Category: Make your future health plan

The vast majority of women worries about breast cancer after age 50. While it is important to continue awareness in relation to this disease, it is also important to realise that mortality associated with breast cancer is low and it is not the leading cause of death for women.

The leading cause of death for women is heart disease so if you want to live longer you need to worry more about your heart.

The first thing to do is to assess your risk and doing this is very simple:

• check your family history. Do you have any close relatives in particular your parents who had high blood pressure, diabetes or suffered heart disease?
• check your BMI. Measure your height and your weight and input them in one of the many calculators that you can download from the internet. Your number should be below 25 but you are in more serious trouble if it is over 30.
• check your waist circumference. Using a tape measurement check the circumference around your belly button area. Your number should be below 88 cm.
• check your blood pressure. Many pharmacies offer this check as a free service.

This process is very simple but it is enough to make a good judgement on your situation.If you don’t score well in any of these three things you should make a plan on how to change them and talk to your gp to add a few more tests like sugar and cholesterol levels.

Once you have changed your diet you can start looking at exercise. Feel free to do diet changes and exercise together if you can manage. Unfortunately this does not always work for people. It all depends on where are you starting from but if you are starting from a bad diet and no exercise then you are going to fail if you change too much in one go. Remember your 30 days plan?

It has to be reasonable and doable. Many people find hard enough to get organised in eating properly without having to start a new exercise routine. You need to do proper food shopping and cooking and you might not have the time. Once your diet is working then you can concentrate on something new and you can pick your exercise. Again it should be something suitable for your lifestyle. Do not make commitments you cannot follow. Again you need to make a resonable plan that you can follow for 30 days and then review the situation.

Was it feasible for you?
Did you enjoy doing it?

All these things are very important if you want to continue otherwise you will stop very soon.

There are other specific advantages for women in menopause who decide to opt for weight training.

This is because we all lose muscle mass as we age and maintaining our strength is essential.

Weight training is also more beneficial for bone protection.  You don’t have to force yourself to join a gym but you can start at home with small weights. There are hundreds of free programs on you tube that you can follow.