Plateaued health metrics

Last year it did not take me enormous effort to see a gradual improvement in my exercise performance. This year, the overall trend line has been decidedly flat, a little lower than where I had hoped to settle. I have been using the cross-trainer for forty minutes four times per week and have not felt as if I were taking it easy. I need willpower for other things in my life too so I do not want to push my workouts in a way that makes them more unappealing: then I may not keep doing them at all.

What I shall try for coming weeks is being easygoing about my average power output, so as to remove some stress from the workouts, but to work out for a bit longer and at a gently increasing average resistance level, my previous resistance level becoming a decreasingly long warm-up. Perhaps I have a tendency toward keeping the RPM in the 50's that means that I will find that my average power settles a little higher than I have managed so far. I shall consider myself to be working hard enough if I am remembering to work my arms as well as my legs and I do not feel as if I have breath to spare.

My weight is still in the official healthy band but also still near the top. I estimate that I am eating little enough that it ought still be drifting downward though at a shallow enough rate that the usual apparently random variations may be clouding that trend. I shall continue to eat as I am for another month before making any changes to my diet so that I have more confident data on the effect of my current regime.

Avoid unprocessed pork?

The UK's National Health Service warn that,

Red meat – such as beef, lamb and pork – can form part of a healthy diet. But eating a lot of red and processed meat probably increases your risk of bowel (colorectal) cancer.

The studies I recall seeing tend to focus on processed pork products such as bacon and sausages. I wonder, is it clear that foods like baked lean pork loin are also significantly riskier than, say, turkey? Research results commonly seem to simply collate the pork data into the same bin as, say, for beef, although a pork chop's heme iron level is often found to be rather nearer that for chicken breast than it is roast beef.