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”?” →