Smart at Heart: A Holistic 10-Step Approach to Preventing and Healing Heart Disease for Women - Softcover

Wood, Malissa, M.D.; Mcdowell, Dimity

 
9781587612787: Smart at Heart: A Holistic 10-Step Approach to Preventing and Healing Heart Disease for Women
Softcover
ISBN 10: 158761278X ISBN 13: 9781587612787
Verlag: Ten Speed Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

If you are one of the millions of women who has been diagnosed with heart disease or are at risk for developing it, you might be surprised to learn that simple life changes will profoundly affect your health. According to a revolutionary study by Harvard-trained cardiologist Malissa Wood, true cardiovascular health must address the whole heart--its physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects.
 
Dr. Wood’s findings form the basis of Smart at Heart, a breakthrough mind-body approach to preventing and healing heart disease by strengthening the ten “bridges” that create total heart health. By exploring these ten key areas of your life, you can fight heart disease. For example, while exercise and nutrition are known to improve cardiac health (and make up two of the bridges), Dr. Wood’s study also shows how small changes to your environment, the way you communicate, or how you handle stress has a big effect on your heart. So something as commonplace as clearing out the clutter from your home can positively change not only your emotions, but also your physical well-being.
 
Heart disease is a serious diagnosis and if you are at risk, there’s a lot you can do to improve your own health. Smart at Heart empowers you with the solutions you need--backed up by science--to create a healthy, whole heart.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MALISSA WOOD, MD, is the codirector of the Corrigan Women’s Heart Health Program at Massachusetts General Hospital. She sits on the board of the Northeast affiliate of the American Heart Association.

DIMITY McDOWELL, a health and fitness writer, has been a contributing editor at Shape and Women’s Health. She is the coauthor of Run Like a Mother.

Visit drmalissawood.blogspot.com.

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chapter one
 
Smart at Heart
 
It’s a Monday night, a few weeks before Christmas. Around 5:30, thirteen women file into a conference room at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Revere Health Center in Revere, Massachusetts. Some grab a clementine from a table of healthy snacks, while others peel off the layers they’d been wearing to protect themselves from the bitter wind coming off the Atlantic Ocean one hundred yards away. Of the thirteen, nine are participants in HAPPY Heart, a two-year-old program that integrates all the facets of a woman’s life (including, among other things, physical health, emotional well-being, stress levels, and relationships) to minimize her cardiac-related issues. Three of the women are nurses (or health coaches, in HAPPY-Heart speak) and one is a daughter of a participant. As the group begins to settle into seats around the table, Isabel, one HAPPY Hearter, announces that she’s going to gather clothes for the homeless in the next week and pass them out and is looking for donations of any size. Another participant, Jenny, mentions that her daughter is taking finals, and that those tests have the whole house stressed out. A third subject, Kim, has an ankle that’s hurting, and Donna Peltier-Saxe, one of the health coaches, promises to take a look at it later.
 
Donna Slicis, another health coach, sets up her computer, and the first PowerPoint slide shows on a screen. “Family: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly,” it reads, “Holiday survival!” After a few introductory remarks, Slicis, who has a great sense of humor and an even bigger sense of compassion, shows a YouTube video, which is called “Family Survival Kit.” The infomercial parody “sells” such helpful items as criticism-canceling headphones and Dr. Phil in a can. (“You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge,” the bald doc preaches from within the aluminum walls.) Laughter and nods of, “So true, so true” fill the room. The mood is light as Slicis focuses on the bulk of her presentation: creating a holiday experience that is low on conflict and bad health habits, and high on self-care.
 
