T HE ORIGINAL AND MOST NOTED SPEAKERS' CORNER is located in the north-
east corner of Hyde Park in London, England. It is, simply, where
public speaking is allowed. In our reformatted WELL newsletter, we
want to give you, our readers, the opportunity to contribute to the
body of knowledge concerning health. We want people to share our
newsletter with friends and we want you and your friends to share with
us, thereby, sharing with each other. Please keep your thoughts under
750 words, if at all possible, include your name and city and email it
all to peter@speakwell.com ».
The Pied Piper of Physical Activity and Sport Participation
EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK THESE DAYS, media outlets are bringing the looming crisis of inactivity to the forefront. On May 27th, Active Healthy Kids Canada released its 2008 Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth. It revealed that Canadian children and youth are spending a staggering 42 hours a week in front of screens and 90 per cent of them are not meeting Canada's physical activity guidelines. Also, Statistics Canada recently reported that there is a decrease in organized sport participation among Canada's young people.
Despite the important role physical activity plays in overall health, most people are still physically inactive. As the National voice for physical activity and sport participation in Canada, ParticipACTION » is shining a light on the urgency of the matter and inspiring children, youth and Canadians to Move More – making it a social/cultural norm.
How is the Pied Piper of physical activity and sport participation jump starting physical activity? By making it easy and fun for everyone and making Canadians aware that a little bit goes a long way. For example, remove the TV from the bedroom, set a goal to limit family screen time, make "after school period" active, be a physical activity role model, leave the car at home and walk, take the family for outdoor adventures in the many parks, participate in community charity walks, take advantage of local community centres, sign up for activities that require physical activity, think of activities that the whole family is interested in doing and advocate for by-laws which promote physical activity.
ParticipACTION is playing the physical activity song for all to hear. Its vision is to lure all Canadians into a lifetime of physical activity. Step by step, ParticipACTION will work with others - inspiring our kids and one another to be more active, sharing knowledge with one another, advocating for policies and infrastructure change - in order to realize our collective goal of a healthy and more physically active Canada.
ILIKE NUMBERS. Maybe that's why I taught mathematics for many years. I like to quantify things. I like to understand how numbers work and to see the way things add up over time; my pedometer is an example. I started wearing a pedometer on December 3rd, 2006. Since then I have walked:
a distance that is equivalent to Victoria, BC to Newfoundland
approx 8.56 million steps which equates to 6,780 kilometers or 4,213 miles
and burned 428,443 calories
...and I haven't missed a day of getting at least 10,000 steps.
Over time, I find these numbers encouraging because it is quantifiable. It tells me that I am doing something positive for myself, something positive for my overall health and definitely for my heart. Walking, after all, is the easiest form of exercise in that it can be done almost anywhere and at any time - and it really is good for you.
But I digress. What is your health by the numbers? It is something that is very simple to understand and regardless of where you are on the continuum of health and fitness, if you observe these simple things it will make a very positive impact on your health.
So, here it is - this is what 0-5-10-30 stands for:
0 cigarettes.
Some might say this one is a 'no-brainer'.
Fact Sheet Health Effects of Cigarette Smoking Center for Disease Control and Prevention (updated January 2008)
Smoking harms nearly every organ of the body; causing many diseases and reducing the health of smokers in general. The adverse health effects from cigarette smoking account for an estimated 438,000 deaths, or nearly 1 of every 5 deaths, each year in the United States. More deaths are caused each year by tobacco use than by all deaths from human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), illegal drug use, alcohol use, motor vehicle injuries, suicides, and murders combined.
Cancer
Cancer is the second leading cause of death and was among the first diseases causally linked to smoking.
Smoking causes about 90% of lung cancer deaths in men and almost 80% of lung cancer deaths in women. The risk of dying from lung cancer is more than 23 times higher among men who smoke cigarettes, and about 13 times higher among women who smoke cigarettes compared with never smokers.
Smoking causes cancers of the bladder, oral cavity, pharynx, larynx (voice box), esophagus, cervix, kidney, lung, pancreas, and stomach, and causes acute myeloid leukemia.
Rates of cancers related to cigarette smoking vary widely among members of racial/ethnic groups, but are generally highest in African-American men.
Cardiovascular Disease (Heart and Circulatory System)
Smoking causes coronary heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States.1 Cigarette smokers are 2-4 times more likely to develop coronary heart disease than nonsmokers.
Cigarette smoking approximately doubles a person's risk for stroke.
Cigarette smoking causes reduced circulation by narrowing the blood vessels (arteries). Smokers are more than 10 times as likely as nonsmokers to develop peripheral vascular disease.
