Fitness: Your Cheapest Health Insurance

Fitness: Your Cheapest Health Insurance

The American Heart Association and its affiliated American Stroke Association are worried. Cardiovascular disease, including stroke, is the number-one killer of women over 25-half a million every year. The AHA believes that at least 30 minutes of daily physical activity will reap untold health dividends and shave that dismal statistic.
Recognizing that many people—especially women pressured by family, job, and community demands—find it difficult to make time, the AHA developed the Choose to Move program. This free, 12-week program is like a correspondence course to help you lift yourself from the sedentary lifestyle. It begins with 10 minutes of easy-to-moderate exercises a day and progresses to the half-hour you need. It also offers fitness tips and invites you to submit a biweekly progress report.
Think about all the problems obesity can cause and exercise can alleviate. As previously noted, excess weight and a sedentary lifestyle are linked with heart disease,stroke, and diabetes in both genders. Women who do not exercise are vulnerable to a host of other chronic problems. From the age of 40 on, most women lose one half to one third of a pound each of muscle and bone every year and often gain body fat in its place. In perimenopause, which precedes menopause, these changes accelerate. More than one third of American women aged 30 to 49 are already overweight, and by age 50, that figure jumps to more than 50 percent. That’s half the female American population inviting osteoporosis, broken bones, fatigue, frailty, depression, and more from lack of exercise.
Not only can exercise alleviate many current health problems and ward off future ones,it also can reveal various disorders. (Remember that cardiologists regularly use a stress test to help diagnose heart and lung problems.) Serious athletes, who tend to be in tune with their bodies, often notice changes in their performance that can signal a medical problem. Even casual exercisers and recreational athletes should be alert to such changes. They might be nothing, or they might help pinpoint such problems as anemia,heart problems, and seizure disorders.
Writing in The Physician and Sportsmedicine, Dr. E. Randy Eichner of the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and Dr. Warren A. Scott of Kaiser Permanente in Santa Clara, California, reported anecdotal evidence of the diagnostic by-product of exercise. They wrote about a 57-year-old man who reported headaches just five to 10 minutes into vigorous swimming or walking. An angiogram revealed severe blockage in three coronary arteries. A 72-year-old softball player who could no longer make it to first base turned out to have Parkinson’s disease. A 25-year-old runner who found his 5-kilometer race times eroding from 15 to 18 minutes was found to be anemic.
No matter where you start, you never know what you can do until you set a goal and work toward it.