Your heart pumps oxygen-rich blood throughout the body to all of your muscles and tissues. When your body has extra weight, that means extra tissue. The heart then has to work extra to pump enough blood to all of the body’s tissues, which essentially exhausts the heart muscle over time. (Here’s more details about how heart failure affects the body.)
The first step to managing heart failure is getting to a healthy body weight if you’re overweight.For more advice on living with heart failure, here are heart-healthy habits for treating heart failure.
Dr. Goodman is board-certified in cardiology, internal medicine, lipidology, integrative medicine, and cardiac CT. He is the director of integrative medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center and a clinical professor of medicine at NYU.
References
American College of Cardiology. (2022). Daily Weight Checks: Quick Tips.
American Heart Association. (2023). Managing Heart Failure Symptoms.
Cleveland Clinic. (2023). Monitoring your weight & fluid intake with heart failure: Tracking your weight.
U.S. National Library of Medicine. (2022). Heart failure - home monitoring.
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