Last week was Caribbean Wellness Week and on Friday we celebrated the last day of this week with the grand finale  at the Marriott in Frigate Bay.

This event was organised by the Ministry of Health in collaboration with the Marriott Resort and we were delighted to have been invited to have an information table.

The event started with free health checks at 2:30pm where members of public and Marriott staff were able to get their blood pressure, blood glucose, BMI and cholesterol levels measured as well as have an HIV test conducted. Also, attendees had the opportunity to visit information tables, one of which we hosted.

We were delighted to welcome people to our information table to introduce the public to our work and raise awareness of our upcoming Living Well With Chronic Disease Course, let women know about our fibroids survey and promote the Healthy Caribbean Coalition’s childhood obesity prevention campaign and call-to-action

Then, at 4pm it was party time! The chairs were cleared away, the music was turned on and soca-cise began. This was a fun, fast-paced aerobics session with a Caribbean twist. Instructors led the audience through a 2-hour routine that got our heart rates up and worked every part of our bodies. It was a fun session and the 2 hours flew by and before we knew it the session was over ☹, proving that exercise doesn’t have to feel like torture to be effective.

We had a great time on Friday and would like to thank the Ministry of Health for the opportunity to be a part of this event. We’d also like to say a big thank you to everyone who visited our information table, it was lovely meeting you all.

We look forward to Caribbean Wellness Week next year and for more information about Caribbean Wellness Day and Week vist CARPHA or PAHO’s websites.

On 8^th September we were up at 4AM for the St Kitts Caribbean Wellness Day Walk. It was hard waking up at that time, way before the sun was up, but it was worth it.

This walk was months in the making and started as an idea, back in June, at the first planning meeting of Caribbean Wellness Week. The planning meeting brought together the Ministry of Health and its partners all working towards a common goal of  improving the health of the nation.

So, on 8^th September, feeling pretty sleepy, we drove to the meeting point at the Caribbean Cinemas parking lot and joined about 50 other people to recognise Caribbean Wellness Day and the importance of physical activity.

The walk was led by Elite Fitness, a local gym, who started off the morning with a warm-up and then we hit the streets of Basseterre for a lovely walk. The route took us through town, all the way down Cayon Street and then we turned left onto Wellington Road and continued to the airport roundabout and then turned onto the bypass road and made our way back to the cinema where we finished off with a cool-down session.

We walked a total of 7.49KM which took us an hour and 20 minutes and with the inclines in two locations, the route provided us all with a great workout.

We had a great time and it was a so nice to see the diversity of people in attendance – old, young, male, female and all shapes and sizes.

This event not only celebrated Caribbean Wellness Day, but it was the launch of Caribbean Wellness Week which runs until Friday 14^th September. Look out for all the events being organised this week. Highlights include the a Health Fest on Thursday 13^th September, National Sneaker Day on 14^th September where everyone is encouraged to wear their sneakers to work and the grand finale at the Marriott, a soca-cise party starting from 4pm with free health checks from 2:30pm.

Come out, get active and let’s make sure that we create a healthier nation!

We are delighted to let you know that registration for our Fibroids Self-Care Webinar Series is now open! Our series starts on Saturday 27th October at 11am AST/4pm GMT with a session led by Le’Nise Brothers, a Registered Nutritional Therapist and the Founder of Eat Love Move.

Le’Nise will deliver a webinar on Fibroids, Diet and Hormones giving attendees the opportunity to learn about the role that hormones play in the development of fibroids and how simple changes to your diet may improve symptoms.

Discounted Early Bird Tickets Are Now Available

Early bird tickets for this webinar are now available and are just $10 (about £8) and you can book your tickets on Eventbrite 

We Have A Special Giveaway Just For You

We’re pleased to let you know that the first 10 people who register for this webinar will be entered into a giveaway and one lucky person will win a copy of the book ‘Flow Fighters – How I Kicked My Fibroids and Heavy Periods to the Curb’ by Holly Bridges.

We’re also delighted to have formed a partnership with OH Services who will be launching their ‘Emotional Impact of Fibroids’ online course in November 2018.  The first 10 people to register for our webinar on 27th October 2018 can claim a £5 discount on the cost of the OH Services course.

