{"id":161705,"date":"2010-01-10T11:17:50","date_gmt":"2010-01-10T16:17:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/calorielab.com\/news\/?p=6733"},"modified":"2010-01-10T11:17:50","modified_gmt":"2010-01-10T16:17:50","slug":"women%e2%80%99s-health-doc-says-it%e2%80%99s-ok-to-break-the-rules","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/161705","title":{"rendered":"Women\u2019s health doc says it\u2019s OK to break the rules"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This time of year we&#8217;re all thinking a little bit more about our health and maybe even coming up with some <a href=\"http:\/\/calorielab.com\/news\/2009\/12\/29\/women-want-to-exercise-more-in-coming-year-plus-other-resolutions\/\">healthy resolutions<\/a> to start the new year. <\/p>\n<p>We all know pretty much what we need to do: eat more fruits and vegetables, get more exercise, less stress and more sleep. But actually doing those things on a daily basis isn&#8217;t so easy for a lot of us. <\/p>\n<h3>Doctor&#8217;s orders: Stop worrying<\/h3>\n<p>Dr. Susan Love, one of the country&#8217;s most respected women&#8217;s health doctors, says it&#8217;s OK if <a href=\"http:\/\/well.blogs.nytimes.com\/2010\/01\/04\/new-health-rule-quit-worrying-about-your-health\/\">we don&#8217;t follow all the healthy rules<\/a> all the time. In her new book, <i>Live a Little! Breaking the Rules Won\u2019t Break Your Health<\/i>, she argues that there&#8217;s no such thing as perfect health, no matter how hard we try. <\/p>\n<p>She also says that most of us are probably healthier than we realize, so we shouldn&#8217;t be stressing about trying to follow every health and fitness rule we hear to a T. <\/p>\n<p><span id=\"more-6733\"><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The whole point of being healthy, she argues, is to live as long as possible with a good quality of life, since no one has yet figured out how to live forever. And there are a lot of variations on diet, exercise and lifestyle that fall within the range of &#8220;healthy,&#8221; she says, with the real problems happening at the extremes, such as with people who never get any physical activity or only eat processed foods.<\/p>\n<p>For instance, we&#8217;ve long been told that people need to get eight hours of sleep a night, but in reality some people can function just fine &#8212; and don&#8217;t seem to be negatively affecting their health &#8212; by sleeping more or less. <\/p>\n<p>And while we might not all be hitting the gym for our 30 to 60 minutes of movement a day, we are often lugging kids or groceries around or doing household chores, and that movement counts (I can attest to that; carrying my 14-pound baby around has brought definition to my biceps I haven&#8217;t seen since before I was pregnant).<\/p>\n<h3>Don&#8217;t use this as an excuse not to do better<\/h3>\n<p>While it&#8217;s true that people can be healthy at a range of different sizes, some health experts argue that this message to not worry so much about your health will be translated as a reason not to worry at all. People might misinterpret it as saying you don&#8217;t have to try at all to eat healthier or exercise more, but being completely sedentary and consistently eating bad foods still sets you up for future health problems. <\/p>\n<p>Others say the message is a good one because it makes the whole idea of health and fitness a little less overwhelming; once people understand they don&#8217;t have to be &#8220;perfect&#8221; they&#8217;ll be able to get started doing anything at all, which can only be a good thing. <\/p>\n<p class=\"correspondent\">(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)<\/p>\n<p>From the RSS feed of <a href=\"http:\/\/calorielab.com\/news\">CalorieLab News<\/a> (REF3076322B7)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/calorielab.com\/news\/2010\/01\/10\/womens-health-doc-says-its-ok-to-break-the-rules\/\">Women&#8217;s health doc says it&#8217;s OK to break the rules<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This time of year we&#8217;re all thinking a little bit more about our health and maybe even coming up with some healthy resolutions to start the new year. We all know pretty much what we need to do: eat more fruits and vegetables, get more exercise, less stress and more sleep. But actually doing those [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2815,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-161705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2815"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161705"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161705\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}