If  you have heart disease, you will have paid attention to your symptoms and you will be in treatment for it. But don’t bet on having those tell tale symptoms until it is too late. Heart failure doesn’t mean your heart is failing. It’s the pumping power that is failing: lacking the power to pump blood at an adequate rate for supply of oxygen and nutrients, your precious juice moves slower through the body on the way to the heart. In response to that slowness pressure builds up in the heart. What other can your heart do in response than stretch like an overblown balloon? Your heart chambers bag out as we can readily imagine, or become stiff and thick. A vicious cycle.

Your hear muscle adapts to cope with the changes, but not for the better. You know what happens at your grandkid’s birthday party: the little terror keeps on blowing and blowing that cool balloon, and eventually pop it goes. Bagged out. Unable to pump nicely, the way we expect, your kidneys try to compensate by storing water in your limbs, lungs and other organs. I mean blood is thicker than water, we say…Eventually you’ll notice this fluid retention in your legs, abdomen and bum, but you might not have caught on yet! You just thought you put on some weight! Naturally, you say, your body is slowing down a bit.

In the meantime, unbeknownst to you, your body is filling up with the fluid, and like the proverbial drop in the bucket, it is just a matter of time before that last drop will come and get you. Your lungs are congested and you’re drowning. You’re wheezing some time

Before that event, and if you’re the type who’d rather not know, let your doctor tell you it’s…bronchitis! After all, you hardly ever go to the doctor, you have no intimate relationship with them, and you’re both wildly guessing at this point. Your half-full glass philosophy will keep you on an even keel, and I am sure although doctors are known for imagining they have all the diseases they encounter while training, it really does helps not to think of the worst first. So it is bronchitis, strange but well, they are the doctors after all.

Before I continue on this road tomorrow, I’ll stress the fact that it IS important to keep fit, to exercise as long as one can – and in addition – it IS important to keep one’s blood pressure as low as possible. To recap, the heart is under greater pressure, therefore the blood can’t deliver what the body needs, your kidneys respond by withholding water that your body stores in extremities, organs, and your lungs. In response to this challenge, try to lower your blood pressure at all cost and lower it naturally. Of course with this disease you’ll be taking many pills to contain the situation for as long as possible, but it never hurts to go just that extra mile.

…to be continued

When it comes to diet, most people think of it as deprivation. Diet is restriction, boredom, it is prescribed by some so-called expert (how many books have you bought on the subject and yet got nowhere?). Sadly, most of us have lost our way, we’re unable to trust ourselves what is right and good for us. We’re no longer self-sufficient, foraging Neanderthals, neither are we evolved enough to be linked up to some magic tube that feeds us all the right stuff in the just right amount, with the benefit of no thinking and planning necessary. So this gives some of us considerable anxiety. What is right and how do you do it?

Exercise is diet. No way around it. The easiest diet there is around, I might say. Take it from me. I have ditched my car. Not an easy choice. I am not telling you to do the same. In some places, commuting is the only way out of Sleepyville. So you just get out of the car earlier and walk a bit longer to your destination. The proverbial 20 minutes a day are a joke. But you could go for a sprint a day. A high intensity 3 minute workout is apparently just as good. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17177251 Imagine the time you have left over to do all the cooking from scratch! I ran this morning. I enjoy it, that’s why I do it. Then, just to get my hair cut, run errands (!) I walked into town, did what I had to do and had a look around. After that the long trek back (10 km, if that helps) Good, that’s done.

The next specifically smart diet is this: avoid having anything in your kitchen cupboards that make you weak in the knees, especially after a hard day, whatever a hard day means to you. Physical exertions has made me weak in the knees, and I have nothing in the cupboards that I can take off the shelf and put in my mouth, pronto. Nothing there that doesn’t need to be prepared and cooked. I am patting my back. Well done, I have painted myself into a very healthy corner. No goodies, no car, and quite a way to walk to the nearest shop. So that diet is done and dusted.