Other Webinars in this Series

Other webinars in the series will include:

Session 2: Deciding on the Best Treatment For You, Apryll Chase, Consultant Gynaecologist, 5th December 2018

Session 3: The Importance of Exercise, Relaxation and Me-Time, Candice Bryan, Founder and CEO, Noire Wellness, 23rd February 2019

Session 4: Hair and Body Care for Women With Fibroids, Rachael and Jocelyn, Founders of Afrocenchix, April 2019 (To be confirmed)

Session 5: Dealing with the Emotional Impact of Fibroids, Olivia Haltman, Founder, OH Services, June 2019

Session 6: Our Fibroids Stories – A Time to Share, August 2019

More Information 

We hope that you’ll join us on 27th October for this really interesting online event and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at events@lakehealthandwellbeing.com or visit our Eventbrite page

Disclosure: this post contains an affiliate link. Find out more here

We love attending health conferences. They’re a great opportunity to discover the latest advances in the field, learn something new and meet interesting people. Since moving to St Kitts about 10 months ago we haven’t had the opportunity to attend any conferences and so when we learnt that the 63^rd Annual CARPHA Health Research Conference was going to be held right here in St Kitts, we jumped at the opportunity and registered immediately and started counting down the days until conference day.  In today’s blog we’re going to share some of the highlights of the conference from our point of view, but first, you may be asking: who or what is CARPHA?

CARPHA – Who Are They?

CARPHA stands for the Caribbean Public Health Agency and they are the only regional public health agency in the Caribbean. They provide strategic direction  in analysing, defining and responding to the public health priorities set out by CARICOM in order to prevent disease, promote health and respond to threats to the public’s health and emergencies. Their programme of work falls in the following categories

• Emergency responses to disasters (hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding),
• The surveillance and management of non-communicable diseases (NDCs) that have reached epidemic proportions such as obesity, cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
• The surveillance and management of communicable diseases (CDs), including HIV / AIDS; re-emerging diseases, like tuberculosis in association with HIV/AIDS; and new communicable diseases that are now endemic in the region
• The surveillance and prevention of injuries, violence and job-related illnesses.
• Contribution to global health agreements and compliance with international health regulations

CARPHA Conference

Every year CARPHA hosts their health research conference which provides Caribbean researchers, at every level, with the opportunity to showcase their work and disseminate their research findings.  This provides the perfect environment to determine how cutting-edge research can contribute to the development of effective evidence-based policies, programmes and practices to tackle the Caribbean’s health challenges.

This year’s conference was the 63^rd conference, making this event the longest running health research conference in the English-speaking Caribbean and it brought together policymakers, researchers, health professionals and public health officials from the Caribbean, Latin America, North America and Europe.

The theme for this year’s conference was ‘Sustainable Health Systems for Economic Growth, Development and Wealth.’ The aim of the conference was to provide an opportunity to raise awareness of Caribbean research that can provide the evidence and information to create stronger health systems in the region.

The conference was a three-day event, packed full of presentations, concurrent sessions, panel discussions, feature lectures, poster presentations and an exhibition, giving attendees an engaging, informative and diverse experience.

Our Conference Highlights

The conference on a whole was excellent, there was something for everyone, but for us certain presentations and pieces of work, really stood out for us. These included:

Assessing the impact of the Barbados Sugar Sweetened Beverage (SSB) Tax on Grocery Store Beverage Sales – with many countries  around the globe introducing a sugar tax it was interesting to hear about the experience in the Caribbean. This presentation summarised the findings, so far, from the introduction of a 10% tax on SSBs in Barbados in August 2015. It was promising to hear that following the tax there was an increase in water purchases, a 4.3% reduction in SSB purchases and a 5.2% increase in the purchase of non-sweetened drinks. It was interesting to note that the decline in SSB purchases was in expensive drinks and there was evidence that consumers were switching to cheaper SSBs.

Diabetes Distress and Diabetes Self-Care in Barbados – this presentation was insightful as we had never come across the term diabetes distress, which refers to the emotional impact of diabetes where patients may experience fear, frustration and guilt. It was interesting learning about this and how promoting self-care and self-management may address this issue.

Obesity and Weight Misperception Among Adults in Eastern Caribbean– this was a very well-presented and engaging talk that explored the extent to which people misunderstand their weight. Researchers found that in their study weight misperception was very common with the majority of people  under estimating their actual weight. This is a problem because it means that people who are overweight or obese don’t realise it, and if people don’t realise they have a problem with their weight they won’t take steps to address this. This leads to people remaining at risk of a number of health issues when they needn’t be. You can find out more about this study here.

