Camera Crumbs - Round Up Of The Week

My Tennis Elbow right arm has little progress in healing, making it challenging to perform household chores, cook, and lift heavy items.  Consequently, my cooking routines have been simplified. I’ve primarily relied on the air fryer and toaster oven for meal preparations. Thankfully, we’ve had a steady supply of food from hubby’s central kitchen, which has been a lifesaver, reducing the need for extensive cooking.

I suspect that the pain could be a side effect of Atorvastatin. Last month, my cardiologist prescribed me this statin at 20mg per day to bring down my cholesterol levels. I have familial hypercholesterolemia (FH). My two younger daughters have FH too, which was discovered during blood tests when they were hospitalized for other conditions.

FH is an inherited disorder that makes it harder for your body to remove low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol from your blood.

No matter how hard I control my diet, exercise, and stay away from foods with high cholesterol, my blood cholesterol reading is still very high.

Familial hypercholesterolemia can affect anyone whose family carries the genetic mutation. The biggest problem with FH is that more than 90% of people who have it haven’t been diagnosed, which means you should pay careful attention to your family history.

About a month into taking Atorvastatin, I started to have pain in my right elbow bone. I later found out that I have a condition called Tennis Elbow.  Later, I started to have aches in my right hip and buttock. My doctor has advised me to take a 4-week layoff from Atorvastatin to see if the pains and aches in my right hand and hip will go away. 

My lunch usually consists of salad, with food from hubby's kitchen:

Chicken and beef satay with satay sauce, Mackerel fish cooked Indonesian style, Sayur Lodeh (Indonesian vegetable stew in coconut milk) in a bed of salad.
Dessert - yummy kuih.

Sambal Sotong, Sayur Lodeh with tempeh and cabbage, and Ayam Masak Merah in a bed of Mizuna salad.

Meehoon Siam, Sambal Sotong and Ayam Masak Merah.

One-tray-grill - green curry chicken thigh with green and yellow bell pepper, Shimeji mushrooms, sweet potato, chopped garlic, and onions, drizzled with olive oil, and seasoned with black pepper, cajun spice, smoked paprika, and garlic powder.
To reduce washing and hurting my tennis elbow arm, I bought disposable aluminum trays for my grills.

Adding More Greens Into My Diet

Ever since my blood work came back with a bad cholesterol reading of 6.5, I am now even more resolute to cut out red meat from my diet.  As I have genetic high cholesterol aka Familial Hypercholesterolaemia (FH for short), it will be quite impossible for my cholesterol level to go down even with a strict diet.  It went down to a reading of 4.9 when I drank 2-3 packets of Izumio hydrogen water daily - that was about 4 years ago.  But Izumio is too costly and I now only drink it when I feel under the weather.  

I now try to include more raw veggies in my diet.  I used to eat quite a bit of raw veggies and sprouts but the darn pandemic and prolonged home quarantine threw my healthy regimen out of the window.   The prolonged lockdown almost threw my sanity out of my my head too.

My yearly blood test  is in January or February each year. But because of the lockdown and my fear of knowing the truth,  I delayed going to my doctor's office until recently (late September).  

Good news is my blood sugar is still good at a reading of 5.0.  I thought that it would protest and go up too as I had not been eating as clean as I should have been throughout the lockdown.  

Bad news is my cholesterol reading has gone up from 6.4 (last year) to 6.5.  And the little good news amid the bad is that my HDL (good cholesterol) went up and my total cholesterol/HDL ratio is only 2.8 (< 5.0).  It must be my diet that's high in nuts and fish oil.

My doctor is not pressing me to go on Statin, albeit he did say that I could try taking Lipitor.  But I'm not taking Statin just yet. I have my reasons.   I may also want to consult our family friend who's a cardiologist at SJMC to seek his advice. He's currently out of country.  

So hopefully by adding more veggies and rawsome goodness into my diet and eating lesser red meat, my cholesterol reading will go down.  I know it's going to be hard with a mutated gene, but eating more veggies will also benefit other aspects of my health.

I love Hakka Lui Cha (Thunder Tea Rice). After all, I'm a Hakka girl.  I've been ordering my Lui Cha from this Hakka seller on Facebook as she makes pretty good Lui Cha.   I like to add on raw broccoli and alfalfa sprouts and cashews to my Lui Cha sans any rice. And it's really filling.

I use the Lui Cha paste as dipping for raw bell pepper slices.  

A bottle of lui cha paste (RM26 with peanut and RM36 with cashews) can last me for almost a month. I freeze them in silicon ice-cube molds and pop one cube into hot water to drink as a healthy veggie tea or simply pop one frozen Lui Cha cube into my mouth and enjoy it as an ice-popsicle.