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.