Headwear Etc Blog

Staying Fit During the Holidays
by Paige Waehner
It CAN be Done!
The holidays are time of celebration…and my how we celebrate! We eat, we drink, we indulge and then we end up feeling like bloated whales by the time it’s all over. It’s almost as though a voice announces: “Let the eating commence and let exercise become a thing of the past!”

This year, you have a choice. You don’t have to let every party become your own personal eating contest and you don’t have to let shopping take the place of your usual exercise routine. All it takes is flexibility, creativity and a new way of defining exercise.

Keep Moving

It’s tempting to ditch your workouts as your days fill up with holiday preparations, parties and whatnot, but, now more than ever, you need to stay active. Exercise will help you deal with added stress and give you energy for everything you need to accomplish.

Also, it’ll help you avoid weight gain. If you have trouble sticking with your usual routine, now is a great time to come up with a new one. Forget the rules, lower your standards…do whatever you need to do to keep moving:
Shorten Your Cardio. Pare down your cardio routine to whatever time you have, whether it’s 10 minutes or 20 minutes. Stick with activities that are easy to do at a moment’s notice–walking, running, jump rope or dancing around the house to your favorite tunes. Try to work as hard as you can in the time you have by keeping the intensity high. Here’s a sample 10-minute workout to try at home:
Exercise wherever you can. You already know to take the stairs, park far away, etc. to get more exercise. This holiday season, slap on a pedometer as you’re running around and see how many steps you can accumulate. Use every opportunity to get in more movement whether it’s parking on the opposite side of where you need to be or chopping down your own Christmas tree.
Make it a family affair. As you gather together with your family, plan active things to do. Walk around the neighborhood to look at holiday decorations. Play football before the big meal at Thanksgiving. Plan contests with the kids to see who can run the furthest or who can do the most pushups. Challenge everyone to a snow-shoveling contest and then build a snow-person out of the remains.
Control Your Eating
Eating yourself into a coma seems inevitable during the holidays what with all the yummy delights available. But treating every party like it’s an invitation to indulge is a sure way to add pounds. These tips are probably nothing you haven’t heard before, but they’re great reminders for keeping the calories in check:

Eat Before You Go. Rules to live by: never go grocery shopping while hungry and, similarly, never hit a holiday party on an empty stomach. You’ll be less tempted to overindulge if you’re belly’s full of something healthy.
Choose One Treat. Once at the party, choose one thing to indulge in and make it good. No chips–you can have those any old time. Pick something you only get during the holidays.
Control Your Drinking. Alcohol is an easy way to consume more calories than you need so avoid mixed or fruity drinks and have a glass of water for every drink you consume. And definitely avoid the egg nog–it has up to 350 calories a cup.
Don’t Skip Meals. It’s tempting to skip meals to make up for whatever nightmare food you’ll eat later but, just like the empty-stomach rule, if you’re starving, your rational mind will be unavailable for healthy food choices. Eat small meals all day to avoid going nuts at the buffet table.
However you deal with the holidays, make this the year that you don’t gain extra weight. Make a decision to do everything you can to stay active and eat healthy while not depriving yourself of all the fun. Like everything else in life, it’s all about moderation. Happy Holidays!

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Dear Friends,
I wanted to wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving! It’s a wonderful time of year to tell the people we cherish just how thankful we are to have them in our lives.
There are so many ways to show your gratitude for the different people in your life:
– Call a friend or loved one just to check in and offer a listening ear.
– Spend time with your children. Play a board game, bake cookies, or read a book together.
– Send a thoughtful card to someone on your medical team who means a lot to you - your surgeon, oncologist, or nurse, for example.

May you all have a wonderful and loving holiday season.
My Best,
Marilyn
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Hot Topics
Double Mastectomy Decisions
Many newspapers recently carried stories about a study published in the online issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology that found that a small but growing number of women are choosing to have their healthy breast removed at the same time they have their cancerous breast removed—even though having this surgery will not improve their survival.

Dr. Love believes part of the reason for this increase in double mastectomies is because surgeons are not explaining to women that:

1. There is a 5-10% recurrence rate in the scar with a mastectomy, which is comparable to the 5-10% local recurrence rate with lumpectomy.
2. What you do locally does not impact survival.
3. That the risk of a woman getting cancer in the other breast is not that high and is often lower than the risk of recurrence of the cancer.

Another contributing factor: It’s easier to do surgery and reconstruction when a woman has a bilateral mastectomy, and the reimbursement rate is higher, too.

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“We help women with hair loss look and feel confident…with style, fit, and comfort.”

Understanding Hair Loss - the Basics
What Is Hair Loss?
Hair grows everywhere on the human body except on the palms of our hands and the soles of our feet, but many hairs are so fine they’re virtually invisible. Hair is made up of a protein called keratin (the same protein in nails) produced in hair follicles in the outer layer of skin; as follicles produce new hair cells, old cells are being pushed out through the surface of the skin at the rate of about six inches a year. The hair you can see is actually a string of dead keratin cells. The average adult head has about 100,000 to 150,000 hairs and loses up to 100 of them a day; so finding a few stray hairs on your hairbrush is not necessarily cause for alarm.

At any one time, about 90% of the hair on a person’s scalp is growing. Each follicle has its own life cycle that can be influenced by age, disease, and a wide variety of other factors. This life cycle is divided into three phases:

Anagen — active hair growth. Lasts between two to six years.
Catagen — transitional. Lasts two to three weeks.
Telogen — resting phase. At the end of the resting phase (two to three months) the hair is shed and a new hair replaces it and the growing cycle starts again.
As people age, their rate of hair growth slows.

There are many types of hair loss, also called alopecia:

Gradual thinning of hair with age is a natural condition known as involutional alopecia. More and more hair follicles go into a telogen, or resting, phase, and the remaining hairs become shorter and fewer in number.

In men, the condition is also called male pattern baldness. It’s characterized by a receding hairline and gradual disappearance of hair from the crown. In women, androgenic alopecia is referred to as female pattern baldness. Women with the condition experience a general thinning over the entire scalp, with the most extensive hair loss at the crown.

Patchy hair loss in children and young adults, often sudden in onset, is known as alopecia areata. This condition may result in complete baldness, but in about 90% of cases the hair returns, usually within a few years.

With alopecia universalis, all body hair falls out.

Tearing out one’s own hair, a psychological disorder known as trichotillomania, is seen most frequently in children.
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