So lets recap: exercise will lower your blood pressure naturally. At the moment I feel like the aforementioned foraging Neanderthal, but you don’t have to go as far! ‘Aerobic fitness is a measure of how good your heart and lungs are at getting oxygen into your body and is an excellent predictor of future health’ says the presenter of Horizon: The Truth about Exercise. The 3 minute sprint will do it for you. Then do diet again: have nothing in your cupboards that seduce you to fudge your healthy living. Treats now and again are allowed and welcome. Even I do it and enjoy it tremendously. But only once in a while. Aerobic fitness brings on the right weight brings on the right lower blood pressure naturally. What more do you want and need to do? Nada!

If you belong to those people who believe that the right kind of climate greatly improves your physical health and mental well being, then this is for you: the ‘right climate?’ Lots of predictable sunshine for me! Isn’t there anything more reassuring getting out of bed in the morning and seeing the sun rise over the horizon – slowly, quietly, unencumbered by gray skies and clouds; reflecting back on the water (another must – living by the sea), nothing but blue sky, blue skies from now on… with a nod to Willy Nelson. Waves gently washing against the shore. Breathe in, breathe out, and there you have your natural solution to lowering your blood pressure. First thing in the morning!

I have set the mood. Now imagine yourself in Southern California – LA, if you like, or more likely Venice, by the Beach. The setting or climate is igual, as they say. The conquistadores must have thought they were coming home to roost, so does the environment remind me of Southern Spain. But hike up to Mount Wilson, the highest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains, you’ll start getting a whiff of humanity, or rather it’s  incessant activities. You smell gasoline. It hangs around on some days like a dull blanket suspended over the valley where Los Angeles has sprawled out. Heart healthy living? Go clutch your heart at the thought of it. And it’s not getting any better. The cars are not getting smaller, nor are the people.

Lifestyle, I am afraid, cancels out climate. Not for all, of course – how could I be so presumptuous, but even the ‘healthy’ may show strange preoccupations (size 0 anyone?).The pace for Southern Californians is fast and furious; the diet is fast food and gluttonous. Eat all you can buffets are taken advantage of as if there were no tomorrow. Chinese buffets warn you to eat and get out, not have a marathon session for 4 long and filling hours only to return for more. A culture that can kill you. Not for the faint hearted. Competition is the name of the game. Muscle-bound men, and women, grace the scenery at Venice Beach. Pumping iron in front of gawping tourists may be inspirational, but who’ll be lowering their blood pressure naturally, if not you?

Or me. Sitting sedately here on the Southern coast of Spain, life beats to a different drum. 3 hour siestas are still common. The sun beats down on you. Shops close. From 1:30 until 5:30. 4 hours even! Dentists, doctors, bankers, in short professionals, go to local restaurants and enjoy heart healthy food: Lettuce with slices of onion and pale pink tomatoes. A bit of olive oil and vinegar on it. No more. No artery clogging gunk. Some olives. Gazpacho, fresh cooked fish, small pieces of meat cooked a la plancha. El pan without butter! Builders, plumbers, mechanics get to do the same. At their local poligono. No need to drive. Cheap menus del dia serve what’s fresh, in season and on hand. With a bottle of raunchy red wine to pass around, or in summer, tinto de verano. Red raunchy wine and lemonade. With lots of ice. Yum!

Here on the Mediterranean the animal has a shorter life span. Cordero (lamb) has no juicy green grass to feast on such as British sheep can call their own. When they’re finally on your plate, their chops are as big as your palm. Here on the Med, feeding and growing season is short. The chops are as tiny as fingernails, and you’ll have to eat a dozen or so to make up for the difference. If you’re so inclined. The whole animal is still precious, and all its internal bits are prepared and eaten. Want not waste not. Food waste and gluttony has arrived with the pressures of modern life, but you’ll have to look very carefully, rather than be poked in the eye by it. The Mediterranean diet and life style still comes out on top for lowering your blood pressure naturally. Culture comes out on top. Climate is only a secondary contribution.