Fitness Works: We Heart You
The heart is an icon we see regularly throughout the month of February. This remarkable organ beats about 100,000 times a day and more than 2.5 billion times over the course of an average lifetime. Do what you can to help it along.
The journey to a heart-healthy life might just start at your front door. Tweak each room, starting at the entryway, to encourage a more healthful lifestyle - it can make a big difference in how well your heart holds up over the long haul. It's important to slow down, sense your environment, and see what we need to change.
Entryway
Add tennis shoes. Set them by the front door in an attractive bin or basket so they're handy for exercising, an essential component of heart health. People who exercise regularly are 40% less likely to have a heart attack or stroke than those who exercise infrequently.
Living Room
Adopt a no-food policy. Keep meals and snacks out of the living room. People tend to overeat far more often in front of the TV simply because they want something to do while watching a show.
Kitchen
Add a kitchen scale. Do you really have any idea what three ounces of meat or an ounce of cheese looks like? Neither does anyone else. That's why a kitchen scale comes in handy for measuring out portions for weight control. Line your shelves. It can be tough to remake your eating habits from scratch. So fill your shelves with heart-healthy cookbooks to draw upon. The American Heart Association sells a line of cookbooks on its Web site, heart.org. Enter the word 'cookbooks' into it's search field. And check out recipes at other web sites such as hearthealthyonline.com.
Bathroom
Stock up on floss. Your dentist really is right - you should floss every day, and not jsut for your dental health. Researchers have repeatedly found a direct link between the inflammation caused by gum disease and heart disease. The healthier your mouth, the less risk to your heart. Dust off the scale. You may have an unfriendly relationship with your bathroom scale, but it's time to mend the fences. Researchers have observed that those adults who weigh themselves daily are the ones who are most likely to keep excess weight off.
Bedroom
Rebruit a listener. Ask the person lying next to you to listen to you the next time you sleep. A little gentle snoring is fine. But if your significant other hears loud snoring coupled with episodes in which you stop breathing for a second or two, you may have sleep apnea, which has been linked to heart disease. Here's why: When you stop breathing , you cut off oxygen to the heart, a process that gets repeated over and over again during the night. Obstructive sleep apnea can wake people up hundreds of times a night, even if they don't realize it. See your doctor for advice on diagnosing and treating obstructive sleep apnea.
Stairs
Use an assessment tool. The next time you climb a single flight of stairs, listen for thumping in your chest. Your heart rate and respiration should not change significantly when going up the stairs. If your heart rate goes up by more than 10 beats per miute or you feel short of breath, you're probably out of shape. If you simply need more exercise, use those same stairs as a starting point. Going up and down them for just three minutes a day can increase cardiac endurance.