Live a Little!: Breaking the Rules Won't Break Your Health

Alice D. Domar, Susan M. Love, Leigh Ann Hirschman

Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony, Mar 15, 2011 - Health & Fitness - 234 pages

Later to bed, munching some fries, makes a girl pretty healthy and wise. . . .

Yes, it's true--more or less. Why? Women do need to eat healthier, exercise, get adequate sleep, and take preventive health care seriously, yet it's equally important for them to relax. Relax, take a breather, and give up trying to follow the narrowly prescribed health "rules" that are constant sources of unhealthy stress and guilt.

In Live a Little!, women finally get a long-overdue dose of realism about what's truly healthy and what's mostly hype. Susan Love and Alice Domar take on the health police, whose edicts make us feel terrible when we don't get eight hours of sleep or eat the maximum daily serving of veggies. Most important, they remind us of a forgotten truth: Perfect health is not achievable.

Breaking down the prevailing health "musts" in six areas--sleep, stress, preventive care, exercise, nutrition, and personal relationships--these doctors, with a little help from the other experts of BeWell, cut to the heart of these topics and give us realistic guidelines for living a healthy enough life, one that also includes laughter, relaxation, and a commonsense attitude about being pretty healthy.

To learn more health truths and whittle down your overblown expectations of yourself, open this book. Using science combined with these experts' surprisingly refreshing opinions, Live a Little! shows you how to be healthy without driving yourself crazy!


From the Hardcover edition.

Contents

• The Myth of Perfect Health: 1
• Sleep When Lavender Sachets Dont Work: 17
• The Stress Test How Much Is Too Much?: 51
• Health Screenings Do You Really Need a Baseline: 79
• Its Not Religion Its Just Exercise: 101
• You Me Us Healthy Relationships: 167
• A Pretty Healthy Life Decade by Decade: 193

About the author

Alice D. Domar is the founder and director of the Mind/Body Program for Infertility. She is also assistant professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Mind/Body Center for Women's Health, Mind/Body Medical Institute, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and two daughters. Dr. Susan M. Love, is an author, teacher, surgeon, researcher and activist. She was born on February 9, 1948, and graduated from SUNY Downstate Medical School cum laude in 1974. She did her surgical residency at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital and was Chief Resident in 1979. She went into private practice in general surgery, in 1980, and was the first woman surgeon on the staff of Boston's Beth Israel Hospital. Dr. Love joined the staff of the Dana Farber Breast Evaluation Clinic in 1982 and in 1988, she founded the Faulkner Breast Center in Boston, which was the first facility in the country to include a multidisciplinary all female staff. In 1992, she was recruited by UCLA to create a program that addresses all aspects of breast care and, in 1994; Revlon gave a gift that led to the establishment of the Revlon/UCLA Breast Center. Dr. Love left clinical practice, in 1996, to devote more time to basic research and her position as Adjunct Professor of Surgery at UCLA. Love has authored many journal articles and co-authored an Atlas of Surgical Techniques in Breast Surgery (1995). She has also written "Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book," which has been called one of the most important books in women's health in the past decade, and "Dr. Susan Love's Hormone Book" (1997), which was on The New York Times bestseller list. Dr. Love founded the National Breast Cancer Coalition, which is a coalition of breast cancer advocacy groups created to involve breast cancer patients and their supporters as advocates for action, advances and change. In 1993, she help deliver 2 million signatures to President Clinton demanding a National Action Plan for Breast Cancer and now she is one of the co-chairs of the plan that brings together women, scientists, politicians and business people to stop the disease. Nancy L. Snyderman was born in 1952 and grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She received a B.A. in microbiology from Indiana University in 1974 and received a M.D. from the University of Nebraska Medical Center in 1977. She initially planned a career in pediatrics, but switched to otolaryngology in her second year of residency at the University of Pittsburgh. It was during her residency that she began to work in broadcasting, which she continued after becoming a staff surgeon in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1983. She is the chief medical editor for NBC News and reports for Nightly News with Brian Williams, Today, and MSNBC. Prior to joining NBC News, she served as a medical correspondent for ABC News. She has received numerous broadcasting awards and grants from the American Cancer Society and the Kellogg Foundation. She has received numerous awards for her medical broadcast reporting, including an Associated Press award for best documentary for her work on sex education in Arkansas in 1987, the Distinguished Service Award from the American Academy of Otolaryngology's Head and Neck Surgery Foundation in 1998, and the Trailblazer Award from the American Women in Radio and Television for furthering the knowledge of women's health on a national level in 2001.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Live a Little!: Breaking the Rules Won't Break Your Health
• Authors: Alice D. Domar, Susan M. Love, Leigh Ann Hirschman
• Contributors: Leigh Ann Hirschman, Nancy L. Snyderman
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Potter/TenSpeed/Harmony, 2011
• ISBN: 0307409430, 9780307409430
• Length: 234 pages
• Subjects: Health & Fitness / Women's Health