Our Voices: Women’s Perspectives on Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening and Treatment in the English-speaking Windward Islands – this presentation really struck a chord with us as we conducted a similar piece of work exploring black British women’s beliefs about breast cancer and their help seeking behaviour. It was interesting to hear that their findings were very similar to what we found around fear, fatalism and stigma

Finally other highlights for us were, being new to the Caribbean, it was just wonderful meeting people, exploring the important health issues in the Caribbean (e.g. NCDs and mosquito borne diseases) and learning about interesting projects like ECHORN, the new Caribbean Cancer Registry Hub and The Seth Fund, as well as innovative methods of care like that being delivered by the Caribbean Cancer Centre Network – a partnered care hub and spoke model.

In Conclusion…

This was three days well-spent and a great introduction into the research being conducted in the Caribbean. We highly recommend this conference to anyone in the Public Health field and we look forward to next year’s conference. Every year the conference is hosted on a different Caribbean island, and we’re also looking forward to the announcement of which of the beautiful islands will host the conference next year.

More Information

To find out more about this year’s conference you can visit the conference website here and you can learn more about CARPHA here

On 23^rd May, we attended the St Kitts Marriott Wellness Lunch. This was a lovely event, organised by the hotel for its staff, that aimed to promote healthy eating.

We were invited to have an information table to raise awareness of the work that we’re doing, and it really was a pleasure being at this event. We received a very warm welcome from everyone and had a steady stream of visitors to our information table who were genuinely interested in learning more about our projects and campaigns.

A member of staff signing the HCC’s childhood obesity prevention petition

We had some great conversations about a number of health issues and got the opportunity to talk to attendees about the Healthy Caribbean Coalition’s Childhood Obesity Prevention Campaign. This was very well-received with many showing their support by signing the childhood obesity prevention petition which will be presented to Caribbean leaders at the CARICOM heads of governments conference in July. You can find out more about this campaign and sign the e-petition here

We were able to speak to women about our fibroids survey which aims to understand the experiences of women with fibroids so that we can determine if there is a need to develop an awareness and support programme here in St Kitts. From our conversations, we learnt that  many women have been affected by fibroids and we hope that we can, in the future, provide some form of help to those who need it.

Additionally, it was  nice meeting representatives from other organisations such as MASA Assist, Nagico, the National bank and credit union, all doing great work in some form or the other to support the wellbing of the public.

The lunch also gave us the opportunity to showcase our new ‘Be Healthy’ badges which we recently released to encourage a healthy lifestyle. Our badges as well as our key rings, t-shirts, tote bag and mug are available on our new online shop. Please do visit our shop to find out more about these products. You can visit our shop here.

This was a fun event, in the beautiful ball room of the Marriott with some lovely healthy food and great conversation – the perfect way to spend an afternoon! We’d like to say a big thank you to the organisers for inviting us to take part and to everyone who visited our table, we really appreciate all the support and kind words, and we look forward to attending future events at the Marriott.

On Wednesday 10th May, we attended the second annual Elevate conference, an event that aimed to tackle the issue of inactivity in the UK and provide a forum for cross-sector debate on physical activity, health and wellbeing.

This conference included seminars, a tech lab, a stage area showcasing interesting projects and products, and there was also an exhibition area.

The seminar programme was divided into four streams: Physical Activity for Health and Wellbeing; Inclusivity – Creating an Active Nation;  Future Performance; and The Business of Physical Activity.

Inclusivity

We attended the sessions in the inclusivity stream which started with a keynote debate ‘Tackling Inactivity: What are the priorities?  On the panel of this debate was: Steve Gray, the Chief Executive of Nuffield Health, Steven Ward, Executive Director of UK Active, Professor Robert Copeland, from Sheffield Hallam University and Paul Tuohy, Chief Executive of Cycling UK.

This was a very interesting discussion with the panellists giving their view on where we need to focus our attention if we are to ensure that exercise is more inclusive.

Steve Gray from Nuffield Health  provided some good background stating that  1 in 3 people in the UK are inactive, 1 out of every  10 deaths  in the UK is linked to an inactive lifestyle and inactivity costs the NHS £1Billion. He also explained that we have more people living in urban areas and most people are very much dependent on technology which has led to a more sedentary lifestyle.