Smoking causes abdominal aortic aneurysm.
Respiratory Disease and Other Effects
Cigarette smoking is associated with a tenfold increase in the risk of dying from chronic obstructive lung disease. About 90% of all deaths from chronic obstructive lung diseases are attributable to cigarette smoking.
Cigarette smoking has many adverse reproductive and early childhood effects, including an increased risk for infertility, preterm delivery, stillbirth, low birth weight, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
Postmenopausal women who smoke have lower bone density than women who never smoked. Women who smoke have an increased risk for hip fracture than never smokers.
"Eat your fruits and vegetables" is one of the tried and true recommendations for a healthy diet, and for good reason. Eating plenty of fruits and vegetables can help you ward off heart disease and stroke, control blood pressure and cholesterol, prevent some types of cancer, avoid a painful intestinal ailment called diverticulitis, and guard against cataract and macular degeneration, two common causes of vision loss.
Some basic fruit and vegetable tips:
Try to eat more fruits and vegetables. If you need 2,000 calories a day to maintain your weight and health, aim for at least nine servings (41/2 cups) a day.
Choose a variety of different fruits and vegetables. It's easy to get into a rut when it comes to the food you eat. Break out and try a wider variety - include dark-green, leafy vegetables; yellow, orange, and red fruits and vegetables; cooked tomatoes; and citrus fruits.
Top 10 Reasons to Eat MORE fruits and veggies?
10. Color & Texture. Fruits and veggies add color, texture ... and appeal ... to your plate. 9. Convenience. Nutritious in any form - fresh, frozen, canned, dried and 100% juice, so they're ready when you are! 8. Fiber. Fruits and veggies provide fiber that helps fill you up and keeps your digestive system happy. 7. Low in Calories. Fruits and veggies are naturally low in calories. 6. May Reduce Disease Risk. Eating plenty of fruits and veggies may help reduce the risk of many diseases, including heart disease, high blood pressure, and some cancers. 5. Vitamins & Minerals. Fruits and veggies are rich in vitamins and minerals that help you feel healthy and energized. 4. Variety. Fruits and veggies are available in an almost infinite variety ... there's always something new to try! 3. Quick, Natural Snack. Fruits and veggies are nature's treat and easy to grab for a snack. 2. Fun to Eat! Some crunch, some squirt, some you peel ... some you don't, and some grow right in your own backyard! 1. Taste Great!
"Walking may be as close to a magic bullet as you'll find in modern medicine," Dr. JoAnn Manson, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, told the Los Angeles Times. "If there was a pill that could lower the risk of chronic disease like walking does, people would be clamouring for it."
As human beings we do very well when we are active but very poorly when we are sedentary. Therefore, we need to become more active and walking is a great way to achieve the exercise we need. 10,000 steps every day, then, is a S.M.A.R.T. goal.
Specific - 10,000 steps, no less Measurable - No problem, your pedometer will record every step Agreeable - Walking is the most popular form of exercise in N.A. Realistic - 10,000 steps is easily attainable by healthy adults Time Limited - The time frame is 24 hours
For a great read on the need to exercise and the value of walking, consider purchasing Dr. Collis' book, Walking Weight and Wellness.
I'll give you your money back if, after reading this book, you are not significantly informed about the need to exercise and motivated to do something about it!
30 = minutes of purposeful exercise every day.
Not only do we need to get the appropriate amount of exercise each day but at least 30 minutes of it should be considered 'purposeful' or vigorous. How do we define 'purposeful'? When you go for a walk, try walking at the pace you would walk if you were late for an important appointment.
That is it. Pretty simply to understand. The big question is... can we motivate ourselves to do it every day? Call up a friend, someone to help keep you accountable and begin today. It will be the best gift you have ever given yourself. Email me and let me know how you are doing. Your success will encourage me too! peter@speakwell.com »
NOT SO MUCH ABOUT WEIGHT, more about life.
A celebration of life actually, delivered by someone where illness will almost certainly cut life short.
"The Last Lecture" the title refers to was actually entitled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams and it was delivered by Dr. Randy Pausch a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon who in the summer of 2006 was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. By August 2007 the cancer was found to have spread and he was given the prognosis of 3-6 months to live.
In September of 2007 Dr. Pausch delivered a lecture at Carnegie Mellon University. It was part of a series entitled, "The Last Lecture Series" where academics are asked to present a hypothetical last lecture presenting it as if it were their last lecture; their last chance to impart whatever wisdom they felt was most important for them to share.
Clearly in Dr. Pausch's case, his last lecture wasn't necessarily just a theoretical exercise.
