Some people will be like me, many others won't, but the real lesson is that there are no hard and fast quick fixes.
I have tracked by BP over 50 kg of weight change, and BP correlates really nicely with fitness level, stress, etc. even though trends are visible over months, not hours.
There certainly are no quick fixes, apart from taking a BP pill (I take telmisartan+amlodipine, the latter replacing a diuretic that made me drier than the Sahara desert)
People are different. Someone who has mild hypertension probably can tweak some lifestyle dials and control it. I had severe hypertension with nothing to point the finger at (e.g. obesity, lifestyle, etc). For whatever reason my body was malfunctioning and in a recursive death loop of escalating hypertension.
Have a look at the effect of fructose on blood pressure. Low carb seems to work well for me, but I'm not consistent enough to see my BP trend down to the point I can throw my pills away. I'm working on it.
And yeah, the entire salt scare is pretty much nonsense that's slowly being debunked. I have a friend who eats more salt than a goat, and he's got hypotension. Go figure. Hyponatremia is not fun, I tend to use salt liberally these days.
You could of course argue that if he ate a ton of salt, his blood pressure would surge. But I wish he would've taken the surgery sooner rather than trying to out-diet and out-exercise his genetics as the diet/exercise had really small effect.
My favorite example of this is from figure 2g of [0]. It shows the time series of blood glucose levels from two participants after eating a cookie or a banana, and they have nearly the opposite responses to each other. It was the thing that convinced me that a ton of modern nutrition that isn’t personalized is basically useless.
Maybe I am misunderstanding, or there is something wrong with my own knowledge, but "30 mmHg" added to systolic seems extremely high.
I am currently an EMT-B student here in the United States, and taking vital signs like blood pressure is our bread and butter. We practice it several times a week, on different people with different body types and different blood pressure baselines. Anything more than ±4 mmHg in a manual reading is terrible accuracy, and anything like +30 mmHg probably comes from someone who doesn't know how to use the equipment.
But again, maybe there is something I am missing. If there is I'd love to be educated and hear about it!
When you're at the GP's office, you might have been rushing to get there, you do a minute of small talk and then they strap on a cuff and tell you "oh my, it's very high", this is the reason. And it happens so often it even has a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_coat_hypertension
I have seen dozen of times, because of effort, anxiety, whatever, my BP being 160/110, which drops to 130/85 after 15+ minutes of complete relaxation. Many amateurs (which apparently includes most GPs) simply do not let the BP settle. The medical value of tracking BP is to know its baseline at rest, otherwise it's a meaningless number.
Just before our wedding, my dad had an crisis, and had to go to the hospital with an infection. He went to Johns Hopkins. They put him in the research wing. The doctors couldn't figure out what the heck to do with him because he was reacting so weird to so many medications. They ended up having to pump him full of vancomycin in hopes that he would last long enough on the three hour flight to get back home where his regular doctor could see him.
People are individuals, and their bodies can react in weird and unexpected ways.
That said, whether I'm oversensitive or more attuned than most ADHD people, I take a light dose, which doesn't turn me into a productive robot machine going 1000 mph.
Stimulants follow a U-curve, and I wouldn't be surprised to know that most people take far too much and have to keep increasing their dosage. A single 30 mg dose makes my anxiety skyrocket, I usually take 20mg twice a day, I've recently experimented with lowering to 15mg twice a day and I think I like it even better.
Vyvanse saved my life.
Omrons are accurate and reliable, and most new models like the Silver have bluetooth and with the Omron connect app will share the data with Apple Health if that's your platform, or you can just keep it in the app and it gives you trends and insights.
Maybe if you did that, you wouldn't disagree so much?
Is this universally true or just you? Is there any source for this? My diastolic pressure is always in the normal numbers while my systolic pressure is borderline high, resulting in a pretty high delta (50-60 mmHg). Sometimes I also get numbers in the normal range for systolic pressure, but maybe 75% of the time it's a bit high.
- Coffee increases systolic by 15 mmHg for 6 hours, so does smoking.
- Lisdexamphetamine (I am diagnosed ADHD) decreases BP by 10 mmHg
- Good sleep for 5+ consecutive days decreases BP. One day isn't enough.
- Rebound hypertension when forgetting my BP meds is a thing. +10 mmHg the next day.
- Low carb diet decreases BP steadily after the first week or so, especially if your metabolism is out of whack (understandable due to the deleterious effect of fructose on nitric oxide production)
- Amateur BP readings (wrong time of day, single measurement, not relaxed enough) can add 30 mmHg easily. Readings taken at the GP's office are worthless for this reason. My advice is measure every 3 minutes until your BP measurement stabilises. The correct reading is the lowest. Sometimes you need 15 minutes to reset to baseline.
- Also important is the delta between systolic and diastolic. Mine is around 40 mmHg, if it's higher than that, it's an indicator of a stress peak (bad sleep, bad day, overwhelmed) that usually resolves after a couple days.