How to Prevent a Stroke

Information from Your Family Doctor

How to Prevent a Stroke

What is a stroke?

A stroke happens when there is a problem with the blood supply to a part of the brain. The area of the brain that does not get enough blood becomes damaged.
A stroke can happen when a blood clot blocks an artery in the brain. A stroke also can happen when the wall of an artery bursts.


Depending on which part of the brain has poor blood supply, a stroke can be mild to severe. Here are some problems strokes can cause:

• Problems with moving (including paralysis)
• Problems with feeling
• Loss of vision
• Problems with thinking, understanding, or communicating (that is, problems with speaking, reading, or writing)
• Changes in emotion or behavior


What increases my risk of having a stroke?

Strokes can happen in anyone, but they tend to be more common in older men, black people, and Asian people. Although we cannot change our age, gender, or race, we can control the following risk factors for stroke:

• Tobacco use
• High cholesterol levels
• Inactive lifestyle
• High blood pressure
• Diabetes
• Heavy alcohol use
• Atrial fibrillation, which is an unsteady heart rhythm (say: ay-tree-all fib-rill-ay-shun)

What can I do to lower my risk of having a stroke?

Here are some things everyone can do to lower their chances of having a stroke—these things will also lower your risk of having a heart attack:
• Get your blood pressure checked regularly and get treatment if it is high. High blood pressure is a “silent” illness with no warning signs.
• If you smoke—stop! Ask your family doctor for ways to help you quit.
• Eat low-fat foods, and have your cholesterol levels checked by your family doctor.
• Exercise regularly—for at least 30 minutes on most days of the week.
• Keep your weight under control. If you are overweight, lose weight.
• If you have diabetes, control your blood sugar levels. Controlling your diabetes will help your heart, kidneys, eyes, and brain.

Can medicine help lower my risk of stroke?

Medicines can help prevent strokes in some people. If you need one of these medicines, your family doctor will prescribe it for you.

If you have high blood pressure, and diet, exercise, and weight loss do not control it, you may need to take medicine to lower your blood pressure. Lowering blood pressure in people who have hypertension is the most important way to prevent stroke.
If your cholesterol level is high and exercise and diet do not lower it, you may need to take a cholesterol-lowering medicine.

If you have atrial fibrillation, you may need to take a blood thinner such as warfarin (brand name: Coumadin).

Aspirin can lower the risk of stroke in some people. However, aspirin is not for everyone. There are risks associated with taking aspirin every day.

Please visit: http://www.aafp.org/afp/2003/1215/p2389.html for more information about how to prevent stroke and health information.

PS: Please consult with your doctor for more information.

Why is it important to eat fruit?

Do you like fruit?


Eating fruit provides health benefits — people who eat more fruits and vegetables as part of an overall healthy diet are likely to have a reduced risk of some chronic diseases. Fruits provide nutrients vital for health and maintenance of your body.

Health benefits

Eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables as part of an overall healthy diet may reduce risk for stroke and perhaps other cardiovascular diseases.

Eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables as part of an overall healthy diet may reduce risk for type 2 diabetes.

Eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables as part of an overall healthy diet may protect against certain cancers, such as mouth, stomach, and colon-rectum cancer.Diets rich in foods containing fiber, such as fruits and vegetables, may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease.


Eating fruits and vegetables rich in potassium as part of an overall healthy diet may reduce the risk of developing kidney stones and may help to decrease bone loss.

Eating foods such as fruits that are low in calories per cup instead of some other higher-calorie food may be useful in helping to lower calorie intake.

Nutrients
Most fruits are naturally low in fat, sodium, and calories. None have cholesterol.Fruits are important sources of many nutrients, including potassium, dietary fiber, vitamin C, and folate (folic acid).Diets rich in potassium may help to maintain healthy blood pressure.

Fruit sources of potassium include bananas, prunes and prune juice, dried peaches and apricots, cantaloupe, honeydew melon, and orange juice.Dietary fiber from fruits, as part of an overall healthy diet, helps reduce blood cholesterol levels and may lower risk of heart disease.