Self-care is a relatively new topic for the women here tonight. “I’ve never taken care of my health,” says Lucy, echoing the sentiments of many in the group. “I just hoped for the best.” Revere is a blue-collar town, and for most of these women’s lives, the natural order of basic human needs--food and water, a safe place to live and sleep, a steady income--dictated that their energy and effort be put toward simply surviving as opposed to thriving. One woman is dealing with a foreclosure on her house; another, at age forty-nine, has had to move back in with her mother because she lost her job and can’t afford her own place. One was shot by a former boyfriend and still has three bullets in her body, while another woman has a son who is a heroin addict. Understandably, self-care hasn’t been a priority for these women; they’ve been too busy figuring out how to pay the bills, put food on their tables, deal with abusive relationships, and just generally navigate the messy details of life. “My life has never been about me,” says Heather, mother of the addicted son. “I’ve spent it taking care of my mother, my siblings, my children, my husband. I never thought to put myself first.”
 
Those life circumstances, combined with their family health histories, put most of them at risk for cardiovascular disease. To be a participant in the HAPPY Heart study, candidates have to have at least two major risk factors for cardiovascular disease: high blood pressure, abnormal cholesterol levels, diabetes, obesity, cigarette smoking, sedentary lifestyle, and genetic history of cardiac issues in the family. Over 80 percent of the sixty-five women in the program have at least three risk factors; the most common are obesity, low levels of HDL (the good kind of cholesterol), and a sedentary lifestyle.
 
Unfortunately, the women are in good company. The American Heart Association (AHA) issued new guidelines for the prevention of cardiovascular disease in women in early 2011, and the statistics cited in the introduction are troubling--to say the least. Two in three women over the age of thirty are either overweight or obese. More than twelve million American women have diabetes, a disease that is so tightly linked to cardiovascular disease that doctors often treat the two conditions simultaneously. Many physicians now refer to diabetes and obesity as “diabesity,” because of their frequent coexistence. High blood pressure is on the rise, especially among African-American women; an overwhelming 44 percent of that population has high blood pressure.
 
Although two of the most popular American pastimes--eating fast food and spending extended periods of time in front of a screen--might lead you to think otherwise, the epidemic of cardiovascular disease is not limited to the United States. “Heart disease is the leading cause of death in women in every major developed country and most emerging economies,” the 2011 AHA report proclaims.1
 
Given that heart disease is the number one killer of women--in the United States in 2006, over 430,000 women died from cardiovascular disease while about 270,000 died from various forms of cancer--the public awareness is still disturbingly low.2 In the AHA guidelines, researchers found that only 53 percent of women polled said that the first thing they would do if they suspected they were having a heart attack would be to call 911.3 That lack of awareness, combined with the rise of obesity, is contributing to a trend that shouldn’t be happening in the twenty-first century: death rates from cardiovascular disease for women under the age of fifty-four are, amazingly, rising. For the first time in forty years, the number of U.S. women between ages thirty-five and fifty-four who die from heart-related issues is actually increasing.4
 
As is true for many women across the world, the threat of a cardiac event stares down the HAPPY Heart participants daily. “My father died of arterial sclerosis at sixty-two,” says Christie, sixty years old, one of the participants who heard about the program from me when she came to my office with heart palpitations. “And my mother was a diabetic who had a triple bypass and a pacemaker. Seven of her siblings died of heart problems before [heart disease] took her at age eighty. Those thoughts just live in the back of my head.”
 
Daily challenges don’t loom so large tonight, though. Tonight, these women--like most of America--are preparing for two weeks of holiday excess: large, rich meals; champagne, eggnog, and plenty of other drinks; intense family time; additional cooking and cleaning; and unspoken, and often huge, expectations. The situation is a recipe for total meltdown for anybody, so Slicis encourages people to forget about perfection. “Be realistic about your expectations,” she says. “If the potatoes don’t come out perfectly, nobody will notice but you.” Then she moves on to talk about more important matters, which include how to protect yourself and your feelings around a group of people who might not always be the most supportive and loving. “You get to be happy even if everybody else around you isn’t,” she says, adding that it’s important to walk away from negative conversations and take a time-out if need be. “The bathroom is a great place to hide,” she says with a laugh. After touching on some budget-minded gifts (a family cookbook, certificates for closet organizing), Slicis reminds everyone to...

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Verlag
Ten Speed Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
158761278X
ISBN 13 
9781587612787
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
282
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Ten Speed Press
https://crownpublishing.com/

Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY
New York
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar