Love Your Heart

We celebrate Valentine’s Day with lace hearts, paper hearts, and chocolate hearts, but let’s not forget about our real hearts.

This weekend I read an interesting article in Good Housekeeping called, “How to Save Your Own Life.” It emphasized the importance of a healthy lifestyle to preventing heart disease, and outlined five key habits:

• not smoking
• exercising regularly
• maintaining a healthy weight
• eating well (including five or more daily servings of fruits and vegetables)
• drinking moderatelty (1-7 alcoholic drinks a week)

According to the article, the more of these habits that you keep, the better your odds of staying healthy. It’s not just enough to be at a healthy weight. It’s not just enough to exercise. “It’s a whole package.”

This Valentine’s Day, commit to loving your heart. Make time for a heart-pumping workout. Enjoy some steamed vegetables with your steak dinner. Indulge in strawberries dipped in dark chocolate.  Toast your love with a glass of red wine.

I was lucky to survive a blood clot that I ignored for weeks, and promised that I would never ignore symptoms or take my health for granted again. When I lost my Dad to heart failure last year, the prevention of heart disease became even more important to me.  So I urge you to learn the warning signs of heart attack and stroke, and don’t hesitate to
call 9-1-1 at the first sign of chest pain/discomfort/tightness, shortness of breath, or sudden numbness, weakness, diziness, confusion, or other sudden symptoms.

Did you know that heart disease is the number one killer of women?