On Wednesday ABC will be covering Dr. Pausch's amazingly inspirational and surprisingly uplifting story. here's their trailer:
If you'd rather, you can watch his entire "Last Lecture" online (amazing speech), but make sure you've got some time – it's nearly 2 hours long.
And lastly, if you're so inclined, you can watch the lecture Dr. Pausch himself is most proud of delivering and that's his lecture on time management. it's roughly an hour long where Dr. Pausch notes that the first 8 minutes are, "introductions i don't deserve"
Dr. Pausch is still fighting – for his own postings on his fight, feel free to head over to his update site ».
Keep on slugging Dr. Pausch, and thank you. [Reprinted from Weighty Matters]
Starve, binge, purge cycle on rise among women over 40 Sharon Kirkey, Canwest News Service
NICOLE ELAINE CAMPBELL WAS 44 YEARS OLD when her heart finally stopped. Her kidneys had given out long before; her bones were so weak she fractured both hips, her arms, collarbone, spine and pelvis.
"For many years Nicole managed the pain, anxiety and ravages of anorexia," read the obituary published after her April 17 death, "and like many women with severely disordered eating, she was very good at it." ::
Kate Lum, Interim Health Education and Program Coordinator for Sheena's Place, a community based support centre for people with eating disorders.
"She was so self-disciplined," her mother Patricia says.
Experts across Canada are seeing an increase in women over 40 seeking help for eating disorders—women so rigid and obsessed about what they eat they throw out entire categories of food ("no meat, no carbs, no dairy, no sugar"). Women who hoard boxes of NutraSweet and eat nothing but dry salad for dinner. Women who starve themselves by day and rush through drive-thru windows by night, binging and purging on fast food. Women who spend all day thinking about not eating.
Some have struggled with weight and food for years. Many are relapsing after being in recovery for decades from an eating disorder they had in their teens; some never got the treatment they needed when they were younger. Others are developing eating obsessions and distorted body image issues for the first time in their lives.
Sheena's Place », a Toronto eating disorders centre, has started a support group for women at mid-life to meet demand.
"We've got women as young as 35 and women in their 60s," says program director Anne Elliott.
At Hopewell » centre in Ottawa, the increase is in binge eating among women over 30.
"They're not doing so much compensating in terms of purging or over-exercising but they're binging and feeling really out of control with it, really guilty about it," says program co-ordinator Misty Pratt.
It begins slowly, like alcoholism. "Eating disorders are not just something you 'wake up' with one morning," Elliott says.
It can start with a diet and, when the feedback is positive ("You look so good!"), can lead to a slippery slide into serious restriction and the beginning of obsessive behaviour—women weighing themselves constantly, rearranging food on a plate, refusing to eat with the family, getting up in the middle of the meal to vomit or an intense fear of weight gain and fat.
A woman can hide bulimia or anorexia to a certain point. "Because the weight loss can develop slowly over time, people get used to seeing someone really thin and don't think this person might have an eating disorder," says Elliott.
But there can be telltale signs too: thinning hair, yellowish, dry skin, sore throat and swollen glands. Elliott can sometimes tell just by the sound of a woman's voice whether she has an eating disorder. "I can tell by talking to somebody if they have been purging through their throat a lot."
For some, it's a coping strategy, a desperate grasp for control at a time of transition or crisis—divorce, the death of a spouse, children leaving home, caring for an aging parent. Women revert to old behaviours that became imprinted in their brain.
People do all kinds of things for comfort and achieving a particular number on the scale can be seductive, says Merryl Bear, of the National Eating Disorder Information Centre.
"It allows them to feel a sense of accomplishment in a world that might feel very chaotic and out of control."
Dr. Lara Ostolosky says more older women are seeking help partly because eating disorders don't hold the same stigma they once did.
The thinking used to be there was no biological component to them, "so that if a person is having eating disordered behaviours like binging and vomiting and laxative (abuse) and starving themselves, it was all an attention-seeking behaviour. The research now says that's entirely not the case.
"There is this large biological component to this. In other words, it's a very bona fide psychiatric illness," says Ostolosky, an eating disorders psychiatrist at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton.
But there can be a huge cultural component as well. The pressure on women is to be perfectly thin and the message beaming out from the bone-thin Desperate Housewives and body suit-clad Madonna on the cover of Vanity Fair is clear: being thin and youthful-looking is not only attainable, it's desirable.
"For some reason this culture is still uncomfortable with women wearing our stories on our faces and our bodies," says Kate Lum, 43, a children's author and health outreach and intake co-ordinator at Sheena's Place, who struggled with an eating disorder in her twenties.
