This part of the Healthy Hearts Peterborough website is dedicated to helpful tips, tools and resources that we all come across. These are always vetted to ensure the source is reliable and that the material is publicly available. As always you should consult your healthcare team for medical advice.
Treating hypertension: Lowering your blood pressure with medications
What role should medications play in managing high blood pressure? In this video, Drs. Anthony Levinson and Richard Sztramko discuss when and what to consider when lifestyle changes alone are not enough to maintain a healthy blood pressure. Click on the link below for a brief ten minute video.
Treating hypertension: Lowering your blood pressure with medications
Heart Healthy Living Guide
The link below takes you to a PDF document published by the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. This is a very handy guide with summary information about all things heart healthy. If there is a particular subject you are interested in, you find it in the table of contents and then click on it and you are taken directly to the page with the information you want. In most cases there are further links provided to explore subjects in greater depth.
NUTRITION FOR HEART HEALTH
The link below will take you a form that you can complete. This is a simple but actionable tool for determining your current nutrition patterns and how they might evolve to improve heart healthy nutrition behaviour. Your community partner JoAnne’s Place has agreed to offer some services from their Holistic Nutritionist, Marissa Laughlin. Marissa will offer you some tips and comments once she has received your tracker. Choose a one week period and track how frequently you consume food in each category. As an example if you had beans on Monday Wednesday and Saturday, that would be three days and you would tick the 3 column. Alternatively you could tick each column as it occurs, so after Monday you would tick the 1 column and after Wednesday the 2 column and so on. If you have any questions you can e-mail Marissa at marissa@joannesplace.ca
Heart Healthy Nutrition Tracker
Once you have started your tracker and click submit you will get an e-mail showing you your entries so far. When you are ready to enter more, click on the edit response at the bottom of your more recent notification e-mail. Do not reenter using the link above as you can only start one form at a time!
Here is an explanation on how to complete your form.
How To Complete Your Tracker
Seniors Safety Wellness Guide
My Kawartha.com have published a helpful reference tool and made it available online in a PDF format. Its read like a magazine as the pages flip when you click to advance them. There is a fair amount of advertising in it that you can just ignore (although there are some handy references you can look at).
Nutrition Diary and Exercise Tracking Application
Click on the link below to check out MyFitnessPal. This is a free tool that you can sign up for. Don’t worry about being asked to pay later as they make their money from advertising. This is a little annoying but not that big a deal. You can upgrade to Premium which gives you more tools and removes all advertising. The free tools are extensive and very helpful in nutrition and macronutrient planning as well as weight management.
Weight Management – February 1, 2021
This section was added to provide a helpful and detailed reference source for peer group members that are interested in managing their weight in support of a heart healthy lifestyle. The source is a comprehensive guide provided by a private medical clinic in the US, Kaiser Permanente, a not for profit integrated health care system with the mission of providing consultative health management, acute and chronic care to its members. They have an excellent website and the section on Weight Management can be accessed at the link below. Here you will interactive tools, information and guidance on all aspects of weight management.
Eat Tracker
Check back here in November for a new tracking tool.
Exercise Planner
The link below directs you to a website that assists you in designing an exercise program based on your own personal situation. It will ask questions about your demographic information, what goals you have, how much time and effort you want to put into exercise and the equipment you wish to use (example stationary bike, therapy-bands, free weights and so on). Once you have entered the start up data it will automatically produce an exercise program for each day of the week. It does take some time and effort to get started but if you are serious about working out, this is like having your own personal trainer along with a nutritionist!
Remember to consult with your healthcare team about safety for you to exercise and don’t start a program without their approval.
Health Studies
For those of you who prefer to do your own research into how diet can influence health there is a reputable website that links dietary practices with health factors. Here is a link to the website.
Health Studies – Diet and Disease
For example if you search Vegan & Vegetarian diet for influence on Heart/Cardiovascular disease you get a menu of research results. An example of the research is shown below.
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