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

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!

SUSAN M. LOVE, M.D., M.B.A., is the president of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, an organization dedicated to ending breast cancer, and is also a clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. You can help her cause by joining the Love/Avon Army of Women at www.armyofwomen.org.

ALICE D. DOMAR, Ph.D., is the executive director of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health. She is also the director of mind/body services at Boston IVF and an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School. Her website is www.domarcenter.com.