Health Conditions Holding You Back?
“I have currently high blood pressure and heart conditions. My father passed away of a heart attack at 50 and I am about to turn 49. I want to be around to watch my grand kids grown up. ”
“I have osteopenia an have been having chronic bone fractures. I’m a 72 and am worried that if I fall, I may break my hip. I like living being independent and don’t want to end up in a nursing home.”
Are Health Conditions holding you back from doing what you love?
Health is more than just having a 6 pack. There are many interconnected systems that impact each other from the health of your heart, brain, gut, body, etc. I’ve known people who are young and look like an elite athlete on the outside, but suffered from heart conditions, cancer, mental illness, you name it. While family history may show that you are predisposed to certain health conditions, your lifestyle plays a really big role.
Knowing your risk factors and risk for certain health conditions can help inform a lifestyle game plan to mitigate some of that risk. Here are a few common conditions, some proxy measurements that you can use to assess risk and some strategies to address them. Note, that this is not meant to be a medical diagnosis or a medical prescription of any kind. These are generalized health measurements and risk factors of common health conditions, but you should ALWAYS work with your doctor for any kind of medical diagnosis or medical prescription. The goal here is simply to provide some simple, yet informative health information that can create some awareness around these issues.
Heart Conditions
Measurements:
Blood Pressure and Resting Heart Rate are two of the most common proxy measures for heart health and readily available to the public. Both are best taken first thing in the morning from a seated position in a chair with your arm relaxed on a table. As an engineer I am strict about managing controls during experiments to limit the impact of variables changing.
What they mean:
Blood pressure is a sign of how much resistance your heart faces while pumping blood throughout the body. Think about sucking a milk shake through a straw versus drinking water through a straw. High blood pressure means more resistance, which means your heart has to work hard just to sustain everyday life. You want your heart to have as easy of a time as possible to do everyday activities, which in this case means as low pressure as possible.
Aim to keep blood pressure below 115 / 75 per the American Heart Associations guideline. Most doctors won’t prescribe medication until your blood pressure is already very problematic, and even then it’s the medication that is managing your blood pressure not your cardiovascular system. If heart health is something you care about, you should absolutely prioritize lowering your blood pressure.
What you can do:
Resting Heart Rate is another sign of how hard your heart needs to work in order to circulate blood throughout the body. A high heart rate, means your heart is probably pumping blood at a low stroke volume and needs to compensate by performing extra beats to sustain everyday life. Think about trying to fill up a large bucket with water from your bathroom sink versus the bath tub. The bath tub has such a large faucet that the volume of water is releases is significantly greater than that of the small faucet on your bathroom sink. You want your heart to have as easy of a time as possible to do everyday activities, which in this case means as few beats as possible.
Aim to keep your resting heart rate below 60 bpm, but if you are really serious about your heart health, getting sub 50 bpm is a great goal that reflect good cardiovascular fitness.
Osteopenia (Low Bone Density)
Measurements:
A DEXA scan is a common and accessible way to measure bone density and can be performed at many doctors offices.
What they mean:
Bone density as it sounds looks at the density of your bones, which basically gives you an idea of how strong your bones are. Typically you hear than bone density goes down with age, but what you may not know is that you have a lot of control over your bone density. Bone is a living tissue like everything else in your body and it adapts directly to the stresses placed upon it. A simple example is that astronauts who travel to space for long periods of time can actually experience a loss of bone density due to the lower exposure to gravity. But if an astronaut were to live on a “high gravity” planet for a year their bone density would actually increase.
If you think about building your body like building a house, you need to have the right ingredients in order to build it. If all you have is some cardboard boxes and tree branches, you might be able to build a small fort, but probably not a strong house. Your body needs to get enough nutrients to supply the building blocks you need, so nutrition is also important.
Lastly, sleep and recovery is where the “rebuilding” process actually happens. Placing stressful demands on the body breaks things down and can trigger your body to react by building itself back up, but the building up phase happens after the workout, not during.
What you can do:
Similar to gravity, strength training is one of the primary methods for building up bone density because it increases your body to exposure of higher loads which it then needs to grow stronger and more dense in order to adapt to. Strength training twice per week is a good minimum threshold to aim for. Start with loads you feel comfortable with and progress them slowly over time as your body adapts.
Another options that actually gets a bad reputation is running or high impact activities. People tend to get hurt with high impact activities not because impact is bad, but because they exceed their capacity of their bodies tissues. Impact is another way of placing a stress demand on your bones, causing them to grow stronger, which is why runners tend to have very high bone density in their lower body. However you do need to find an appropriate stating point that stays within the capacity for your tissues to handle. Like strength training, you can build up the intensity and/or volume of impact slowly over time as your body adapts.
Additionally on the nutrition side, a high protein diet will help give you the building blocks your body needs to build stronger bones.
Obesity
Measurements:
Body fat percentage is a good measurement to use for obesity. This can be done using body fat calipers, a weight scale with impedance measurements or a DEXA scan. Most people think about their body weight or BMI, but that can be a bit deceiving because it doesn’t give an indication of the quality of your weight with respect to body fat versus lean body mass. That exact context gives you A LOT more information than just weight or BMI alone.
The term “skinny fat” became a slang term for someone who is at a normal or even low weight, but high body fat percentage. So it can be deceiving that their weight and BMI may appear to be normal/low, but in reality they may suffer from both low muscle mass and relatively high body fat percentages.
What they mean:
You body is made up of a bunch of stuff, but can be broke down into 3 simple buckets:
Body fat
The stuff most people want to get rid of.
Excess can be correlated to higher risk of with other health issues and higher levels of imflamation.
Lean body mass
Bone, muscle, skin, organs, etc the stuff most people want to build up.
Muscle is one of the biggest contributors to your metabolism, so keeping this high is very important, especially for weight loss.
Water/Food
What you eat and drink can cause daily fluctuations up to 10 lbs per day.
This is what most people see as changes on the scale when they measure daily and why people tend to over react to the short term ups and downs or cutting out certain foods that may actually help they loose weight. It is important not to get fluctuations here confused with changes to body fat.
This is also why if you do a fast or stop eating for a day, your weight will go down, but you didn’t actually impact fat at all yet… This doesn’t mean what you did isn’t helpful, it just means it didn’t do what you think it did.
What you can do:
Eating at a calorie deficit will allow you to begin losing weight, but you should be sure to keep your protein intake high.
Eating high protein and strength training will allow you to preserve muscle mass and thus preserve a higher metabolism.
If you track your weight, track it daily, but don’t put any stock into the individual numbers. Only look at the trends over time using a 7 day running average. This will reduce the noise created by those daily fluctuations in water and food weight so you can focus on the stuff that matters. ONLY react to trends with your 7 day running average looking at week over week or month over month changes. You may see you weight go up on a particular day because of water/food, but if you body fat is going down then it’s still a win.
Get back to doing what you love without apprehension! If you need help identifying the low hanging fruit in your life that could help to lower those risk factors, setup a free consultation with me.