My Diet My Diet
For the last several years I have had a problem with hypertension; actually
the problem has been with the Medical Profession, but the result is the
same -- I've had horrendously high blood pressure, resulting in damage
to the left ventricle of my heart, and debilitating bouts of Angina.
I got sick of getting more and more pills prescribed -- the more pills I had, the higher my blood pressure got, and the more Angina I had. I ended up with spots before my eyes, swollen ankles, and a constant blood pressure of 206/120 mmHg.
Seeking for some
more sensible solution I turned to nutritional texts and gradually evolved
a blood-pressure lowering diet. After a while I modified this to
reduce my cholesterol levels, and after a year I had high-but-just-within-the-range-of-normal 
blood
pressure, lower cholesterol, and no Angina -- all this on a tenth
of the medication. I'd also lost 18kg, which didn't hurt at all.
The diet depends on a computer program which I originally wrote for an old BBC Micro I had in the bottom of the wardrobe (I bought it for my kids in the early '80s). When that gave up the ghost I re-wrote the program in Mitsubishi Basic on an old Sperry-Rand 286 PC rescued (almost literally) from a skip. A further version, this time in Visual Basic, is undergoing Zeta testing as we speak.
The point of using a computer is that I measure everything I eat, and the program tots up my calorie, lipid, protein and carbohydrate intake so far this morning/today/this week. It also lets me know how much of each I can afford to eat over the next hours/days/weeks, to conform to criteria which include 33g or less of lipids from all sources per day and no more than 60g of protein from all sources per day.
This bit is negative;
the rest is all positive. There are certain foods I must eat every
day, including Oats (especially Oat Bran), 'hot' vegetables 
(onions,
garlic, ginger), raw vegetables, dark coloured vegetables, particular bits
of fruit (some citrus fruit every day, and at least one apple), and lots
of oily fish (Mackerel is my favourite).
The best thing about this is, when I eat the food I'm supposed to eat, I don't have room for anything much else (though no foods are forbidden in this nutritional regimen). The basis is similar to the Pritikin program (American spelling for 'programme', not software), including the requirement for aerobic exercise, which in my case means simply walking a lot.
Nutritional information
initially came courtesy of various conflicting and internally inconsistent
printed texts, but for the present version of my program I downloaded information
from the US Department of Agriculture via the Web. (If you need
this information, use the search key USDA).