I am new to the forum and have been eating whole foods plant based for almost two months now. I developed high blood pressure during labour with my third child. Before that, I have never had high BP that I am aware of. Anyway, it took 3 months for my BP to come down and get off the pills. I was off the pills for over a year when suddenly I had funny vision (doctor thought it was a migraine from my description) and my bp shot up to 198/150, which scared the hell out of me and I went straight to hospital and popped a leftover BP pill, which helped to slowly bring it down to safer levels. I met with a doctor and after a week I reduced my BP pill by half with doctors guidance and then a further week got off it, after the first week I started to do whole foods plant based diet. My levels were pretty good at 115/75 average and then I got a spike in my BP and it went up to 170/100. This happened at the start of my period, which also happened my period before that and coincidentally when I had my huge spike of 198/150 I was also on my period....I am wondering if hormones could cause these random spikes? My BP then comes down after a day to the range of 130/85 and then a couple more days later down to 120/80 and I am assuming it will go back down to the 115/75 in the next day or two....I think I will know for sure during my next period if some sort of hormone shift causes this big spike. I will also ask the Doctor when I see him next week, as I will be fitted for the 24 hour BP monitoring device.
I am just curious if anyone has had this or read about this before (the correlation between spikes and monthly cycle)? OR is it just a coincidence for me and I get random huge spikes. I am 38, healthy weight with a BMI of 18.7, which I know is a little on the low side, but its because of the change of diet and me exercising now I have lost a little weight. Before I just ate whatever and as much dairy, meat etc that I wanted and remained slim (I always could do this, but then I had high cholesteral and developed high BP as a result!). So anyways, I have cleaned up my act and doing this diet and going to pilates, jump, spin class 5-7 days a week now. I started the exercising about 3 weeks ago. Does it take time for my BP to stop these spikes? I am also a very anxious person. I have huge health anxiety, which I am sure effects my BP. An example of what I eat:
1 cup of oats cooked with water, one mashed banana, strawberries, blue berries, flax meal and some walnuts. (Should I cut the walnuts out? I felt like I needed a little bit of fat to help me not to lose more weight....and I added flax because I read how not to die and it was suggest flax could help lower BP.
brown rice with lentils, tomatoes, spinach, sweet potato, carrots
a few hours later I will have a second serving of the above (this helps stop me losing weight)
apple, berries or sometimes a smoothie w oats
dinner is usually something like pasta with a veggie sauce or a huge salad with bread and humus (i did read humus is high fat, so maybe this is something i need to cut as well?)
I would like to have a BP of 110/70, with my diet and exercise efforts (dont we all
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