I’ve been a little low energy lately and wanted to find out why.  I go to Wuesthoff Reference Labs every few months to get blood work done. I love Wuesthoff, it’s cheap, they’re fast and there’s a lab just down the street. Best of all, no doctors needed! I do it several few times a year to make sure my cholesterol is nice and low. When I eat in restaurants, I can’t be sure how much fats I’m getting.  When I ate egg drop soup every day for a month earlier this year, my triglycerides doubled to 138. No more egg drop soup for me!  I learned from the lab tech that the easier arm to draw blood from is usually your non-dominant one. Being right handed, my right arm may have more musculature covering the veins, so they like to draw from the left. That’s good to know – I knew one was better than the other but always forget which. Now I’ll remember.  My test results showed that my iron is not its usual 77-ish but only 47.  I began drinking hot water with blackstrap molasses and ordered some ferrous sulfate liquid to pick up at Palm Bay Pharmacy tomorrow. That should perk me right up. My iron was abnormally (for me) highest (127) on July 30th when I was eating eggplant and hummus every day for a month before — wow, the body knows what it needs.   

I bought kale at the market and added it to a roasted veggie soup, and threw garbanzos in it too. I’m excited to find my iron was low, since I’ve been real low energy lately.  I like knowing what it is.  I have some ferrous sulfate coming later today, and I ordered some Ferro Sequels which will be here next week. Yesterday I began taking big spoonfuls of blackstrap molasses, too. I don’t want to overdo taking supplements, if I can get the iron from my food and absorb it that way, all the better.

When I got the blood test back showing low iron, I called a galpal who knows about that kind of stuff, having grown up very anemic.  When I got her voice mail, I remembered she never has her phone on.  I left word anyway. I was surprised when she called right back saying she was at work and felt compelled to turn her phone on and check voice mail. I was glad she was tuned in to the Universal Mind and got my message

Yesterday I began reading through a fave book, Prescription for Nutritional Healing, an A-Z reference to drug-free remedies using vitamins, minerals, herbs. It’s packed with great info. BIG NEWS FLASH — I learned that the frozen yogurt I’ve been eating all month is likely zapping my iron. That’s real good to know. I’ve never been a frozen dairy/ice cream kinda person and now I have a reason not to be.

I also realized I’d stopped eating pasta and rice the 60 days before the blood test.  Both pasta and rice are enriched with iron, so when I stopped eating them, that could conceivably drop my iron count.

I wondered how my iron could plummet in just three months, so I’m glad I keep a record of what I eat each day.  I saw that my iron on July 30th was at a high of 127 because of eating garbanzos and parsley every single day for the month prior.  I saw that every single day for 30 days prior to me taking the blood test, I ate some frozen yogurt at night.  I figure that’s good evidence of what boosts the iron naturally, and what inadvertently depletes it.

I love it that I can regulate my body chemistry without drugs, by eating the right foods and getting the right vitamins and minerals.  Some high iron foods are:

Apricots
Figs
Eggs
Kale
Molasses
Raisins
Brown rice
Whole wheat bread
English Muffin
Oatmeal
Total cereal
Cream of Wheat
Raisin bran cereal
Sunflower seeds
Soy milk
Kidney beans
Broccoli
Green beans
Lima beans
Beets
Peas
Potato with skin on
Vegetables, green leafy
Watermelon
Liver

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