What Does Your Heart Yearn For?

My hearts yearns for:

Information
Do you know your risk of heart disease? I'm just learning about mine. I now know what the top and bottom numbers mean for my blood pressure : )

Exercise
Okay maybe a no brainer for many. But for some people including myself I thought once a week would be enough. My problem is consistency. I'm working on one hour for 3 days a week and I'm working on sticking with that schedule.

Healthy & Clean environment
Fortunately most restaurants and public enclosed spaces are banning smoking. After leaving Chicago and moving to Austin and then visiting Chicago my lungs got spoiled my body recognized the difference between clean air and heavy congested city smog.

Healthy Food
Enough said.

Common Sense
Well this didn't come to me right away. How can my heart yearn common sense? Well the first thing that came to mind was HEALTH SCREENING. So simple, it never occurred to me. I'm one of those people I go to the doctor when I'm sick. Participating in preventive health screening is more accessible. My husband's job has trailers outside in their company parking lot that provides mobile health screening. Now if I get them to come to my house : )

Sometimes Knowing Too Much Can Be Scary

I was listening to NPR about a breast cancer gene that a family found out they inherited. They spent a lot of money and stressful waits by the phone to find out if the gene was past on to them and from them to their daughters. It was heartbreaking and hard to listen to. So I turned it off.

So of course I started thinking about health screening as a whole. And how sometimes to much information isn't a good thing. This family was pretty frantic and even had periods of depression due to the unknown of their health screenings. I started to think about how health screening for your family doesn't have to be all doom and gloom.

I think if you make it mandatory that annually or whatever schedule your doctor suggested, it will become routine. I think about how I go for mammograms and pap smears and it's typically a non-stressful appointment. It's health screening and should be treated as such, a way to warn your self in advance so you can take preventive measures or treat problems. Needless to say the NPR story on health screening had me thinking a lot about my own health and how I can take control by using health screening for preventive care.