cholesterol down

Depending on how, where and when you get your cholesterol tested, the reading can vary by as much as 40 points in either direction. To get the most reliable reading, follow these guidelines.
Don’t do it at the mall, Those quickie finger-stick tests can be wildly inaccurate for a number of reasons, ranging from poor or miscalibrated testing equipment to contamination of the blood sample. Instead have blood sample. Instead have blood drawn through a needle at a lab certified by the Centers for Disease Control.
Get repeat tests. Even if you go to the best labs, readings can still vary because of changes in your body’s cholesterol level from day to day or even from hour to hour. “Although these variations are usually under 10 percent, if your first reading is extremely high or is borderline, it pays to get tested two or three times—a couple of days apart—and take an average,” says Basil Riflind,M.D., chief of the Lipid Metabolism and Atherogenesis Branch at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Washington, D.C.
Don’t sweat it. Get your cholesterol checked before you exercise. You lose water when you exert yourself vigorously, and as a result your blood becomes more concentrated. That can lead to higher cholesterol readings.
Stick to your regular diet. Although one or two high-fat meals may not have much effect on your blood cholesterol levels, a consistent pattern of such eating can boost your numbers. Similarly, if you’ve been following and unusually low-fat diet recently, your numbers may be unrealistically low.
Sit down, but not for long. Have a seat before having blood drawn, but not for more than 5 minutes. Cholesterol readings decline by as much as 10 to 15 percent in people who’ve been resting longer than 20 minutes.
If you’re laid up, don’t do it. Any surgery of illness-eve a cold or the flu—can alter the composition of your blood and throw your cholesterol reading out of whack. The Laboratory Standardization Panel of the National Cholesterol Education Program advised waiting two months after illness or surgery before being tested.
Things harder. Will I be able to stick with the program? I stoke my self-control with pop-psychology tricks: visualizing the glistening white plaque deposits from a blood-red steamship round of beef, seeing pâté de canard as a ribbon of sludge encircling my struggling heart. Some of it’s just plain discipline. On a restaurant menu, I have trained myself to ignore the meat and head for the fish or salads. I ask for the dill butter sauce on the side without butter. At a cookout, if everyone else is having a hamburger, I will, too. (I don’t want to come off like a jerk.) But I’ll just have one, and I’ll make a mental note that I have used up animal-fat allotment for the next day or two.
The strongest motivator is the knowledge that, unless I suffer a fatal slip on a cake of soap or accidentally get mowed down in a drive-by shooting, the condition of my heart is likely to be the dominant factor in how long I to get to hang around before I move on to that big pastry shop in the sky. When you put in those terms, it’s not all that hard to have oatmeal for breakfast instead of eggs.

Once every two weeks or so, alone with my sin, I would yield. There is a bakery near where I work that makes a napoleon that Napoleon himself would have esteemed. The crème oozes out under a hundred stories of sheaf pastry collapsing beneath my teeth like a high-rise in an earthquake movie. I made it a point to take my pleasure crudely, standing on the sidewalk in full view of strangers, savaging what  I should be savoring. It was heavenly. Afterward I felt guilty. And happy.
Mostly, I was good. Certainly more good than not. I haven’t been in a McDonald’s in months. When I was drawn toward the office candy machine, I didn’t even look at the high-fat choices. I got a box of Cracker Jacks or dumped a prepackaged low fat hot chocolate into my coffee, trying to push the chocolate and caffeine buttons while hopping nimbly over the fat.
It became easier with time. I struggled with the feeling that I was being unfairly deprived. Then, at a certain point, I made my peace with it. The cravings for fatty foods, for pastries, for chocolate ice cream began to dissipate. In fact, after about six wees of eating light, going for that napoleon wasn’t as pleasurable as I’d anticipated. I imagined it congealing in a big lump in my stomach. I also noticed my overall energy level was improving from lighter fare. A lunch of barbecued ribs, french-fries and creamy potato salad at Billy’s used to leave me ready for a two-hour nap—and nest to useless in that afternoon meeting.

