A heart attack has a way of getting your attention. Mine sure did, and once I got past the initial shock of it, I decided I was going to come out the other side healthier than I was going in. Five months later I'm down 30 pounds and feel better than I did before any of this happened. Here's what worked for me.
The Mediterranean diet
I switched over to a Mediterranean-style way of eating, which was highly recommended by my dietician, my cardiac rehab team, and my doctor as the best-supported diet for someone recovering from a cardiac event. In practice that meant a lot more vegetables, fish several times a week, olive oil instead of butter, whole grains instead of white bread and white rice, beans and lentils showing up in meals they never used to, and fruit for dessert instead of the stuff I used to reach for. Red meat became an occasional thing rather than a default, and processed food more or less disappeared from my diet.
What I like about it though... is that it doesn't feel like a diet. Nothing is off-limits in a punishing way, and the food is genuinely good. That mattered a lot, because I knew from the beginning that whatever I picked had to be something I could still be doing a year from now, not just five months from now.
Smaller portions, but not too small
The other half of the food equation was portion size. I was eating too much, plain and simple, and cutting portions was going to have to be part of this. But I was careful not to overdo it. If I cut portions to the point where I was hungry and miserable all the time, I'd quit inside of a month — I know myself well enough to know that.
So I aimed for meals that left me satisfied but not stuffed. A smaller plate helped. Slowing down at meals helped too, because it turns out that when you eat more slowly you notice you're full a lot sooner than when you're shoveling it in. The goal was sustainability, not suffering.
Daily Exercise
I had a fantastic cardiac rehab team and they were a huge encouragement to me! I worked out with them 3 times a week which is basically a highly monitored workout session with 20 minutes of jogging/running, 20 minutes of cycling and 10 minutes of stretching and cooling down. They'd hook me up to a blood pressure monitor and a portable EKG "thingy" that had electrodes on my chest and rib cage. The team would monitor these stats along with my heart rate to make sure I took it slow and also made steady progress.
The program was 3 months but I graduated a month early since I improved so rapidly, but I knew I needed to join a club or I'd never keep exercising like I needed to.
The exercise piece is where I signed up with 24 Hour Fitness, and I picked a location specifically because it has a swimming pool and a massage room. I go pretty much every day. Some days that's the treadmill and some light weights, some days that's laps in the pool, and some days after a hard workout I'll spend time in the massage chairs to loosen everything back up.
The pool has been a bigger deal than I expected. Swimming is easy on the joints, gets my heart rate up in a controlled way, and I can go longer than I can on a treadmill without feeling beat up the next day. It's also just a nice change of pace from the same cardio machines everyone else is on.
I ended up leaning a lot on the massage room. Stress was a factor in getting me where I ended up, and I take that seriously now. Twenty minutes in one of those chairs after a workout does something for me that no amount of willpower does. I come out of there relaxed in a way I hadn't felt in years.
Going every day
The daily part is important. Not because every workout has to be hard — some days it's a light swim or an easy walk on the treadmill — but because making it a daily habit takes the decision out of it. There's no debating whether today is a gym day. Every day is a gym day. That mental shift removed a huge amount of the friction that used to keep me from being consistent.
Going every day also means the workouts themselves don't have to be brutal. An hour of moderate activity, done seven days a week, adds up to a lot more than two punishing sessions on the weekend followed by nothing.
The results
Five months in, I'm down 30 pounds. My clothes fit differently, I sleep better, my energy through the day is higher, and I anticipate my follow-up numbers with my doctor will be better across the board. I actually feel healthier now than I did before the heart attack, which is a strange thing to be able to say but it's true.
None of this was extreme. I didn't do a crash diet, I didn't train for a marathon, and I didn't cut out entire food groups. I changed what I ate, I ate a little less of it, I moved every day, and I took the stress side of it seriously. Every piece of it is something I can keep doing, and I plan to.
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