Know Your Heart

Welcome to Step 6 of our series, 10 Steps to Heart Health, Know Your Heart. 

A Balanced Heart Is A Healthy Heart

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So let’s talk about the heart. What is it? You can’t see it. You can’t feel it. You can’t touch it.  So it gets kind of scary and mysterious. Well, let me tell you, it’s really simple. 

There are four parts to the heart. There’s the muscles, the electric system, the valves and the arteries. And they all work together to make sure the heart pumps the blood throughout your body to deliver oxygen. That muscle is what squeezes. And it squeezes by getting oxygen from the arteries. And the arteries provide oxygen and blood and they turn the switches on in the electric system, which opens and closes the valves. You hear that hum – that’s the valves opening and closing. When all of these work together, it’s all in synchrony. The most amazing thing is we never have to think about it all day long. 

The Most Common Type of Heart Disease

We don’t even have to pay attention. Our heart is following us throughout our days. Happy, sad, exercising, sleeping, bum, bu-bum – it’s constantly with us. Coronary artery disease is the development of plaque in the lining of the arteries. It’s what leads to a heart attack. It is the most common type of heart disease. 

Now, I have to explain how this starts in the artery. There’s a lining that is called the endothelium. It’s really important, and we’re going to be talking about it a lot because that endothelium protects the artery. Now, what happens when you develop plaque is you get a little tear in the lining of the artery, and when it’s torn cholesterol and inflammatory cells go inside, and it builds up these massive cells that lead to the plaque. When that plaque ruptures, that’s when a heart attack develops. It’s when it blocks off blood flow to the muscle and no oxygen is delivered. 

The Number One Reason People Die of Heart Disease

So endothelium is extremely important, and coronary artery disease is really what we want to prevent because it’s the number one reason that people die of heart disease. It’s so interesting because women and men develop atherosclerosis differently. Men get plaque in one location. And since it’s just in one area it’s really, really easy to see. All the rest of the artery is normal and there’s the disease. 

But women, no, we get it throughout the artery. It’s diffuse, meaning there’s no normal. You can’t just look at it and say there’s a normal and there’s an abnormal. The whole thing looks abnormal. And the reason this becomes important is that all the tests that we’ve used compare normal and abnormal. Now, think about that. If we use a test that compares normal and abnormal, how are we going to find disease in women when the whole thing is abnormal? 

Diagnosing Heart Disease in Women is Not the Easiest Thing

There are multiple risk factors for heart disease, and there are standard and typical ones that are the same for both men and women. There’s high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Elevated sugars are a bad diet, along with smoking, a sedentary lifestyle and not exercising. There’s also family history, and there’s stress, depression and obesity.

But then for women, those risk factors are a little different. In fact, women who’ve had high blood pressure or preeclampsia, high sugars or gestational diabetes during pregnancy are at an increased risk of heart disease later in life.

Another risk is depression. Because depression happens in women about two times more than it happens in men. The scary thing is when a woman is depressed, she has a 50% increased risk of heart disease. So it’s so important, critically important that if you’re depressed, you actually reach out for help so you can protect your heart. 

Symptoms Are Also Different in Men and Women

In men it’s sort of that Hollywood heart attack. This idea of an elephant sitting on the chest. It’s a lot of pain and pressure. In women it can oftentimes be more subtle things like shortness of breath, jaw pain, back pain, nausea, vomiting: flu-like symptoms. 

We can learn to do better for ourselves. We can learn to protect our hearts by changing how we live, by eating better, sleeping more, exercising more, managing our stress by actually taking care of ourselves. We can actually get rid of those risk factors: the blood pressure, the cholesterol, the sugars. If we start eating better, if we start moving, we can get rid of all of these risk factors that I was telling you about just by changing our lives. 

Part of the whole story is getting tested and understanding exactly what’s happening.

That is step one. Step two -I’ll teach you what those numbers really mean. I’ll teach you how to interpret them, how to use them to help you live a better life. I will teach you how to use those numbers to educate and empower you to eat better, to exercise more, and to take care of yourself. Specifically, I’m going to teach you to listen to your heart so we can find out exactly what it needs.

Step three, take care of you. Women are so used to the juggling act, going to work, taking care of their families, taking care of their kids, doing all the things on their checklist, but they often put themselves last. It is so important that you put yourself on your list, not on the bottom, but on the top. You know how they say in the airplane, put your oxygen mask on first. That’s what you have to do.

Continue to Follow Along With Us on This Journey

In case you’ve missed it, Step 1 taught us how to Live From the Heart, In Step 2 we discussed how to get moving. Step 3 was all about nourishing your heart and body with foods that taste good and are good for you. If you missed it, you can read it here, Nourish Your Food And Your Heart. 

In Step 4, we discussed something very close to my heart and something we all deal with on a daily basis, Stress, Anxiety, Depression And Purpose. The past few years have been a really, really rough time. It’s been a time of stress in ways that we never even knew were possible. We all can deal with stress in like a day or a week or a month even, but years and years of chronic stress, it’s hard. 

Last week, Step 5, People, Pleasure and Purpose was all the effects of relationships on our heart. 

We are almost to the end of this year, stay with us as we continue this journey of heart health. 

Adesso, Adesso, Adesso, the time is now.