Hasta La Gadget!

The holidays can be stressful for so many reasons: gift shopping, family events, the collection of parties, making memories for the kids, and of course the sugar-filled goodies that tease us from every coworker’s desk.

As a child, I overheard the adult conversations about holiday weight gain and their resolutions to rid themselves of it. We have all refused the beautiful dessert or forgone the second spoon of a dish we truly wanted.

The most stressful part of the holidays, for me, used to be the collective mass of food available. At 15, I developed an eating disorder and bought into the lie that skinny was beautiful.

I longed for holiday joy but was faced with dread, self-loathing, and self-distrust. How could I be happy when I was a big fat failure?

When I recovered, I studied the source of what robbed my holiday joy. I realized that we tend to set rules for ourselves instead of listening to our bodies.

Rules like:

“I will only allow myself one cookie.”
“I will bake cupcakes with my child, but I won’t eat any.”
“I’ll have just one forkful.”
“No thanks, I’m watching my shape.”

Many of us share a collective predicament: the focus on our bodies as a measurement of our self-worth. So how do we stop this ridiculous war?

Here’s 3 simple things you can do, this holiday season, to bring the magic back into food and peace to your heart and mind.

1) Get Rid of the Rules.
Have you devised certain written or unwritten rules about how/what you’re allowed to eat? Throw them in the trash. Seriously. The best thing I ever did for my body was to make no food taboo. The psychology is simple. The more we resist something, the more it persists because we’ve given it a strong focus. Take the power away from food.

DO THIS INSTEAD:
Allow all foods, but pay attention to how your body feels when eating each food. The body is amazing and will tell us what it truly needs, if we let it. Allow foods that you want too, like that delectable cupcake. Then, when you are enjoying that cupcake, actually enjoy it. Use all your senses to appreciate taste, color, and texture. Don’t just shove it down your gullet, in the car, hating yourself the whole time. Treat foods like treasures, whether they are body needs or body wants.

2) Get Rid of Naughty/Nice Food Labels.
It’s become quite boring to hear people talk about food being on the “good” or “bad” list, as though foods must compete for a “naughty” or “nice” award. Food is food. You are not sinful because you ate a brownie for dinner. Likewise, you are not a saint because you refused the brownie and had a salad instead.

DO THIS INSTEAD:
When you notice that you’ve just put a food on the “naughty” list ask yourself, “Why is this food naughty?”

Often, we crave sweet food when we need more “sweetness” in our lives. Sometimes our eating masks an emotional need. Other times we just wanna eat the cupcake.

If you want to eat the cupcake, at least know why you’re eating it. Then eat the darn thing, with love.

3) Get Rid of Being a Grown Up.
When I was a kid, the holidays were full of special moments. Time spent in the kitchen baking cookies with my mom. Dancing to Christmas music while flinging tinsel on the tree. Palm trees glowing with rainbow Christmas lights. As we grow up, some of the sparkle we felt as a kid dims.

DO THIS INSTEAD:
Bring the sparkle back.
a) Does your family sit around after meals, watching TV? Suggest an alternative. Build a snow family in the front yard. Take a walk and see who can capture the best photo on their camera or iPhone. Create arts and crafts for the house or mailbox.
b) Tired of the same holiday goodies? Is your body craving a more natural treat? Try out a new recipe. There are numerous people today creating recipes from ingredients your body might process better.
c) Make a secret family recipe and gift it to a neighbor.
d) As a child, what did you love most during the holidays? How can you recreate that sparkle in your life today?

If you find yourself struggling with food stress this holiday season, reach out to a friend, life coach, or therapist. You can have a healthy and happy mind and body this season.

Mele Kalikimaka and joyful holiday wishes to all.

—

If you’re struggling with an eating disorder, call the National Eating Disorder Association hotline at 1-800-931-2237.

By now, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen or heard about Adult Swim’s Too Many Cooks — an epic, warped internet video that sends up the overly tidy world of ’80s and ’90s sitcoms. But just why did this video manage to click with so many people?…

More than 17,000 medical professionals gathered in Chicago this week to participate in the annual scientific sessions of the American Heart Association. Five days of comprehensive education focused on the fight against cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death for men and women in developed countries. The scientific program, replete with late breaking clinical trials, new devices, drugs, acute interventions and guidelines for treating existing heart disease was comprehensive; fewer reports detailed ways to prevent heart disease. This is understandable given that those with existing heart disease are at higher risk for subsequent events and almost 50 percent of the decrease in deaths over the past three decades is attributed to secondary prevention with novel interventions, devices and medications.

The biomedical community, economists and health care professionals understand that prevention of heart disease can yield even greater benefits. Speaking to this point, we know that the likelihood of suffering from heart disease increases with age, but, even as older Americans experience better than a 20 percent decrease in heart attacks, hospitalization rates among young and middle-aged adults have not decreased. The effects of cardiac disease are not limited to the heart but touch social aspects of life. When young adults in their prime suffer the consequences of a heart attack or worse, the loss of life, the lives of thousands of families, many with young children, are upset and societal productivity diminished for years. Such life-altering events place an emotional burden on family members and friends and may necessitate lifestyle changes. Imagine this heart-rending situation among young people– specifically young women. The fact is that young women (30 – 55 years old) hospitalized with a heart attack have higher death rates, more co-existing diseases, and longer hospital stays than men. Between 2001 and 2010, 30,000 of these women were hospitalized.

