I haven't forgotten yesterday...
...I said it would be continued, and it will be, but I have something else to share for today.
Last night I was at a music meeting and we spoke about Valentine's Day, Mothering Sunday and birthdays, then, of course, we are in a period of Lent leading up to Easter so I thought I would talk today about, the heart.
The Heart - Part One
I am sure that you have heard, or even said, phrases like,
"he/she is heartless."
"he/she doesn't have a heart."
"he/she has a heart of stone."
"he/she is suffering from a broken heart."
The fact is, that, despite medical advances, without a heart we would not be alive.
So we need to look after our hearts in order to have a healthy life. My research tells me that we are advised to observe the following .(in order to keep our heart healthy:
Eat healthy.
Be active every day (sitting for too long is not good).
Stay at a healthy weight.
Quit smoking, keep away from second-hand smoke and tabacco products.
Keep your cholesterol, blood pressure and sugar levels under control.
If you drink alcohol, drink only in moderation.
Manage stress.
I realise that not all of these are very easy to, and for some, there is more than one item on that list that needs to be addressed, so where do you start?
Before I do, let me give you a bit of information about your heart. First of all, it weighs less than a pound, beats 100,000 times a day and over 2.5 BILLION times in the average lifetime.
If that isn't enough, imagine walking around the world twice. How tired would that make you? How many times would you need to stop for a rest? Well our system of blood vessels is over 600,000 miles long and that's how far our small heart pumps blood!
No wonder we need to look after it. Genetics do play a part in some aspects, such as (but not exclusively) high cholesterol/blood pressure, We don't need to get up in the morning, stop, eating, drinking, smoking, and start running a marathon. I'm guessing that would certainly raise your stress levels and is an impossible task. But there are steps we can take to help.
Babies learn to walk gradually, so why not see what you can cut down on to make a start? A short, ten minute walk each day is a good beginning. It might be that you can then increase the intensity of your walk, or the length of it. You know what you are able to fit in to your current lifestyle and what you need to work on to keep your heart healthy.
We all know someone who has lived to the ripe old age of ... and they ... as well as those who took care of all the points above and still went on to have a heart attack, maybe even die at a young age. The truth is we are all mortal and our physical bodies will expire at some point, most of us don't know when that will be, so all we can do is be as careful as we can and look after ourselves to the best of our abilities.
Jeany Pavett, Author of Life After Death: A Mother's Story
Photo by Will O on Unsplash
