Sarí Harrar - Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally: Drop Pounds and Slash Your Blood Pressure in 6 Weeks Without Drugs

This book is intended as a reference volume only, not as a medical manual. The information given here is designed to help you make informed decisions about your health. It is not intended as a substitute for any treatment that may have been prescribed by your doctor. If you suspect that you have a medical problem, we urge you to seek competent medical help.

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With deep appreciation to Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum for her passion, deep knowledge, humor, and down-to-earth, do-it-yourself savvy about healthy, natural blood pressure control; to Trisha Calvo and Sarah Pelz, our patient, insightful, and good-humored editors; to Stephanie Clarke and Willow Jarosh of C&J Nutrition for developing a delicious, mineral-packed eating plan and answering countless questions; to Jess Fromm for gracefully managing a million details; to Preventions fitness director, Jenna Bergen, for designing the books innovative fitness plan and to Bari Lieberman, Preventions senior associate fitness director, for demonstrating it; and to Hope Clarke, Elizabeth Neal, Wendy Gable, Susan Hindman, and Michelle Janowitz for creating this powerful and beautiful book.

Special thanks to our intrepid test panelists who changed their daily lives for 6 weeks to test the plan, overcoming all sorts of obstacles along the way, from broken arms and family medical emergencies to getting up early to exercise.

Hows your blood pressure?

Its an urgent question no man or woman can afford to ignore. Living with high blood pressure is like having an invisible, raging river speeding through your arteries day and night. It damages artery walls, and it can harm almost every organ in your body. And living with this raging river in your arteries is just downright dangerous.

High blood pressure has been dubbed the silent killer because it often has no warning signs or symptoms. It is also linked to many other health complications: It doubles your odds for a heart attack, raises your risk for a stroke fourfold,

The shocker? Almost all of us have high blood pressure or are at high risk for developing it. Two-thirds of Americans have hypertension (a blood pressure reading of 140/90 or higher) or prehypertension (a higher-than-healthy reading between 120/80 and 139/89). And if youre among the one in three with healthy blood pressure levels, hypertension may very well be in your future. Your lifetime risk for developing this invisible, unfelt threat is a whopping 90 percent. By age 60, 50 percent of us will have high blood pressure, and most of the time it is due to our lifestyle choices.

However, more Americans than ever before are aware of high blood pressure and trying to do something about it. The number of people whose BP (shorthand for blood pressure, which youll see throughout this book) is being treated doubled between 1988 and 2008. Hypertension is now the most frequently diagnosed health condition that turns up in the 1 billion visits we make to our doctors each year,

But theres still a huge and frustrating gap. Half of the 78 million women and men with high blood pressure dont have it under control. And just one in three of the 70 million with prehypertension do. The reasons?

Medication alone isnt the answer. Taking one, two, or even three different drugs for high blood pressure often cannot overcome the everyday factors that cause high BP and conspire to drive it higher and higher.

Making the wrong lifestyle changes can lead you to believe that do-it-yourself strategies dont work. If youve ever tried to drop a few pounds or cut out a little salt to lower your BP, only to see your numbers barely budge, you know what were talking about.

Theres a better way to lower your blood pressureeffectively, naturally, and often without adding more drugs or increasing the dose of current medications. Its the synergistic, breakthrough approach in this book we created with the help of Suzanne Steinbaum, DO, a leading cardiologist and the director of Women and Heart Disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. It helped our test panelists, all of whom started the 6-week program with high blood pressure, lower their numbers significantly and, as a result, slash their risk for heart attacks, strokes, and all of hypertensions other life-altering consequences.

Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally is the only plan that attacks the root causes of high blood pressure on all fronts with eight proven, drug-free strategies. The lifestyle changes youll make on this plan are proven to work individually, but emerging research shows that combining them increases their pressure-lowering power.

Thats the magic of synergy. But its not the only magic in this plan. Every step is easy and convenient, so that you can benefit from pressure-lowering synergy on your craziest, busiest days and make this 6-week plan a permanent part of your life.

Our test panelists are the proof. When our seven volunteers with high blood pressurewomen and men ages 26 to 75followed the Lower Your Blood Pressure Naturally plan for 6 weeks, the results were spectacular. Everyone reduced their blood pressure, lowering systolic blood pressure (the top number in a BP reading) by as much as 30 points and diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) by as much as 17 points. Several panelists taking blood pressure drugs without much success were finally able to reach healthy levels. Two even worked with their doctors to reduce their medications.