He explained that there is no single solution to address this issue but felt that firstly everyone needs to take accountability and that includes the government, businesses and individuals. He also explored the fact that exercise needs to be more accessible practically (made more affordable, easy to fit into a person’s day) and emotionally (everyone needs to feel that they can do it). Finally he also discussed the fact that we need to look at new approaches that are bespoke, suit the individual and are holistic, so they go beyond just the physical.

It was also interesting to hear from Steve Ward from UK Active who explained that their work focuses on communicating the message that it doesn’t matter how long you move for just as long as you move. This is a simple message that makes exercise less daunting.

One of their main priorities is getting more children and young people active as we currently have the most inactive children compared to  previous  generations.

One area they are working on is making sure that children keep active during the summer holidays. He explained that during term time children tend to be very active but once they go on holiday all physical activity ceases.

Another focus area for them is targeting workplaces and ensuring that businesses have a health and wellbeing offer for their staff.

Paul Tuohy also provided some useful insight explaining that 90% of people in the UK own a bike but only 2% of people commute to work or school regularly. The challenge is how to get people from good intentions to action. He also explained that exercise needs to be made simple and people need to get away from the artificial idea that to be fit they need to be a member of the gym. With regards to cycling, he felt that there was a need to normalise cycling rather than feeding the idea that it is an elite sport. People need to see cycling as fun and something they can do everyday.

Engaging with the  least active

We also really found the seminar session on addressing the least active very interesting. This focused on projects that have explored the motivations, attitudes and lifestyles of the most inactive people.

We first heard from Barry Horn from the English Federation of Disability Sport. He spoke about their project Get Out Get Active which is a sport and active recreation project for people with a disability. He explained the need for the project – people with a disability are the single most inactive people in the nation. He stated that their project looked at reaching inactive groups through outreach, engagement and effective marketing and a major priority for them was ensuring sustainability – making disabled people active for life.

As part of their project they explored what disabled people wanted from an exercise program and 64% wanted to take part in physical activity and sport with non-disabled people, they didn’t want to be excluded.

They have also developed some key principles for getting people active – drive awareness, engage the audience and offer support and reassurance.

In this session we also heard from Age UK about how they are getting the elderly more active and the Women’s Sport Trust on the work they’re doing with girls and women.  We were particularly interested in the presentation by Anun King from Sporting Equals about exercise and ethnicity.  He showed data that looked a physical activity and participation in different ethnic groups and this suggested that black and Asian women were the least active.  He explained that some of the barriers to participation were cultural, attitudes to exercise,  socio-economic and organisational.  To address this Sporting Equals have implemented a number of project including a faith centre model. This focused on people from an Asian background. Anun explained there were a number of benefits of working with faith based organisations, these include their large footfall and they have indoor and outdoor facilities. He discussed other projects which included their cultural events model, community sport zones and ethnic minority media work.

Great day out

This was a really busy day that we thoroughly enjoyed it. We attended so many presentations but just wanted to highlight a few interesting ones in this blog. Other projects that you may find interesting that we learnt about at Elevate were:

• Working with disadvantage communities to remove barriers to participation and get children and young people active
• WHO HEAT Tool
• Tackling inequalities and behaviour change in Birmingham

You can find out more about Elevate on their website and look out for the next event in May 2018.

Last weekend, we attended the Black Women’s Conference. This is an annual event organised by The Black Women’s Forum that  aims to provide a safe space to share, empower and engage with women of African,  Asian, Arab and Caribbean descent living in the UK. It provides a forum for open, honest discussion on issues affecting black women.

This year’s conference was the fifth anniversary of the event and the theme of the conference was ‘Celebrating the Achievements of Women of Colour.’ The  program included panel discussions in the morning followed by workshops in the afternoon.

The panel discussions consisted of speakers from a variety of fields with the first panel focusing on black women in the creative and education industry and the second panel focused on black women in sports and business.  You can find out about all the speakers here

We were really inspired by all the speakers who took part in the panel discussions  and it was interesting to note that the message of the importance of our health and wellbeing was a theme that recurred in almost every presentation.

Black women in the business world face a lot of barriers and challenges which were clearly illustrated by the speakers as they shared their stories of racism and sexism. This core barrier of racism has led to loss of opportunity, difficulties in securing investment, daily battles with “the system”, lack of career progression and so much more.  Fighting these inequalities every single day is tough, affects our wellbeing and can thus impact both our physical and mental health.

