Category: Living with heart disease

posts here focus on the “new normal” you’ll discover once you get home from hospital and the reality starts to sink in

Is your doctor telling you to “meditate, eat veggies, walk, quit smoking?” If not, why not?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 20 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Newsweek once called his advice “the state of the art in psycho-cardiology” – a lifestyle regimen best known for the stringency of its ultra-low-fat diet, but with equal emphasis on exercise and stress reduction. And in The Atlantic, the famous preventive medicine guru Dr. Dean Ornish has written an essay called Why Health Care Works Better than Disease Care. Dr. O is founder and president of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute.

And his research studies were the first to claim that lifestyle changes can reverse cardiovascular disease without drugs.

He’s a rare duck: a man with the letters M.D. after his name who shuns the prescription pad and Big Pharma’s domination of what’s been called “marketing-based medicine”. Instead, he has long advocated preventing – and even reversing – heart disease without drugs or surgery through changing your lifestyle. He actually recommends two different diets:  the prevention diet and the reversal diet. The reversal diet is a very strict low-fat diet designed for people who have diagnosed heart disease.

Alas, so far I have yet to meet any heart patient who has been successful in sticking to this extremely restrictive diet for any significant length of time. Continue reading “Is your doctor telling you to “meditate, eat veggies, walk, quit smoking?” If not, why not?” →

Heart-healthy weight: secrets of the always-slim

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 10 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

By middle age,  65% of women and 52% of men in Canada are considered overweight. And we know that being overweight has a direct result on our heart health. But an enviable minority stay slim throughout their whole lives. We hate those people . . . 

Are these types just genetically blessed? Or do they, too, have to work at keeping down their weight? To find out, the Consumer Reports National Research Center surveyed over 21,000 subscribers to Consumer Reports about their lifetime weight history and their eating, dieting and exercising habits.

Turns out that people who have never been overweight are not sitting around  in their La-Z-Boys scarfing down gooey Tim Hortons maple dips like I always imagined they could do if they felt like it.  Here’s what Consumer Reports did find out about how their always-slim respondents compared to people who have successfully lost weight and kept it off:  Continue reading “Heart-healthy weight: secrets of the always-slim” →

Resilience: it’s hard to feel like a victim when you’re laughing

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 6 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

Somebody recently described my presentations on women’s heart disease as “part stand-up comedy and part serious cardiology talk!” I think she was right. I now believe, in fact, that some parts of my own heart attack story are downright hilarious. In hindsight, of course.

They weren’t one bit amusing when they were actually happening.

Authors Drs. Steven J. Wolin and Sybil Wolin would likely say that this ability to see humour in a catastrophic health crisis can be a key ingredient in healing resiliency. In their book The Resilient Self, they describe creativity and humour respectively in this way: “they turn nothing into something and something into nothing.”   Continue reading “Resilience: it’s hard to feel like a victim when you’re laughing” →

Why your heart needs work – not rest! – after a heart attack

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 4 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas   ♥   @HeartSisters

After surviving a heart attack, I couldn’t wait to start my 3-month cardiac rehabilitation program so I would just start feeling “normal” again. But when I showed up for my first assessment, I was disappointed by the cardiac nurse’s recommendation that, because of ongoing issues, I should wait two months until I felt much stronger before starting. A Canadian study from the University of Alberta now suggests, however, that earlier might just be better for many.

For best results in most clinically stable patients after a heart attack, these new findings suggest that early exercise as well as prolonged exercise may well be the key to the best post-heart attack outcomes.  Continue reading “Why your heart needs work – not rest! – after a heart attack” →