’ve read about these type of pills say that you can’t just stop taking them because if you’re doing something to reduce the blood pressure and the heart rate and everything chemically and you reduce it, boom. You’re that much more likely to actually have a heart attack or stroke.

I didn’t want to sign up for this, I didn’t like those five horrible symptoms or side effects, I don’t want to have a chance of having something I take and I put myself at great risk and I went ahead and researched a great deal about additional nutritional supplements that have had a phenomenal impact on reducing blood pressure naturally. And when I say naturally, some may argue, why would you want to take a nutritional supplement versus popping a pill? Isn’t it easier to just pop a pill? In fact a pill, many times, is just a synthesized variant of what was discovered naturally and it’s a short cut. Well maybe again I don’t want to treat symptoms and it just freaks me out.

Doctor then prescribes a different medication and he wants me to take this different one. He says you know what? Don’t read all that paper work that comes in from long brains, just take this one. Well personally I’d like to research what I’m putting in my body and this new one I thought it was called vasotec but it seems it is Enalapril. This one fortunately does not have a lot of side effects except it could cause a sore throat and a cough. Not something an active vlogger would want or somebody who is a professional sales maker. I talk a lot. In the interest of getting this video online I’m not going to delve super deep into the nutritional supplements, if you’re interested in learning more please put a comment and let me know. I do plan on putting some additional videos together to drill deep into why these nutritional supplements work.

Some additional supplements that I added to my diet include fish oil, specifically adding in the krill. And some people state that the krill is superior to the regular fish oils. I say they’re food so I’m going to take both and see the impact on my blood pressure and I’ve been taking each of these for the past 30 days. Cocue 10. Also something I have done a great deal of research on and found has some significant improvements towards health for cardiovascular system, particular value with reducing blood pressure naturally. I get back into it naturally.

I recognize that these are nutraceuticals that come from sources that may not be as regulated as certain pharmaceutical, pharmacological corporations. However, I like the idea of nutritional supplements being just that foods. I’ve never heard that if you stop taking a food, that you can have a heart attack. I know if I stop eating sushi or something I may be craving it, but I don’t really find as much risk with something that’s an addition to my food, versus something that’s a synthesized drug. The other thing that bothers me with the pharmaceuticals is quality control.

People talk against nutritional supplements being not as regulated as the FDA was originally years ago, but, the problem with pharmaceuticals is you have the main brand chemical formula and then you get the generics and there’s different variations with the generics. And there’s people who have experienced different results. Now perhaps some of that is a placebo, psychosomatic thing with our perception, however perception is reality and that doesn’t actually control how we feel and what we experience. The other part is too they are different chemical variations. It may be a different filler or some type of addition to the base recipe that causes it to not work the same. Either way it’s difficult to measure. My choice is to take a look at nutrition.

I’ve made some incredible changes with the blood pressure, with just those few changes of adding in some soya milk and adding in a couple of supplements. The CoQ10, the krill oil, and some magnesium. I definitely would like to delve deeper into what I’ve learned and why these different nutritional supplements have been so beneficial and recap what I’ve learned from researching others experiences as well. So yeah, let me know if you’re interested in that and I’ll make sure to delve deeper, I would like to share more but I also want to get this video online. I feel it’s something important. Almost my PSA to the world here and hoping to connect with others.

Initially when I had this diagnosis it wasn’t something I shouted. It wasn’t even something I really took seriously. And it took my awareness, my ass kicking was effectively the fear out of side effects of the medication. It was a wakeup call for me to do something about this. And I’m making really good changes. In the past couple of weeks I’ve been noticing some tremendous reduction, as you saw with the app track, and I’m going to continue to do so.

It’s September 2012 and we saw where my readings were at. We’re reading in at up to the second application analysis right here. So over all, things are dropping. Looks like the pulse is going up. Maybe because I’m working out more and the weight has been, well, well kind of high. I need to reduce my weight more.

So, I’m going to go and cut out, and work out and come back, I’ll tell you more about reducing blood pressure naturally. Thank you.