But a woman's metabolism slows as she ages and the natural tendency is to put on weight. The more women try to defy that biological set-point, the more the body rebels.
"Throw in things like menopause and it's even more difficult metabolically. The body doesn't want to lose weight," says Ostolosky, of Edmonton.
"So the more they try to restrict, the hungrier they get, the more they binge, the more they vomit and on the cycle goes."
The behaviour becomes entrenched and and starts to exact a toll. Women begin to lose bone, their blood pressure drops and fine hair, like the downy hair of a newborn, can grow over the body as it tries to compensate for constantly being so cold.
"They're unable to work because they're binge eating and throwing up so much, or they've restricted eating to the point they can't think clearly and employers are starting to notice, or the relationship is falling apart because the husband discovers the binging and purging," Ostolosky says.
Or they seek help because of their daughters. "They're worried about their daughters, about what their own eating habits are saying. 'Why doesn't Mom eat the same food we do? Why doesn't Mom ever have dinner with us?' "
One 45-year-old woman would starve herself all day and then binge on fast food at night.
"Starting at 6 p.m. she'd go through Burger King and get her meal and eat it and then throw up. Then she'd go through McDonald's and then Wendy's and Taco Bell. Three or four in one night," says Dr. Dena Cabrera, a staff psychologist at Remuda Programs for Eating Disorders in Arizona, the largest in-patient treatment centre in the U.S. for girls and women with eating disorders.
Another woman restricted her intake to 400 to 500 calories a day: one egg white in the morning, a slice of turkey with a few carrots or celery for lunch and salad without dressing for dinner.
"If she was feeling like she needed a little pick-me-up she'd maybe throw a couple of slices of chicken on it," Cabrera says. "But usually they're vegetarians."
Nicole Campbell's mother Pat says there are as many reasons as there are stars in the sky why someone develops an eating disorder. "If we knew we would have done something about it."
Nicole was a gifted athlete and student, a musical and much-loved eldest of four children and, "looking on the surface, there was no identifiable trauma."
If Pat can trace it to anything, she thinks the problem may have started the year Nicole spent in Switzerland doing Grade 13, where she was fed a particularly rich diet and gained some weight. At the University of Western Ontario she became very picky and then, gradually, she didn't cook or eat much at all.
Throughout her 30s and early 40s, Nicole's weight hovered between 80 and 90 pounds.
"Her eating habit changed to very deprived, unhealthy things," Pat says. Nothing but soda crackers with no salt, or a certain brand of soup. "When we were together on family occasions she would eat a bit of what we had. It was this obsession. If she made a mistake and ate a proper dinner she would quickly remove herself and give it back."
Her kidneys stopped working properly, and even seemed to shrink. Five years ago, when they shut down completely, Nicole went on daily dialysis.
"The next way we noticed it, other than her incredibly low body weight, was that she became severely osteoporotic. She had numerous fractures," Pat says. "For a time she was having mini seizures and falling."
Nicole died last month of a septic lung infection. "Her body just wore out," Pat says.
The longer women live with disordered eating and the more medically compromised they become, the harder the recovery. Having anorexia is the single most important risk factor for suicide, Cabrera says. But many doctors don't look for it. The focus today is on obesity, she says, and women aren't opening up and saying, "I'm kind of restricting, or I'm binge eating or I'm having problems with food. They don't talk about it."
But when they do seek help, many women enter treatment highly motivated.
"They're tired of it. They're old enough so they have more life experience and more motivation to get better. They've seen how it's destroyed their lives and the toll its taken on their families," Ostolosky says.
"The message is, there is hope and support for people with eating disorders," says Elliott, of Sheena's Place.
"One of the first things is to break the isolation and seek medical help and find some kind of support group and counselling where you can deal with some of the underlying issues in your life, so that you can find new coping strategies that don't put your health in any kind of jeopardy."
- If you, or someone you know, is struggling with an eating disorder or is preoccupied with weight and dieting, contact the National Eating Disorder Information Centre at nedic.ca », or call toll-free 1.866.633.4220. The non-profit organization has a national directory of service providers.
How is the Pied Piper of physical activity and sport participation jump starting physical activity? By making it easy and fun for everyone and making Canadians aware that a little bit goes a long way. For example, remove the TV from the bedroom, set a goal to limit family screen time, make "after school period" active, be a physical activity role model, leave the car at home and walk, take the family for outdoor adventures in the many parks, participate in community charity walks, take advantage of local community centres, sign up for activities that require physical activity, think of activities that the whole family is interested in doing and advocate for by-laws which promote physical activity.
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Dr. Lara Ostolosky says more older women are seeking help partly because eating disorders don't hold the same stigma they once did.
