– posts here focus on how to address your risk factors to help prevent heart disease
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
I was contacted by the British Medical Journal recently, asking me for a heart patient’s perspective on a new cardiovascular risk calculator. It’s been launched by the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS), and claims that it can tell you your real heart age. Here’s what I wrote . . . Continue reading “Yet another cardiac risk calculator? My response in the British Medical Journal”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
” Physicians, get out your prescription pads and prescribe this book to every one of your heart patients. This encouraging, common sense and easy-to-read book deserves to be in the hands of all freshly-diagnosed heart patients and those who love them.”
That’s the little blurb I wrote for Oregon cardiologist Dr. James Beckerman’s book, Heart To Start.* As explained in last week’s book excerpt published here, Dr. B believes that heart disease is essentially a sitting disease. To rally against that, he embraces a profound belief that “exercise is medicine” – and this is especially important for all of us heart patients. In fact, he believes that physical exercise is the least prescribed yet most effective heart treatment. Far too many of us, however, get little or no regular physical activity – particularly while recuperating from a cardiac event – and instead insist on doing something that just might be dangerous to our health: we sit.
But Dr. Beckerman believes that what we most need to do is to move more. We were “born to walk”, he reminds us. And even if we weren’t born to walk, we sure weren’t born to be sitting around all day. Continue reading “Were you “born to walk”?”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
When Oregon cardiologist Dr. James Beckerman sent me a copy of his new book called Heart To Start and asked me to review it, I agreed – but I have to tell you that it took me a month to actually open it and read it. These days, I’m often invited to review heart-related books of varying quality, so I tend to be a wee bit wary when taking on another review. But I’d already been following Dr. B for some time on Twitter, and I’d quoted him in this 2013 article – so part of me really, really hoped I would like his new book.
But I was wrong. By the end of the first chapter, I realized that I didn’t like this book. I loved it! Continue reading “Heart disease is a sitting disease”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Back when I was a run leader at the Y Marathon Running Clinic, we’d have an overflow crop of eager new participants at our first Sunday morning run of each New Year. Some even told me that this was finally going to be the year in which they quit smoking, lost 30 pounds, and ran a marathon! “Pick one!” was my pragmatic response to such announcements . . . Continue reading “The Sitting-Rising Test: what’s your score?”
Heart Sisters 