We applaud the honesty of Imriel Morgan, the Chief Executive of the Shout Out Network and co-host of Melanin Millennials who spoke with passion about the pioneering work that she’s doing in the podcasting world and the challenges she has faced. This has included difficulties getting her podcast onto well-known platforms which lack diversity and seem not to embrace black podcasts and organising the first ever black podcasting festival. Imriel spoke of the frustrations of not being able to access investment despite being an award-winning podcast and then very movingly tried to fight back tears as she told us that being a black female Chief Executive is really tough. Imriel opened up and was very honest about her experience with depression saying “the struggle is real” and spoke about being on anti-depressants.

We have to do something about this. We have to make sure that black business women have all the support that they need to fight these battles and get through them with their physical and mental health intact. One solution that was discussed throughout the day was the need for black women to come together to form supportive networks so that women have a support system and don’t feel alone in the corporate world.

We feel there is much to do in this area and will explore what we can do as a charity to support black business women.

Saturday was a really exciting day for us as we hosted our first fibroids conference, Fibroid Focus. The theme of the conference was treatment and we aimed to provide an in-depth look at all treatment options including natural options.

The day started with an introduction by our founder, Abi Begho, who welcomed everyone, explained the aim of the day and briefly summarised the work we’ve been doing on fibroids. This work has included conducting a survey to understand the needs of black women with fibroids, forming an expert panel, developing a booklet and organising awareness events.

You can watch a clip of Abi talking about the event here

Exercise and Fibroids

We first heard from Lillian Lartey the founder and CEO of I Want My Body Back. Lillian discussed exercise and fibroids and we learnt that exercise has been shown to be beneficial in reducing the risk of developing a number of hormone-dependent conditions such as breast cancer and hence we expect that it will also be beneficial in preventing fibroids but also in improving symptoms as part of a healthy lifestyle. Lillian explained that stress is an important factor as any benefits of exercise are cancelled out if we are experiencing persistent stress in our lives. Finally, Lillian reminded us that we should be aiming for 30 minutes of moderate exercise a day and that we shouldn’t consistently take part in long bouts of exercise as this can put pressure on our body. Lillian ended with three suggestions on how to move forward:

• Check your lifestyle – how will exercise be a part of your life?
• Choose the right type of exercise for you and avoid stress-induced exercise
• Manage your stress – this is more than just resting but managing your thoughts.

You can watch a clip of Lillian’s talk here, download her presentation in the section below this blog piece, listen to her full presentation here and you can read our blog on fibroids and exercise here.

Diet and Fibroids

Next we heard from Leah Salmon, The Naturally You Coach, who spoke about diet and fibroids. Leah stressed that food is more than something that we eat three times a day because it tastes nice, food is medicinal. To reap the benefits of food and to fight disease we need to have a solid foundation of nutrients for our body to build on. To achieve this Leah advised that we make at least 50% of our diet unprocessed foods. Leah explained that fibroids have been linked to a number of nutritional deficiencies such as vitamin D, magnesium and essential fatty acids.  Leah stated that we can use our diet to prevent the deficiencies that lead to the fibroids or, if we have fibroids, use nutrition to re-balance the deficiencies, build and repair the body and stop the fibroid tumours from growing. Leah then recommended nine foods that can achieve this:

• Irish Moss and sea weed
• Bone broth and oily fish
• Evening Primrose Oil
• Molasses
• Tumeric
• Garlic
• Green smoothies and vitamin C rich food
• Vitamin D
• Water

Leah also warned us about six foods we should avoid:

• Xenoestrogens (growth hormones in commercially reared animals and can thus be found in red meat, poultry and eggs and also BPA, found in some plastics)
• Alcohol and caffeine
• White sugar
• Processed grains
• Trans and hydrogenated fats

Finally, Leah stated that success in this area is all about our mindset and we need the willingness to change, the stamina to commit to a healthy lifestyle and patience.

You can download Leah’s slides below this blog, watch clips of Leah’s talk here and here, listen to her full presentation here and you can read more about diet and fibroids here.

Medical Treatment and Fibroids

We also heard from Rajiv Varma, a consultant gynaecologist at the Nuffield Hospital, who presented on the medical management of fibroids.  Mr Varma first described some of the effects of fibroids such as challenges with fertility, problems during pregnancy and a number of symptoms that affect a woman’s quality of life, but he did stress that most women with fibroids do not experience these problems.

