One of my students is a pharmacist and instead of teaching her English I use her as my doctor/psychologist.
I didn't drink alcohol in January and was wondering about the effect on my cholesterol and body fat etc. I was thinking out loud about buying expensive scales that tell you your muscle/fat percentages, and about where I could get a lipid test - "Oh, we do that in our pharmacy."
I'd never heard of such a thing. Surely it costs hundreds of francs from a doctor?
"No, just come to the pharmacy. It's 49 francs. We'll check your blood pressure, blood sugar, HDL, LDL, triglycerides, tell you your fat and muscle percentage, and tell you what risk band you are in regarding heart attacks."
I did it the other day and have the results in front of me. (I'm flabby but healthy. Yay!)
My student runs one of the pharmacies in the Niederdorf but I guess it's available at lots of others too. I think I'm not the only one who's never heard of such a service, because me and my friend were the first customers to take the test in the two years my student's been working there.
Something to think about if you believe 'what gets measured gets managed'.
Yep, the psychology is very interesting - fortunately I didn't see it as an excuse to go crazy the rest of the year!
My main focus was to lose some weight, and I lost 4 kilos. But by coincidence I saw a BBC doc in which a guy lost the same weight in a month and the doctors told him half of it was muscle mass, and everyone looked as grim as though they were writing his obituary already.
How much of my weight loss was 'good loss' and how much 'bad loss'? I realised I had no idea what I was really doing to myself because all I was going on was this single metric - my weight.
I thought I should find out where I stand on the other stuff. I just wish I'd known about the pharmacy service earlier - the sooner we all get this data on ourselves the better!