Fiber is important for proper bowel function. It helps reduce constipation and diverticulosis. Fiber-containing foods such as fruits help provide a feeling of fullness with fewer calories. Whole or cut-up fruits are sources of dietary fiber; fruit juices contain little or no fiber.

Vitamin C is important for growth and repair of all body tissues, helps heal cuts and wounds, and keeps teeth and gums healthy.Folate (folic acid) helps the body form red blood cells.

Women of childbearing age who may become pregnant and those in the first trimester of pregnancy should consume adequate folate, including folic acid from fortified foods or supplements. This reduces the risk of neural tube defects, spina bifida, and anencephaly during fetal development.

.....The Best Get-Happy Foods : Leafy greens - Mood-Boosting Ingredient: Folic Acid
Research has shown that the folic acid in leafy greens such as kale and spinach can reduce depression and even improve blood flow to the brain. If you're not eating at least one serving per day you're more than likely low in folic acid, so try getting more or consider taking a multivitamin that contains it. - Abigail L. Cuffey/Woman's Day

From : THE SPIRITS OF HEALTHY LIVING

16 Reasons NOT to Diet

Check out this list of 16 Reasons NOT to Diet. I’m reposting the whole list here because it’s THAT good. I came across it on the awesome Through Thick and Thin Forum and it really resonated. The original author of the list, Golda from Body Love Wellness, has a great reason for picking 16 reasons:

To support you in this journey, I am reprinting my 16 Reasons Not To Diet. Why 16? Because that’s the average dress size of American women!

And here's the list!

1) Many diets support the use of non-nutritional, highly chemicalized foods like fake fats and fake sugars. These chemicalized foods negatively affect body chemistry, cause low-level undernourishment, and often encourage overeating when the dieter gets the signal that s/he is not getting nourishment.
2) Diets have such a high failure rate that they are really a gamble with a low chance of success. If you look at the fine print of most studies on diets, they will tell you that diets have a 90-99% long-term failure rate. People lose some weight, only to find it creep back up, often surpassing their initial, pre-diet weight. Even the “successful” dieters often don’t keep all of their weight off.
3) Dieting gives dieters the message that they cannot trust their internal sense of what nourishes them. This distrust of internal signals affects other aspects of a dieter’s life, where they seek external approval and control of their non-food
related actions.
4) The diet industry has a deep interest in the failure of dieters—if everyone got skinny, they’d go out of business.
5) Dieters’ self esteem is often tied to their weight—they feel good about themselves when they’re losing weight and bad about themselves when they’re gaining weight.
6) The diet system reinforces low self esteem in dieters by making them feel like they have no “willpower” when they have diet lapses. In actuality, diets encourage people to ignore their internal will in exchange for the perceived will of the diet industry.
7) Rather than being about nourishment, food often becomes about reward and punishment for dieters.
8) Diets cause dieters (who are often women) to revolve their lives around food
rather than other things that may really matter to them (relationships, careers,
social issues).
9) Diets cause a lot of body hatred, particularly when the dieter isn’t losing weight. Dieters tend to see their bodies as wrong and problematic when they’re not seeing the “results” they want.
10) Diets often categorize foods as good/okay vs. bad/forbidden. Just like our culture’s genesis story revolves around a woman eating a forbidden food (the apple), it’s human nature to want what’s forbidden. Thus, it’s no wonder that dieters often crave forbidden foods even more once they are forbidden, and then hate themselves for eating those foods (maybe because they’re made to feel as though they’ve caused all of humanity to become sinners).
11) Diets encourage what I like to call “lottery thinking”—most dieters know that diets haven’t really worked for them nor most of the people they know, yet they think that this new diet is going to make them thin, and they’ll finally be in that tiny successful group.
12) Most diet programs are expensive. I cringe when I think about the money that I and my friends and family have spent over the years on Weight Watchers, special
shakes and diet pills!
13) For some people, diets are like Band-aids on deep scars. For people who really overeat and eat unconsciously, they often eat to numb their feelings and consciousness. Their issue is not really “portion control.” In fact, they often are too controlling of themselves and their emotions.
14) Diets assume that all fat people eat too much. They don’t account for the fact that people come in all shapes and sizes, and that a person’s weight is not an indicator of overall health.
15) The weight loss/gain cycle created by dieting is more stressful on the body than just being plain, old fat.
16) Diets work on a scarcity principle. Diets make dieters focus on lack, tell them they can only have “this much and no more” and that to want more is a bad thing. Because dieting is so all-encompassing, this scarcity principle often filters into other aspects of dieters’ lives. They begin to see lack and scarcity in their relationships, in their jobs, in the world.

