A Balanced Heart Is A Healthy Heart
Are you living from the heart? Find out. Take our brief quiz to get your own #LiveFromTheHeart tip sheet.
Take the quiz!
By Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum | Posted Dec 17, 2024
You have to know your risk factors, not your doctor. I mean, if your doctor knows them and you don’t, does that make any sense to you whatsoever? I’m Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum on this journey with you to reach a heart healthy life.
Are you living from the heart? Find out. Take our brief quiz to get your own #LiveFromTheHeart tip sheet.
Take the quiz!
I’m going to tell you something just to remind you; we don’t have much research about women and heart disease. So we have more women dying of heart disease than all cancers combined. Think about that. Does that make any sense? So without that research, we’ve had this gap in information. We have these women who don’t even know that heart disease is her number one health threat.
There was this survey that was sent out to women, asking if they believed heart disease is their number one health threat. The sad thing is many younger women don’t believe this has anything to do with them. I was exactly the same way when I was in my training in cardiology, learning all this stuff. I was living on coffee and jelly beans because hey, I was young. Nothing was going to happen to me. But guess what? It takes time for heart disease to develop. It’s not like it just happens when you’re 55. This is about your entire life.
If somebody told me the jelly beans and coffee was not going to work out for me so well, I would’ve done it differently-I think. I’m pretty sure. I think so. I would’ve maybe eaten chocolate instead… Dark chocolate that is. It has a lot of good stuff in it. So that would’ve been an option for me and water instead of coffee.
Let’s go back to the basics. The American College of Cardiology is a big non-profit organization where all the science, all the research comes from. They put together this way of analyzing who is at risk for heart disease. However, they access things like age, sex, blood pressure, your medications, cholesterol issues. But this analysis never asks about family history. Therefore through this assessment, a woman’s risk, 50% of the time, is not accurate for you.
Now this organization is extremely helpful, but is also a great example of why you need to advocate for yourself and know your own risk factors as well. You have got to empower yourself with information. You have to get the knowledge.
So now here’s what I want you to do. Ready? Take all your clothes off. Get totally stark but naked. Stand in front of the mirror and take a good look. You. Where are you not doing a good job? Where are you not taking care of yourself? And what do you see? Do you see somebody healthy? Are you absolutely not doing what you need to do to be the healthiest version of yourself?
What are you thinking? How are you feeling?
Are you optimistic? Because believe it or not, optimism helps your heart. Or are you pessimistic and dark and angry? That’s bad for you. Go down to your heart. How does it feel? Is beating really hard? Is it causing you to get short of breath when you just walk a little bit just doing the smallest, smallest things? That’s a risk factor. What about your legs? Are they moving? Are you moving? Are you walking? Are you taking the stairs? Are you going up the elevator? Which one? Who do you want to be?
Risk factors for Heart disease are: high blood pressure, high cholesterol, elevated sugars, smoking, being overweight, not exercising, bad diet. How you think and feel, depression, anxiety, and stress also contribute to heart disease.
Get checked. Know your numbers. It’s critical to pay attention to your symptoms. It’s so important to understand what’s going on in your body. And the best way to do that is through testing. The first thing we say is know your numbers. What does that mean? Well, you have to get your blood pressure checked to know if you have high blood pressure. You have to get your cholesterol blood drawn to know if your cholesterol is elevated. You need to also test that blood to see if your sugars are high. So if you don’t know any of these things, how are you going to know If you’re at risk? It’s impossible. You got this. The time is now.
In case you’ve missed it, Step 1 taught us how to Live From the Heart, In Step 2 we discussed how to get moving. Step 3 was all about nourishing your heart and body with foods that taste good and are good for you. If you missed it, you can read it here, Nourish Your Food And Your Heart.
In Step 4, we discussed something very close to my heart and something we all deal with on a daily basis, Stress, Anxiety, Depression And Purpose. The past few years have been a really, really rough time. It’s been a time of stress in ways that we never even knew were possible. We all can deal with stress in like a day or a week or a month even, but years and years of chronic stress, it’s hard.
Step 5, People, Pleasure and Purpose was all the effects of relationships on our heart. Step 6, Know Your Heart was all about, well, the heart and how well do we know it. Last week we discussed Step 7, Why You Must Advocate for Yourself With Medical Care.
We are almost to the end of this year, stay with us as we continue this journey of heart health.