Whenever I talk to the young women in my office about heart attacks, I am struck with the care and concern they have for their loved ones. Uniformly, they are concerned about being good daughters, wives and mothers. They make sure that parents are on-time for medical appointments, that the men in their lives exercise and that their children learn healthy eating habits. I am also struck by an assumption they make — they assume that heart disease won’t happen to them. Unfortunately, they are wrong. Heart disease accounts for a remarkable 1 in every 4 female deaths — almost 300,000 female deaths in 2009 and it is the leading cause of death for black and white women in the United States. Despite more than two decades of public health messages, however, only 54 percent of U.S. women recognize that heart disease is the leading cause of death for women. Compared to the year 2000 when just 34 percent of women recognized this fact, progress has been made. But, among minority and less-educated women, even fewer are aware. The lack of awareness can be fatal, making it harder to recognize symptoms of a heart attack: Women often don’t realize that symptoms like neck, jaw or back discomfort, nausea and weakness are signs of a heart attack. As a result, they get emergency care more slowly, causing long-term adverse consequences such as arrhythmias, heart failure, and premature death. In the case of heart disease, knowledge is life-saving, and people who know about the risks are more likely to take preventive actions and adopt healthier lifestyles.

Now, there is a new list of risks for young women of child-bearing years and they are akin to a “stress test.” For example, whereas most medical professionals will ask a woman if she has smoked, been treated for diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or has a family history of heart disease, fewer ask if she was diagnosed with preeclampsia (very high blood pressure) during pregnancy nor do they advise her that preeclampsia significantly increases her future risk for a heart attack. Young women who take oral contraceptives and smoke are more likely to develop “early” heart disease. Those with depression have more than a two-fold chance of developing coronary heart disease. Equally troubling is that pre-pregnancy obesity is not only associated with the mother’s increased risk for heart disease and stroke, but obesity also raises the risk for later-life cardiovascular events of her offspring.

An alarm is raised that younger adults, considering themselves at low risk or even no risk, will take part in behaviors resulting in the added health burden of obesity and diabetes. Rising rates of youthful obesity are alleged to account for life shortening between two and five years, and are expected to reduce U.S. life expectancy for the first time in two centuries. Because of the greater health burden of diseases that they will live with over many years, young women will benefit even more from aggressive efforts to identify and treat risks. In the short term, women who are not aware of healthy habits or take pleasure in lifestyles that give rise to heart disease (lack of exercise, unhealthy eating, smoking), may take exception to advice that encourages them to live otherwise. In the long term, however, reduction of heart disease will create conditions that are advantageous for these women and their families.

Efforts to reverse the recurrent trends require efforts of patients, the biomedical community, policy makers, health care providers and the media, all of whom should be aggressive and proactive about informing the public about the risks of heart disease for young women. But, progress is slow and appropriate materials designed for age, level of education and culture need to be made available. Moreover, we need to look into the sex-specific biologic, clinical and social issues accounting for the increased mortality, longer hospitalizations and greater health risks for young women. If we don’t, the effects on young American women, and on the people who love them, will be, well, heartbreaking.

The author has no conflict of interest.

Elsa-Grace V. Giardina, MD, MS
Professor of Medicine
Director, Center for Women’s Health in the
Division of Cardiology
Columbia University Medical Center
622 West 168th Street
New York, NY 10032
Phone: (212) 305-6154
http://www.cumc.columbia.edu/dept/cwh

Welcome to another week of Reading List where we dig through all those Black Friday deals assaulting your Twitter feed to bring some much deserved stories from around the web to your attention. This week we have contributions from The Awl, ProPublica, Fast Company, and The New York Times. Happy Reading.

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VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis tenderly embraced children with autism spectrum disorders, some of whom avoided meeting his gaze, during an audience Saturday aimed at showing solidarity with people living with the condition.

The pope urged governments and institutions to respond to the needs of people with autism in order to help break “the isolation and, in many cases also the stigma” associated with the disorders, which are characterized by varying levels of social impairment and communication difficulties.

“It is necessary the commitment of everyone, in order to promote encounters and solidarity, in a concrete action of support and renewed promotion of hope,” the pontiff said.

After offering a prayer, Francis greeting the young children and teens with autism as well as their families, kissing the children and cupping their faces in his hands as he circulated the auditorium. Some appeared to avoid the pope’s eyes, while one teen whom the pope had greeted followed Francis and gave him another hug from behind.

Families of children affected by the disorders were touched by the pope’s words.

“It was an explosion of emotions,” said Maria Cristina Fiordi, a mother of a child with autism. “For us, we are parents of a child affected with autism, this meeting was very important. It was as an outstretched hand through a problem that is very often not considered in the right way.”

Franco Di Vincenzo, another parent of an autistic child, said he took strength from the pope’s call not to hide, “that we should live with this problem in serenity.”

The audience was attended by some 7,000 people, including health care workers who had attended an international conference on autism hosted by the Vatican’s health care office this week.

While autism is being diagnosed more frequently in places like the United States, where about 1 in 68 children are said to be on the spectrum, it is still largely unknown and undiagnosed elsewhere, including in the Vatican’s own backyard of Italy, according to Dr. Stefano Vicari, the head of pediatric neuropsychiatry at the Vatican-owned Bambin Gesu hospital in Rome.