Big thanks to Gina at Through Thick and Thin for posting this there. This list really gets at the heart of the futility of dieting and the body hatred it inspired in me. Fighting that uphill dieting battle was causing me nothing but pain. Learning to accept myself as I am is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever tried to do, even harder than the dieting, I think. But the reward is so much greater. It takes a lot to completely turn my worldview upside down and to start swimming in the other direction. It feels strange and sometimes lonely. But I know in my heart that I’m doing the right thing for me. For all the effort I put into dieting, what did I get? A lot of feelings of failure and the opposite of what I thought I wanted (I became bigger in the long run, instead of smaller).

Though painful at first, letting go of the goal of weight loss is freeing me up to engage with myself and others in ways I haven’t before. Instead of joining in to body-shaming conversations, I try to be the voice of reason and love. The world is a hard enough place sometimes, without piling on abuse our very selves. I loved the End Fat Talk movement from last month – it was a great way to get this discussion going and to bring awareness to this problem. Now, we have to take it one step further and bravely step away from the scales that arbitrarily determine our moods and often, even our self worth. It’s time to ditch the outside voice of some random authority that makes money on perpetuating our struggle. Who gave them the right to decide what we need to eat? Are we that out of touch with ourselves that we don’t even get to decide that? I think we can do better for ourselves and I will start by reminding myself of the truth contained in this list everyday.

I know there will be some differing opinions out there – please share your perspective below. Do you think that diets work? When they don’t, do you assume it’s all your fault and that you messed up? Do you think the diet industry truly wants you to find lasting success (and quit getting your cash)? Are you willing to devote yourself to food restriction for the rest of your life? Is that really a reasonable expectation? And if not, what’s the alternative? How can we all lead happy and content lives at home in our skin without becoming obsessive? Please share your experience and any insights you’ve found that help ease the body shaming that is so rampant and excepted in society.

To Lose Weight, Feed Your Brains

As you may know, as soon as you put yourself on a diet, you only have one thought left: to eat. Sooner or later, it will overcome you...except if you hit first.

When was the last time you focused so much on a task that you forgot to eat? You did not really forget, but you were too much interested in what you were working on to stop doing it and go to the fridge. Years ago, when your body was slim and your head swollen with projects, did you ever think that to be a grown up would not mean to be responsible and free?

Stop looking for somebody to sue: nobody shovelled food in your mouth. Stop whining about commercials that influence you: nobody tied you up in front of the telly. Stop opening your mouth and closing your mind.

You know, everybody know, that the higher the education, the lower the weight. If you point at a person you know who has a PhD and 30 extra pounds, you act exactly as those people who say that there is no correlation between smoking and lung cancer since their grand father died of old age after having smoked thousands of cigarettes. I don't write for you. Bye bye!

Now that we are between us, let's move on to the main point. How much does this portrait look like you:
- You often feel incredibly bored,
- You think that you are more worth than what you show,
- If you were given a new start, you would lead your life differently,
- You cannot help wishing something else than getting up to go to work each morning,
- In fact, it looks sometimes so vain that you'd rather stay in bed.

Do you recognize yourself? If yes, the choice is limited: either you fall in a depression, or you feed your brains. Since in order to get out of a depression, you would have to feed your brains, jump directly to the second solution!

First, recognize your qualities and make them shine in others' eyes. Modesty? You are not asked to show haughtiness but to get a sense of pride from your abilities. Would the world be better if Mozart's father had shyly hidden his son's gift? Don't let anyone mislead you: those who advocate modesty have nothing to show. Most time, they do not want you to succeed because it would be the evidence of their own failure. They brandish their righteousness against you because it is, by far, easier to damage your chances than to improve themselves. So, be honest and recognize your qualities.