The good news was that  there were two other risk factors I could do something about—exercise and diet. I exercise regularly, which she told me was a plus, In fact, the Centers for Disease Control say that sedentary living, not high cholesterol, is the leading preventable cause of coronary death in this country—sedentary people have twice as many heart attacks as those who get even mild regular exercise. As for my diet, she said it sounded pretty good, but could be better. Furthermore, my blood pressure was low—another good sign.
Sue is a busy woman, but I kept her on the phone for about half an hour talking mainly about nutrition. We discussed LDL (bad) cholesterol and HDL (good) cholesterol (see “Good vs. Bad Cholesterol” on page 48) Se essentially reinforced what my doctor had told me: Avoid animal fats and anything high in saturated fats, such as palm, palm kernel and coconut oils. Eat lots of fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
Okay, I thought, lost 24 point and you’re in the clear. Willpower time.
Although I’d long since weaned myself of the daily meat habit and had found it fairly easy to cutback in general on high-cholesterol foods, eliminating them altogether was going to be difficult. Like most American children, I was raised hooked up to a cow. Cookies and milk were a tradition dating back to nursery school. And when that Good Humor truck bell rang outside on summer nights, a whole brain lobe went ballistic. Chocolate malts had an equally long lineage.
I knew I couldn’t kick dairy products cold turkey. At first I tried skim milk over my cereal and banana, but it was so sad that I stopped. The problem with skim is you can see through it and your eye forewarns your stomach that what is coming is not really milk but dairy plasma. Even 1 percent is opaque by comparison, so I compromised and used it.
Sugar, the nutritional plutonium of the 1970s, is making a comeback these days. I decided I would go for it when the craving for bad food got too strong. The key would be finding sweet, satisfying foods that weren’t overladen with fat.

You’re sort of slim, sort of fit, and the doctor has told you it’s now or never. Here’s what you can do when your cholesterol test comes back high.
MY FACE MUST HAVE gone ashen that day six months ago at my health club when Lou read me my results at the while-u-wait cholesterol screening. Lou is the club’s equipment manager. Four times a year he turns into a sweat-suited cardiologist when he runs the portable testing machine the club sponsors. He had just told me my number was 233.
“Hey, don’t get so bent out of shape,” he said cheerily. “It’s not like you’re gonna die.”
Wrong, barbell head, I thought, a lump of worry caged inside my ribs. I am gonna die. The only mystery in when. It had been a less than stellar day to begin with. I’d cut my gums flossing too vigorously, driven off from the self-serve pump with my gas cap on the roof and found my secretary circulating a caricature of me as a balding infant in fully loaded diapers. In fact, it was only because I needed the satisfaction of getting one thing right that I’d let them stick me with that needle at the health club.
After all, I had reasoned, at 35, I’m still in the pink of health: trim (6 feet, 160 nonsmoking pounds), fit (I run four mile three times a week and play squash once or twice and reasonably diet-conscious (almost no red meat, 2 percent milk on my banana and shredded wheat, light lunches so I can keep from drooling over my work in the afternoon). I hadn’t had my cholesterol tested since my last physical, two years ago. All I remembered was that my doctor had said it was okay.
Yet now, even as I watched the back of  Lou’s crew-cut head while he loaded my slide into a machine resembling a bowling-ball polisher, my own sweaty palms dismantled my confidence. I was thinking that all the men on both sides of my family had died of heart trouble. The machine hummed while its red digital readout flashed past 100,150, then 200. This was like the Wheel of  Fortune in hell—and there was no Vanna anywhere in sight.
Anything below 200, I’d been told, was basically cool. From 200 to 240 was borderline dangerous, a car with bald tires and bad breaks. Anything above 240 was grizzly country, a highwire act with no net. Finally the digital devil froze at 233—somewhere in the high foothills of the Coronary Range—and I did, too. It was, I think, at that moment that I crossed over from the “young” column into the one marked “middle age.” My body, not unlike a girlfriend with whom one lives comfortably and unconsciously for years, was suddenly packed and standing at the door. Better be nice to me, it was saying, or I’m out of here.