Men’s Maintenance
We are in control. Everybody needs to engage in some type of exercise program.
The other thing that impacts greatly on our overall health is our diet and so we spend a lot of time talking about eating more fruits and vegetables, less saturated fats, and less refined sugar.
Does family history play a role in a man’s health?
The one thing that's different about family history compared to other risk factors is you can't control it.
You can control your tobacco use and your exercise and your diet and you can control your cholesterol, blood sugars to some degree, but you can't pick your parents and so it's very important that we look at that part of it in terms of heart disease, risk for diabetes, certain cancers like, prostate cancer and colon cancer so it becomes a huge factor in terms of the things that you know we can control.
How important is it for men to know their numbers?
Remember they're only numbers and what's most important is what you do on a daily basis, how much exercise are you getting per week in and how often are you exercising, are you eating a low-fat diet, are you eating more fruits and vegetables, are you watching your sugars and numbers are just a reflection of how you're doing.
They're a report card if you want to think about that way. I don't treat numbers, I treat patients so I tend to focus more on what are you doing today to make yourself healthier.
How do I manage stress?
You have to identify what your cause of stress is, if it's your job, your family or money, you have to work on that and then we have to practice what I call thought stopping. You know we worry, we perseverate about certain things, we just need to focus on what we can control.
The other thing I tell people is we need eat healthy that helps us control stress.
We need exercise on a regular basis because that helps us control stress and one thing I haven't mentioned yet is we need to get a good night's sleep. Stress is always magnified many times if we're not resting getting a good night's sleep.
What is the goal of Healthy After 40?
We can make a huge impact on the outcomes in our health.
Heart disease, cancers, strokes, those are the big three killers in our society and some of these are inevitable but you can shift the odds in your favor and it's not with medications it's what we can do to lower our risk of getting those types of things.