Some people might advise you to devote your life to a charity cause. It is another way to prevent you from going ahead of them. Do you think that it would have been a great idea if Pasteur had chosen, out of charity, to visit the poor instead of inventing "pasteurization"?

Then, choose the domain in which you will be able to scintillate. Again, do not be humble. The satisfaction of reaching a goal is proportional to the difficulty you encounter to reach it. If you aim to learn arranging flowers, sure, you will succeed, but you will feel as bored as today and your thirst for something to fulfill your life will remain as burning as it is right now. You need to be confronted with a task exciting enough to prevent you from dropping it to go out to eat, or to take time to order a pizza. If the excitement is not rewarding enough, you are going to turn towards "the fridge consolation".

Your goal must also be rather difficult because you are going to need time to change your way of life; so, decide to master the violin, to write an anthology about Roman Poetry, to learn a foreign language or to obtain a degree in chemistry; anything requiring your intellectual faculties to fully work and that you will not be able to complete in a couple of weeks is an activity that deserves to be chosen. Of course, the better you like your goal, the greater your chance to reach it, but do not worry: usually, we are attracted by what we guess we are good at.

Not only "decide" to change, make your decision official: proudness will help you to go on the day you are tired or disheartened.

Multiply your chances to succeed by eliminating the childish desire for "telling them". If you suffer from not being estimated at your true value, make yourself known to your own eyes. The rest will come. Within three years you are going to gain higher education that will lead you to higher income while losing extra weight.

Sure, people will notice.


By: Gabrielle Guichard


About the author:
Gabrielle Guichard, a French teacher who can be reached on http://GabrielleGuichard.comand listened to on http://FrenchPodcasting.com

Do You “Struggle with Your Weight”?

It’s a common phrase – one I’ve used myself many a time. I used it as a way to express that I was somehow a work-in-progress, that I knew and understood that I was flawed and that I was expending effort to fix the problem. It was a badge to hold up and say, “See, at least I know there’s a problem!” I could participate in the larger culture with my fat-exemption card. I have to admit that it was a big part of my identity, to the point where I created a whole social life around myself built on the very premise. Struggling together was easier than struggling alone because we all know, struggling sucks. It’s hard. It’s energy draining. It took over my life. I decided to revisit this idea after reading this post over at Living 400 lbs.

Now, I’d like to say that the struggle is over – that I’ve learned my lesson and all is healed. If it were only that easy. Life is never black and white and I am swimming my way through the gray. Some days I fully embody Margaret Cho’s Fuck it Diet, and feel really great, really in tune with what my body needs to function well and wants just for the joy of it. Other days, the anxiety creeps in and the struggle resurfaces as an effort to silence the food police in my head and the nasty thoughts about my current (and frightening-to-think-about future weight).

The one real tool I have to combat these negative feelings is exercise. The thing I sometimes forgot about when “working out” to try to lose weight, is that moving my body feels fantastic. Getting going is the hard part but usually I feel good while doing it and really good afterwards. It’s hard to feel bad about myself when I’ve just done an hour plus of walking, yoga, pilates, or other strength training. It just doesn’t compute. What I try to avoid, however, are the thoughts about how doing these things will somehow prevent the apocalypse of The Ever-Expanding-Amelia outcome that I so fear. I cannot claim to have overcome that one yet, but practice makes perfect. I try to reframe my desires for movement as something that is showing myself care, that I’m doing it to feel better in my own skin. The goal cannot be weight loss. It just doesn’t work for me. It makes the whole thing into a chore, something that must be checked off the good-fatty checklist. There is no faster way to churn up Please-Just-Let-Me-Sit-On-The-Couch thoughts than that.

I’ve started to notice that the more I talk to myself in this way, the closer I come to believing it. It’s the whole fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy in action. So, I’m calling it – I’m done with the “struggling” metaphor. My body and I are on the same team. Even when my brain sometimes rebels and I have to talk her down, we’re still on the same side. It’s all me and it’s all good. I’m all good. I don’t need or want fixing. I can take excellent care of myself with wholesome, yummy food and fun, joyful activity. I can do all that without the goal of changing my body or losing weight. I can be healthy and not at war with my body. I’m calling a permanent cease fire.

