The Vibrant Life Podcast

001: Live Longer & Healthier with Vibrant Life Intimate Wellness Physician Dr. Clark Brittain: Avoid Heart Attack, Stroke, and Depression By Implementing Modest Daily Exercise


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Hello. This is Dr. Clark Brittain. I'm a gynecologist in Bloomington, Indiana, and I'd like the share with you what I think is some important information that I think will make a change in your life.

I grew up on a farm in the Midwest near Winterset, Iowa, home of the book The Bridges of Madison County, written by James Waller, and the site for the movie of the same name starring Robert Redford and Meryl Streep. It was a town full of wonderful people, who ... very loving and giving and kind. But it dawned on me, as I was growing up, that these are really not very healthy people. And we were showered with love and attention and comfort food, and I do mean comfort food. All of my relatives were fat. Most of my friends' parents were fat. Many of them smoked cigarettes and really didn't very good care of them.

By the time I was 16 years old, most of my family members had passed by the time they were in their mid sixties, and the only one really left was a grandfather who was about 86 when he finally died. And he'd stayed pretty healthy up until the end, and walked every day and took pretty good care of himself. He never smoked cigarettes, never really drank alcohol and had a pretty modest life. So I started looking around at the common thread among people that I knew who managed to stay healthy for a long time and have a long, healthy life, and seemed to have a pretty good attitude, and seemed to be active into their older years. And they all had some common things that they did. Many of them had some kind of a faith community, they had a sensible diet, they had a group of friends, and they did some form of exercise.

And I started medical school when I was in my mid-twenties, and took it upon myself to start with a pretty good exercise program, even though I'd been in the army during Vietnam, and I worked construction and worked farm work. I was strong and healthy and all that. But I started running and doing additional exercise, and, in fact, ever since 1975 I've run or walked two to six miles at lunchtime every day. And I'm a firm believer that that's helped make me healthier and more alert, and have a more vibrant life. In fact, that's the name of my spa practice, where I focus on intimate wellness and care of the menopausal and the andropausal man, Vibrant Life in Bloomington, Indiana. And you can reach us on our website at www.drbrittain.com, or call our office at 812-331-9160, or visit our Facebook page at Vibrant Life. I'd be happy to interact with you.

But I'd like to tell you a little bit more about why I'm so passionate about this, and what it means for me, and I think will mean for you, and some of the consequences of the things that we do and the things that we don't do. So by maintaining some physical activity, you can interact with your children. You can interact and be active with your grandchildren. You can go hiking and swimming and biking and play tennis and golf and square dance and do the fun things that require a little bit of physical activity that many people, as they get into their sixties and seventies, are just not able to do, and this I kind of sad.

But the people who do stay active find that they have sharper minds, they have better sex lives, they have less heart disease, they have fewer cancers, they have fewer strokes, they have stronger bones, and they have less depression, and along with all of these physical activity things, a sensible diet, and, above all else, maintaining a good hormone balance. As we age, our bodies inevitably lose some of the hormone production that made us really vital and alive when were in our peak reproductive years. Women poop out around the age of fifty, and many men do so at an even earlier age, and it's amazing how many people we see whose hormones have bottomed out, and they're just feeling awful.

Well, in my practice, in about the last 10 years, I have focused almost exclusively on the care of the aging woman and the aging man, and how to help them maintain a vital life and a vibrant life, and maintain the physical capabilities that they're so wanting and able to do. The government in England looked at the civil servants and published an article in the mid-seventies when I was in medical school that really peaked my interest. They wanted to find out who in their civil servant society was having heart attacks and who wasn't. So they looked at activity patterns of their servants, and they found that people who did even modest activity had fewer heart attacks.

And this modest activity included ballroom dancing, bicycling, swimming, running, walking up and down steps and modest activities like that. And so that, along with the family history that I had, really got me going on a healthy exercise program. I did long distance running, I have done resistance training and so forth. And to this day, one of the things that I try to do on a daily basis, is I get up early, I do some yoga, I do some stretching, I do a little bit of a physical therapy routine, I spend and hour sweating on the elliptical trainer, and then I am at my office by 7:00 AM every day, and I'm 70 years old. And I can go all day long seeing patients, taking care of complicated things, complicated patients, and feel energized by the people that I interact with, and they get energy from me.

And I really think that by setting an example, I can encourage them to obtain and maintain a physical fitness and a hormone balance that will keep them vital and alive for a really long time. Now, they may not live a lot longer, but they will have a healthier life. And what I like to say, is that people don't want to just kind of ... live and die, they want to live, live, live, live, live, live, die. And nobody wants to linger, and you want to stay as physically fit and active as long as you can. And by staying physically active now and in the future, and maintaining hormone balance, you can make that happen.

So once again, please visit my website, www.drbrittain.com. Visit our Facebook page at Vibrant Life. Give our office a call at 812-331-9160. I'd love to talk to you some more. Thank you very much. This is Clark Brittain signing off.

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The Vibrant Life PodcastBy Dr. Clark Brittain for Vibrant Life