Heart-Embracing Lifestyle Plan (HELP)
HeartCoaches offer you the opportunity to embrace a healthy heart as the guiding principle for making important lifestyle choices--choices specifically designed to improve your prospects for living a longer, healthier life. We combine the advice of your cardiologist, nutritionist and other health professionals, with the latest research on health and fitness protocols and the 'best practices' of coaching, to deliver an integrative approach that has proven effective in optimizing health and healing for those with heart disease and associated risk factors.
At the heart of our work is HELP-- a personalized Heart-Embracing Lifestyle Plan. HELP provides a framework for creating a health-promoting, life-enhancing vision that includes making changes across five lifestyle domains that directly impact the health of your heart and the quality of your life:
Heart Empathy
You're in constant conversation with your heart. You may not be familiar with all of the channels of communication, but there is a steady flow of information being exchanged between your brain and your heart and other areas of your body. For example, when you make decisions that threaten your heart, like eating a high cholesterol diet or avoiding physical exercise, your heart responds with expressions of "disdain". Your blood pressure rises. You start feeling chest pain. You have a heart attack. It may take some time before your heart's protest is heard, but eventually its displeasure is voiced, loud and clear. When you listen empathically to your heart and respond positively to its needs and interests, you're more likely to reap the rewards that come along with living a heart-embracing lifestyle: more energy, better immunity to disease, increased vitality and mood, longer life.
Medical science uses 'cardiac markers' to "listen to the conversation" going on in your body:
- Cholesterol and other lipids
- Coronary inflammation
- Blood clotting
- Weight
- Blood pressure
- Diabetes
- Metabolic syndrome
- Aerobic capacity
- Smoking
- Personality Type
These cardiac markers are selected not only because of their direct physiological links to your heart but also because each one is a gauge for measuring the effectiveness of your behavioral choices on achieving and maintaining a healthy heart.
Using data from a variety of sources (your cardiologist, nutritionist, other health professionals, lab work, clinical observation, etc.), your HeartCoach helps you create a personalized 'dashboard' of cardiac markers that can be used to guide your efforts in improving your prospects for optimal health and longevity. In a manner of speaking, we help you become a better listener and, where necessary, a better care-giver for your heart.
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Participating in daily physical activity is key to a healthy heart. Exercise is particularly important because it both directly and indirectly influences all cardiac markers. Regular exercise helps the heart in many ways:
- Strengthens cardiac muscle
- Conditions the heart
- Protects the coronary arteries
- Reduces blood clotting
- Boosts HDL cholesterol (high HDL is protective of heart health)
- Lowers blood pressure
- Promotes weight loss
- Reduces stroke risk
- Maintains oxygen uptake
- Reduces stress
A number of studies have examined the relationship between regular exercise and the incidence of heart disease, including studies that show that people who attain cardiovascular fitness through exercise reduce their risk of a heart attack by up to 50%. Your HeartCoach helps you ease your way into a regular routine of heart-healthy physical activity by supporting your efforts to combine a range of methods to increase your movement, flexibility, and stamina. These include aerobic exercise (jogging, swimming, biking, etc.), leisure activities (golf, bowling, dancing, etc.), recreational sports (touch football, tennis, volleyball, etc.), and every day activities (walking the dog, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, gardening, etc.).
Dietary habits are a significant factor in managing cardiac markers--particularly lipids, weight, blood pressure and diabetes. But what most of us choose to eat bears little resemblance to what we should eat for achieving and maintaining a healthy heart. Your HeartCoach works with you to review your nutritional habits in light of your specific cardiac markers, and then helps you adopt a dietary protocol that provides you with the insight and guidance to make nutritional choices that increasingly move you toward a heart-healthy way of eating. Old habits die hard, however, especially if your eating patterns are tied to other aspects of your life, like stress, mood, or self-esteem. That's why your Heart-Embracing Lifestyle Plan integrates these other dimensions of your life. For example, people who handle stress effectively are less responsive to anxiety, anger and "the blues" as eating cues. People who exercise regularly feel better about themselves and expect success in making healthy eating changes.
Obesity is particularly threatening to the heart. If weight loss is an issue and you want to achieve on-going success, your HeartCoach will first help you get rid of the concept of "dieting"--a short-term weight reduction program that sheds excess pounds rapidly by decreasing caloric intake. In this context, there is often no relationship between diet and permanent behavior change. You'll form a heart-embracing lifestyle habit only when you make permanent changes to your diet routines over the long-run. That's why the question your HeartCoach will ask you is not "How do you want to eat for the next week?", but "How do you want to eat for the rest of my life?"
Stress also threatens your heart. Experience a sudden job loss, relationship failure, or death of a loved one, or even something as "routine" as a hospitalization or retirement, and your fight-or-flight hormone--cortisol--sky rockets. Elevated cortisol levels make your heart blood vessels constrict, blood pressure rise, and your immune system falter, leaving you vulnerable to disease and illness. A distressed heart also expresses itself through a variety of painful and volatile emotions, such as fear, anger, and despair. Under continued duress, the heart becomes worn-out and begins to weaken. You feel tired, confused, depressed. You lose motivation. Stop trying. Or, conversely, you become wracked with chronic insomnia, disabling anxiety or seething rage. No wonder so many heart failures occur right after a stressful event.
Handling stress and stressful emotions can sometimes seem impossible. The key is knowing how emotions work, and that requires boosting your emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is your innate capacity to perceive emotion, integrate emotion into your thinking, understand the impact of emotions on your interactions with others, and to regulate your emotions to promote personal growth, health, and happiness. Your HeartCoach is well-versed in techniques for advancing your emotional intelligence and will help you learn how to manage stress better, express feelings more constructively, resolve conflicts in a nonviolent manner, and make responsible win-win decisions that take your emotions--and emotions of others--into account. By heightening your emotional intelligence, you'll start living a heart-embracing lifestyle that is more mindful, empathic, relaxed, cooperative, lighthearted...even stress-free!
People who live a heart-embracing lifestyle also have goals that concern the social and spiritual dimensions of their life. Playing bridge with friends, getting involved in a good cause with others who share your interest, attending religious services, going horse-back riding, meditating, volunteering, hiking in the woods, taking an adult ed class, joining a support group -- these are just a few of the many ways of expressing your social/spiritual self. And they can all have an impact on your health!
For example, caring for pets seems to be particularly therapeutic for people with or at-risk of heart disease. Researchers studied patients in a coronary-care unit at a major hospital. All had experienced a heart attack or had severe chest pain. In the one-year follow-up period, 28% of those who did not own pets died, as compared with only 6% of pet owners. Some experts believe the difference is primarily due to active involvement in the daily care of pets and from the unconditional love and acceptance that the animals offer their owners.
A 29-year study of people aged 25-55 found that those who attended religious services once a week had 36% lower mortality than non-attendees. As Dr. Fred Luskin of the Stanford University School of Medicine exclaims, "People who go to church, synagogue, mosque or Buddhist monastery once a week average 83 years of longevity. For those who do not go at all, longevity averages 75 years. You do the math!"
Your HeartCoach will help you explore your social/spiritual affinities and facilitate your involvement in those activities that you find most engaging, nurturing, and affirming. It just might save your life.
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