Does anyone else use this metaphor? Do you think it's helping or hurting your efforts to be happy and healthy?

Oh, to be a Red Shoe Blogger

I love my little piece of the internet – it’s right here and it’s all mine. AND, I love The Wizard of Oz – so much so that I went to see it in the theater for its 70th anniversary a couple weeks ago. What do these two things have in common? Blogging is like The Wizard of Oz and there’s no place like home.

This has to be my #1 favorite blog post, like EVER. And it has nothing to do with health or finances (well, a bit, actually…) It boils down to talking about what really makes a blog successful. You see, many people have gotten into the biz of blogging to *gasp* try to make money. They learn and employ all the tricks to drive traffic and boost revenue. But if the content isn’t there, if there’s nothing behind all the bells and whistles, you’re left holding a bag of useless trinkets. Eventually, the whole thing will pop like an overinflated hot air balloon.

Well, no one could accuse me of THAT. I write what I want when I darn well feel like it. I must confess that it tickles me to know that you all (both of you!) are reading, but I don’t do anything specific to try to get more eyeballs. I don’t go around commenting on other blogs just to get people to track back to me. If I’m moved to share my thoughts, I do, if not, I cruise on by… I’ve also abandoned all hope or effort to make any money at this. I used to have some ads but they were awful weightloss or payday loans, most of the time. And who has the time or energy to police that stuff? All for a few pennies (and by this, I mean that literally). So, the ads went by-by and I like how uncluttered this space is. As I said, it’s mine and I love it.

So I’ll keep doing my thing, sporting my Beautifeel Size 9-wide sensible red heels (they may not be sparkly, but they FIT), strutting in and out as I please, talking about what’s important to me, on my schedule. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

The iPhone and My Healthy Life

It’s been a week since the Cute Man and I gleefully made our way to the Apple Store and bought our iPhones. I must say that it has more than compensated for the sadness of having to give back the Mini (HP Netbook). It really is everything I thought it would be and I have absolutely no regrets about the purchase (financial or otherwise). Good financial management is about making choices based on what’s important to you. And after 2 years of waiting for our contract to be up (we regretted not doing this almost right away when we chose Verizon over going with AT&T and the iPhone), we wanted these puppies and we wanted them something fierce. So, we planned for this expense and are thrilled with the result. It doesn’t even look like we’ll be paying THAT much more, especially considering how much more we’re getting for the money.

It’s a whole new world, especially for me. CM had his iPod Touch so it was basically just an upgrade/consolidation thing for him. But for me, the “just give me the free phone” girl, it was a revelation. It is the most fantastic thing I’ve ever owned. I’ve downloaded applications for everything from free music to stream based on my preferences (Pandora), to ones that help me practice my German with fun little games, to full-on yoga classes. It’s incredible. Not to mention the old standbys of weather, online banking, and maps. And I can read my Kindle books on it! I even downloaded the entire Firefly television season (plus the movie Serenity among others), which I have been watching every free moment.

To complement my new toy, I’ve gotten some accessories as well: a Sony iPhone alarm clock with great sound from the speakers, a charger for my car, and my new favorite FREE DIY iPhone stand that I made out of an old card.

At this point, it’s time to put on the breaks and just enjoy what I’ve got. There are so many free things to do/get with it (podcasts, free apps, Pandora and music I already have, Kindle books I already have, and free audio books that I found in an app) that I can stop the bleeding (spending) now and be quite content for some time.

I also plan to save some cash by using the low cost strength training and yoga apps that I downloaded. I will keep up with my paid yoga classes (2 times per week), but I’m going to forgo at least one of the two weekly paid Pilates classes and work out with my apps in the free work gym instead. We’ll see how that goes. I like the classes because they are an appointment to keep so it lends some structure. However, I think I can capitalize on my love-affair with my new gadget to lend some added motivation to hit the gym on my own.

After only one week, I know I’ve just scratched the surface of what my iPhone is capable of but I’m thrilled with what I’ve discovered so far. Going forward, I will have to be mindful to take the most advantage of the capabilities without frivolously buying things with little thought (which is EASY to do, I know). But all in all, I couldn’t be happier!