Mr Varma explained the treatment options available and these include:

• Doing nothing (watchful waiting)
• Drug treatments – mainly used to shrink fibroids before surgery or to relieve symptoms
• Procedures
  • Uterine Artery Embolisation (UAE) – cuts off blood supply to the fibroids
• Surgery – to remove the fibroids

Mr Varma then gave us some really good insight and advice on a number of issues:

 NHS treatment vs. private treatment:  He stated that in an ideal world there would be no difference between NHS and private treatment but unfortunately there can be some issues with NHS care such as: lack of choice, long waiting times and limited treatment options. There are a number of benefits though which include: the NHS is better equipped to deal with complex cases,  easy access to supportive services (such as blood transfusions and intensive care),  the consultant is present and other specialists are available.

Second opinions:  Mr Varma explained that we are entitled to get a second opinion and the situations where he would advise that a woman seeks a second opinion are: if you are unhappy with the treatment and management options that have been presented to you; if you lose confidence in your doctor; and if there is poor communication between yourself and your doctor.

Finding the right doctor: he stated that the most effective way of finding the right doctor is to have insider information and nurses are the best people to get information on who the best doctors are.

Herbal Remedies and Fibroids

Patricia Ferguson, a Medical Herbalist and a member of the College of Practitioners of Phytotherapy, then discussed herbal remedies that have been shown to be effective in treating fibroids. These remedies either contribute to shrinking the fibroid or are effective at managing some of the symptoms. They are as follows:

Vitex Berries (or agnus cactus) – act on the pituitary gland and depress oestrogen and progesterone (both of which can stimulate the growth of fibroids).
Shepherds Purse – can be effective in treating heavy menstrual bleeding
Red raspberry leaf – can help control heavy menstrual bleeding and can help shrink fibroids

Nettle leaves- can be effective in reducing heavy bleeding
Yarrow – helps to stop the growth of fibroids
Thuja  – helps to stop the growth of fibroids
Burdock  Root – can improve liver function and may inhibit the growth of fibroids
Milk Thistle – improves liver function and therefore can help the live control oestrogen levels

It was also noted that before taking any of these herbal preparations women should seek advice from a medical herbalist as some of the above shouldn’t be taken if a woman is pregnant or if she is on certain medication.

You can download a copy of the handouts to this presentation below this blog and read about some research on complementary and alternative medicine and fibroids here.

Managing the Emotional Impact of Fibroids

Finally, Olivia Haltman discussed the emotional impact of fibroids and how to manage this. Olivia explained that women may experience a number of emotions when going through their fibroid journey. This starts before the diagnosis with some women experiencing fear of the unknown due to symptoms. There can be a significant amount of anxiety whilst waiting for results and after receiving results, there can be a feeling of loss of control and hopelessness where you feel like you can’t control the outcome. Additionally, the vaginal examination can cause a significant amount of stress particularly for women who have had a traumatic sexual experience in the past.

Once a woman has received a confirmed diagnosis she may feel a fear of the growth of her fibroids and experience some unease about how her employers may respond, for example, missed days from work due to symptoms. Additionally, she may have anxiety over her fertility and then feel overwhelmed by the treatment decision.

The emotional impact may also include loss of focus, mood swings, panic attacks, lack of self-esteem, irrational emotions, fears regarding relationships and severe premenstrual syndrome.

So, fibroids can have a significant emotional impact on women which, in many cases, go unrecognised. These issues need to be addressed so that women can heal and move on.

Olivia provided some tips on how to start dealing with the emotional impact and these were:

• Educating yourself about fibroids – this can be empowering allowing you to make informed decisions about treatment
• Relaxation and breathing techniques
• Ground techniques
• Writing as therapy
• Positive thinking techniques
• Talking to your partner, friends and family
• Talking therapy
• Healthy eating
• Holistic lifestyle

Olivia finished by summarising tips from HysterSisters which were:

1. Don’t play the blame game
2. Don’t dwell on the what if’s
3. Don’t compare yourself to others
4. Give yourself time to heal emotionally as well as physically
5. Don’t underestimate how much your hormones affect your emotions
6. Don’t do it alone
7. Do move on

Conclusions

The event ended with a really good summary from The Lake Foundation’s trustee, Fadzai Marange, who shared a little of her personal experience with fibroids, summarised the talks and appealed to women to follow Leah Salmon’s advice regarding the watchful waiting option i.e. if you have been diagnosed with fibroids and your doctor says: ‘ let’s watch and wait’, don’t be passive during this time, act – adopt a healthy lifestyle and see what you can do naturally. Finally, Fadzai encouraged women to visit their doctor and check whether they have a vitamin D deficiency as this is strongly linked to fibroids.

