Health & Nutrition
Controlling Your Risk For Heart Disease
In our first newsletter I talked about the need to keep tabs on certain health indicators. Most of them don’t cause any symptoms when they are merely abnormal, so unless you specifically measure them, you won’t know that they are abnormal. High LDL and total cholesterol, high blood pressure, being overweight or obese and being inactive all increase your risk of cardiovascular disease including heart attack and stroke. So does low HDL. Excess weight, inactivity and hypertension increase your chance of developing diabetes.
But there is good news! Adopting a healthier lifestyle through increased physical activity, better nutrition and weight loss can make a huge difference! Research tells us that just a 10-15% decrease in weight for someone who is overweight can significantly decrease their risk of heart disease.
Benefits For Diabetes Too!
Diabetes is also positively impacted by changing to a healthier lifestyle. Doctors now recognize an entity called pre-diabetes. The pre-diabetic is diagnosed by a glucose level higher than normal but not high enough to cause them to be classified as diabetic. Many of these pre-diabetics will develop diabetes and, even while they are pre-diabetics, they carry an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. Some doctors prescribe a medication for these pre-diabetics that will prevent many of them from becoming true diabetics. Since being overweight and inactive seems to lead to this pre-diabetes condition, some doctors studied the effect of weight loss and increased activity on these pre-diabetics. They found that by adopting a healthier lifestyle the chance that these pre-diabetics would develop diabetes was cut by 58%. This result was better than that with the medication and, of course, without its cost and potential side effects.
You're Not Just Losing Weight - You're Getting Healthier!
Weight loss and increased physical activity also helps control hypertension, lower total and LDL cholesterol and triglycerides while increasing HDL cholesterol (the “good” cholesterol).
Bottom line: Each of our members has her own personal reason that motivates her to expend the effort on her weight loss program, but they each reap health benefits while they journey to their personal goal!
Next time I’ll talk a little about the role of physical activity in your weight loss program.
For Your Health! - Dr. Bob
