Your must-follow health list continues to grow: Train with weights to build muscle. Stretch for mobility. Drink one glass of wine for heart health, but stop at just one to prevent breast cancer. Get ten minutes of sun for vitamin D, but then slather on sunscreen to prevent melanoma. You know the drill. It's enough to drive you crazy.

Alice D. Domar is the founder and director of the Mind/Body Program for Infertility. She is also assistant professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Mind/Body Center for Women's Health, Mind/Body Medical Institute, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and two daughters.

Chapter One
The Myth of Perfect Health


What woman can't rattle off a list of to--do items for healthy living? Exercise for a healthy heart; train with weights to build muscle and bone; stretch to maintain mobility; eat meals that are carefully designed for good artery and bowel function; drink one glass of red wine daily to avoid heart disease; resist the temptation to drink two glasses of said wine to avoid breast cancer; get a full night’s sleep to promote immune function; expose the skin to sunlight for ten minutes to absorb vitamin D, then immediately apply sunscreen to avoid skin cancer; relieve stress to strengthen the immune system; build a social support network to ward off Alzheimer’s; book appointments with our mates for healthy sexual pleasure; and, of course, maintain a body mass index that falls exactly within the “healthy” range listed in every women’s magazine.

And don’t forget the Kegels.


This list is so impossible that it leaves most women either consumed with panic or doubled over with laughter. Yet if you have picked up this book, chances are you feel at least some obligation to follow what we’ll call, with more than a dab of irony, the “health rules.” The individual rules themselves may change with unsettling frequency—by the time you read this book, at least one of the rules we listed will probably be out of date—but one thing remains constant: Every time you turn on the television or read a magazine, you are bombarded with a highly specific set of dos and don’ts for staying healthy. Of course, you want to be healthy. And if you do get sick, you definitely don’t want people to say, in an accusing tone, “She brought it on herself, you know, because she -didn’t eat enough broccoli.” So you try.


But despite earnest efforts to follow these rules, you probably find it tough-going. Maybe you’ve experienced the “what the hell” effect. I’ve been “bad” and eaten a cookie. What the hell, I’ll eat the whole bag. Or: There’s no way I can exercise for sixty minutes every day. What the hell! I won’t exercise at all. Or perhaps you’ve done your level best to follow every piece of health advice and then been riddled with a sense of failure when you fell short. These experiences are common—all too common, we believe. The health rules, which are supposed to help us live longer and live better, have become a source of pressure, guilt, and stress. This is not a healthy situation.


We’ve written this book as a corrective to the narrowly laid--out health rules; in their place, we’ll offer a more relaxed definition of both health and health habits. You might argue that we’re exactly the kind of people who ought to be vigorously defending the conventional rules, not questioning them. And, yes, we’ve both devoted our lives to bettering the health of women. Susan is a breast cancer surgeon; the author of books about menopause and breast health; and president of the Dr. Susan Love Research Foundation, an organization dedicated to ending breast cancer. Ali is a psychologist and author specializing in women’s health; the head of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health; the director of Mind/Body Services for Boston IVF; and an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School. We’re both part of BeWell, a team of health care professionals at the forefront of helping women live healthier lives.


In our jobs, we rarely encounter women who blithely ignore the health rules. Instead, we see women who are overwhelmed by them. So we decided to review the evidence for the health rules, sifting through piles of data—and guess what? We’ve come to believe what you have probably suspected all along: These rules are a little redic

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Excerpted from Live a Little!: Breaking the Rules Won't Break Your Health by Alice D. Domar, Susan M. Love, Leigh Ann Hirschman
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.