The Exhibitors

At this event were a  number exhibitors including:

• Gedeon Ricther
• I Want My Body Back
• Nearer Nature
• Noire Wellness
• Pure Goodness
• The Naturally You Coach
• TOHETI
• Wisdom of Osun

Together they:

• Provided information on fibroids;
• Provided information on the support available for women affected by fibroids;
• Provided information on health and well-being programmes;
• Sold health and well-being books;
• Sold natural feminine hygiene products; and
• Sold natural hair and skin care products.

We also had ‘Meet the Exhibitor’ sessions on the agenda giving attendees the opportunity to hear organisations talk about their work.

Thank you

We had a great day and would like to thank everyone who attended, shared their story and for being a fantastic, engaged audience. We’d also like to thank all the speakers for their thought-provoking, informative presentations and all the exhibitors for attending and sharing their information, services, products and knowledge.

Finally, we’d like to thank Black History Walks, Natracare and Noire Wellness for their support.

On Wednesday 4^th May, we attended the first annual Elevate conference. This conference included seminars and an exhibition that aimed to tackle the issue of inactivity in the UK and provide a forum for cross-sector debate on physical activity, health and wellbeing.

The seminar programme was divided into three streams: physical activity for health and wellness; inclusivity: strategies to increase participation; and future performance. We attended the sessions in the health and wellness stream which began with a session on ‘Physical Activity as Preventive Care’.

Speaking at this session was  Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health.   Sally Davies started by asking the question:  ‘what can we do to get people to listen to us about physical activity?’ She stated that only 1 in 5 young people between the ages of 5 and 18 are getting their recommended amount of exercise and many adults too are not achieving the recommended amount of physical activity. She stated that exercise is an investment in reducing our risk of a number of diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s Disease and cardiovascular disease, and somehow we need to communicate this in a way that causes behaviour change.

Sally Davies stressed the importance of health professionals in getting the public active and recognised that many health professionals don’t have the training to promote physical activity. She said we are missing an opportunity because 1 in 4 people said they would do exercise if they were advised to do so by a health professional. She said messages can be as simple as ‘just walk’. Additionally, we need to utilise all professionals including teachers and those in the work place and determine how best to use elite athletes as role models. She also explained that we need to ensure we have a safe environment for physical activity so the public feels confident if they decide to go cycling, jogging or running.

We then heard from Justin Varney, the Interim Deputy Director for Health and Wellbeing at Public Health England. Justin started his presentation by stressing the importance of physical activity stating that only 10% of diseases can be prevented by medicine whilst 40% can be prevented by lifestyle changes including being more active.   He also said that physical inactivity is one of the top ten reasons for death in the UK and that adults are 20% less active now than they were in the 1960s. He highlighted the fact that the UK is less active compared to other counties with 63% of the UK’s population being inactive. He explained that one of the challenges in encouraging people to be more inactive is that the benefits are not immediate, it takes years for people to see the benefits and this doesn’t motivate people to get active now.

Justin Varney informed attendees that  Public Health England published their report Everybody Active, Every Day and it provided an evidence-based approach to tackling inactivity with there being four focus areas:  1) Active society – creating a social movement, 2) Moving professionals – activating networks of professionals, 3) Active environments, – creating the right spaces and 4) Moving at scale – scaling up the interventions that make us active. He ended by saying that there is a lot of evidence out there about the benefits of physical activity and what works, and what we need now is to stop writing documents but read them and focus on implementation.

These two presentations set the scene for the rest of the day with presentations and sessions  that followed focusing on examples and ideas on how to get people more active, case studies on the benefits of physical activity (e.g. for cancer patients, diabetics etc) and the role of  technology. The presentations that we found most interesting were:

1. Research and evidence into physical activity and non-communicable diseases by David Terrace of the Richmond Group of Charities. In his presentation David explained that the Richmond Group is a coalition of twelve of the leading health and social care organisations in the voluntary sector and they aim to build on each other’s expertise to get more people active. They worked together on a one year project to map out the work each of their charities do with respect to physical activity and to draw together all the evidence on physical activity so they could develop a joint approach to tackling inactivity.  Two of the key areas they wanted to focus on were training health professionals and addressing the barriers to physical activity.

