by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
A recent study of over 200,000 Australians suggests that you might want to stand up if you happen to be sitting down right now. This study*, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that prolonged sitting is a health risk independent of physical activity, and adds to the growing body of evidence that people who sit the most die the soonest – and, worse, you may not be able to exercise this effect away.
I don’t know about you, but I thought that last finding was disturbing.
In fact, Aussie researchers reported that not even getting regular physical exercise can outweigh the higher mortality risks associated with sitting more than 11 hours a day. Healthy or sick, active or inactive, the more people sat, the more likely they were to die sooner than non-sedentary people. Continue reading “Are you reading this sitting down? Don’t!”
There are few life events more stressful, in my considered opinion, than surviving a heart attack. Not only is the actual cardiac event a traumatic and overwhelming experience in itself, but what very few cardiologists tell us before they boot us out the hospital door is how debilitating the day-to-day angst about every little subsequent bubble and squeak can actually be. I can recall, for example, feeling virtually paralyzed with fear over unexpected chest pains following my heart attack (symptoms, I later learned from my cardiac nurse, that are often called “stretching pain” – common in recently stented coronary arteries). These symptoms turned out to be relatively benign – NOT the massive second heart attack I feared they signaled at the time.
Heart Sisters 