Healthy enough

I love this piece – New Health Rule: Quit Worrying About Your Health

Now Dr. Susan M. Love, one of the country’s most respected women’s health specialists, offers a new rule: stop worrying about your health.

In the new book, “Live a Little! Breaking the Rules Won’t Break Your Health” (Crown), Dr. Love makes the case that perfect health is a myth and that most of us are living far more healthful lives than we realize.

Dr. Love, a clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that failing to live by the various health rules is a major source of stress and guilt, particularly for women. For most of us, “pretty healthy” is healthy enough.

“Is the goal to live forever?” she said in a recent interview. “I would contend it’s not. It’s really to live as long as you can with the best quality of life you can. The problem was all of these women I kept meeting who were scared to death if they didn’t eat a cup of blueberries a day they would drop dead.”

The book, written with Alice D. Domar, a Harvard professor and senior staff psychologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, explores the research and advice in six areas of health — sleep, stress, prevention, nutrition, exercise and relationships. In all six, they write, the biggest risks are on the extremes, and the middle ground is bigger than we think.

“Everything is a U-shaped curve,” Dr. Love said. “There may be times in your life when you’ve gotten too much of this or too little of that, but being in the middle is better, and most of us are probably there already.”

Wow – I am so glad that they have written a book.  Health depends on accumulated behavioral activity.  My rules are simple. 

1. Do not smoke (that is really a no brainer)
2. Use alcohol moderately – some alcohol trumps no alcohol for health
3. Avoid illicit drugs – marijuana is likely an exception, but even then use infrequently
4. Avoid obesity – you need not achieve thin, but rather avoid obesity – a bit overweight seems to not cause problems
5. Exercise regularly – at least modest aerobic exercise during which you raise your heart rate – I would shoot for 3 times per week on average
6. Try to eat a balanced diet – I like the Mediterranean Diet – although I cannot tell you exactly the components
7. Minimize over the counter drugs – every drug has side effects
8. Laugh daily
9. On average sleep long enough – we all have days that we cannot get enough sleep, but we should arrange our lives to usually find enough sleep time
10. Enjoy life

They argue that we should not worry about every rule that someone publishes.  I agree, so feel free to ignore my list.

Have a great day – laugh about something – try to do a bit of exercise and get a good night's sleep.