They carried out some work to examine the relationships between inactivity and long term conditions and their key findings were:
– Even people who are incapacitated want to be active
– Many people felt that exercise and physical activity were “not for people like me”
– The main barriers were: pain, fatigue and breathlessness

They found that what worked in getting people active was:
–  Positive but realistic messages
– Speaking to people’s aspirations
–  Messages coming from a credible person (health professional)
–  Empathy

A couple of weeks ago we listened live to Harvard Medical School’s Mini Med seminar on ageing. This was a very informative  event featuring experts in the field Amy Wagers Professor of Stem Cell Regenerative Biology; Sharon Inouye, the Director of the Hospital Elder Life Program and Professor of Medicine; and  Bruce Yanker, the Co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Centre for the Biology of Ageing. Together they explained how the body ages and how we can keep it young and healthy.

The event started with an introduction by Amy Wagers who explained that ageing is a collection of physical and behavioural changes that take place as an individual gets older. She stated that ageing is the biggest risk factor for many diseases and the challenge that the medical field faces is how to promote healthy ageing.

When thinking about aging it was stressed that we have to think of a person’s health span as opposed to their life span. A person’s health span is the number of healthy years of life they experience and currently the general population’s life span has increased but their health span is relatively short and we need to do more research to determine how we can effectively increase a person’s health span; we don’t want people to have a long life span but have a poor quality of life because their health span is short.

Amy stated that we need to understand the cellular, biochemical and molecular basis of ageing and therefore understand how age-related diseases develop so that we can target these diseases. Amy stressed the importance of identifying predisposition to age-related diseases as there has been an explosion in these diseases over the past 15 years, mostly because we have more elderly than ever before.

Amy explained that ageing is a complex process where many biological mechanisms interact, these include loss of protein function, reduction in the communication between organs, the loss of the ability to regenerate cells after injury, metabolic dysfunction and DNA defects, just to name a few.  She said that there is hope that we can target the biological causes of ageing to prevent and reverse age-related disease.  Amy stressed that there are two very important factors in preventing age related diseases and these are: diet and exercise.

We then heard from Sharon Inouye who explored the clinical aspects of ageing. She stated that some of the main issues with ageing are: illness, disease and medications affect older adults differently; older adults are more likely to have multiple health conditions; we’re in a stressful society and stress results in a reduction in our physiological reserve so our body is less able to deal with ageing; falls are the leading cause of death in the elderly; many eldery experience a significant decline in brain function and finally we don’t have enough geriatricians to treat older people. Due to all of these issues we need to find ways to ensure that people age well. She stated that an important part of addressing these issues is ensuring that older people maintain their cognitive health by: encouraging people to be physically active (this is the most important), reducing cardiovascular risk factors, looking at medication management,  keeping the elderly socially and intellectually active and ensuring they get enough sleep.

Finally we heard from Bruce Yankers who spoke about brain function in the elderly. He wanted to answer the question: how do people who are healthy lose neurons? He stated that many older people retain memory and cognitive function but others lose this, why? He explained that biological processes in the brain decline with age and there are a number of genes involved in this process. REST is a gene regulator that appears in the ageing brain and disappears in people with Alzheimer’s Disease. REST controls many genes involved in memory. It keeps cells alive and regulates genes involved in neuron function. REST proteins are protective against Alzheimer’s Disease and thus prevent loss of neurons. He explained that some people can withstand Alzheimer’s lesions and do not go on to develop dementia, why? It seems to be REST proteins that are protective in these situations.

Finally Bruce explained that research has suggested that the strength and quality of relationships dictate how well people age. It was found that how happy people are is important in ageing healthily. Specifically how happy people are in marriage by 50 seemed to be a good indicator of how well they will age. Therefore it’s important that people control their stress levels and strive to be happy.

This was a very interesting seminar and gave us a lot to think about with regards to how to promote healthy ageing. A key theme of each talk was the power of exericse and we’ll continue to encourage the public to keep active.

We’d like to thank Harvard Medical School for organising this seminar series and making it as accessible as possible by broadcasting it live on the internet. You can find out more about this seminar series, read the lecture notes and watch