Cholesterol

As I may have mentioned in the past, my cholesterol is high for someone my age. My first test was in April and I recently went and got another one. Since April, I changed my diet, lost 20 pounds, and started exercising again. It took quite a bit of work to lose the weight and get back in shape. Buy the end of the running season (when daylight savings turned off) I was up to three miles again. I am going to try to maintain during the winter by running occasionally and lifting weights. My goal is to lower my body fat percentage by several points to bring it more in line with what is considered normal.

I had some dramatic changes to my blood chemistry, but not the ones I expected. I expected there to be a significant change in my cholesterol, because I heard triglycerides where tough to move with our medication. It turns out that triglycerides are very weight sensitive, and were adjusted the most. I think a picture will explain it.



Triglycerides and VLDL both decreased dramatically. HDL and LDL increased. LDL had the largest increase. Looking at the data, I have come up with my own theory concerning cholesterol and I think it holds a bit of truth (further research revealed my theory to be somewhat true. Read here and here).

First a little background. VLDL, LDL, and HDL all make up your total cholesterol level. VLDL is the smallest, LDL is the next largest, and HDL is the largest of all (update: actually the size information is wrong.). I believe that my VLDL got rolled up into LDL. Additionally, some LDL was rolled up into HDL. The decrease in VLDL shows a general trending of my body creating larger lipids (or cholesterol). How much of this is true, I am not totally sure. Either way, I feel my overall cholesterol improved a bit more than my raw number shows.

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