Valentine's Day 101: Your Heart Is Your Beat by Marilynn Preston on Creators.com

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Valentine's Day is too bloody commercial, but it can also be a sweet reminder to examine our hearts. Find yours right now, and put your right hand over it. Now your left. Take a few slow, deep breaths. Do you feel that little thump?

Can you check your heartbeat — by gently touching inside your wrist or the side of your neck — and stop taking calls long enough to tune in to the pulsing rhythm that is the beat of your own life? When your heart stops, you stop. End of story.

Keeping your heart healthy, strong and, yes, full of love is one of the few jobs you can really count on in this economy. Open, smooth, flexible arteries. A well-oiled, deeply muscled, pumping machine. A heart that thrives on kindness and compassion and consciously lets go of anger and regret. This is what the Healthy Lifestyle Club of American goes to bed wishing for every Valentine's Day ... but how do we get there?

Listen up, class is in session. A healthy, happy, well-functioning heart can't happen overnight, but if you start now, you can shape-shift yours to a remarkable degree:

Exercise. It all begins here. If you choose to live a sedentary lifestyle — driving everywhere, long hours at the computer, a thousand excuses for not getting to the gym — your heart will deteriorate and suffer. Thirty to 60 minutes of physical activity a day — aiming for five days a week — is a reasonable goal. More is better. Too much more, and you're flirting with unnecessary injuries and added stress.

Moderation is forever the key. If this St. Valentine's Day finds you without a fitness routine that is fun, relaxing and something you look forward to — Dancing! Yoga! Riding your bike! — get help immediately. I mean it.

Eat real food. When all is said and done, when all the diets and supplements and colonics and fast food foolishness has been tried, a heart-healthy diet comes down to eating a balanced variety of real food, in moderate amounts, and letting go of all the drama surrounding weight gain and loss.

Nothing gimmicky works over the long haul. What does work is learning to cook simple healing meals, losing the belly fat, giving up processed foods and cola drinks, and nourishing your body with the clean, pure, red-wine-infused fuel it needs to maintain strength and flexibility and avoid inflammation and heart disease.

Cutting back on fats won't save your heart. It needs good fats (i.e., olive oil), omega-3 rich fish, a variety of nuts and — hallelujah! — a little bit of high-flavonoid dark chocolate.

You can either learn this healthy eating stuff yourself or you can pay someone to educate you, but my heart sinks when I meet someone who is absolutely clueless about nutrition, especially when he's got an M.D. after his name.

Did you know that most heart disease can be prevented and even healed by quitting smoking and changing your eating habits? This Valentine's Day, buy yourself a copy of "Food Rules" (Penguin) by Michael Pollan. When you finish reading it, put it in a heart-shaped box and give it to someone you love.

Keep an open heart. Your emotions have a huge impact on the health of your heart. I can't stress this enough, stress being one of the primary causes of heart attacks. The positive emotions — love, joy, gratitude — are heart-healthy, and the icky sticky negative emotions — hate, jealousy, anger — are the moral equivalent of shooting your heart in the foot. Your job this Valentine's Day — and remember, in this economy you're lucky to even have a job — is to spend some quiet moments examining the heartfelt emotions that are holding you back from living a healthier, happier life.

The first baby step toward ridding yourself of negative emotions is to own up to them. I hate the person who betrayed me. I'm afraid to quit my job, learn to ski, take the mobile phone away from my 12-year-old. When you face your emotions instead of hiding from them, your heart opens up in wonderful ways. A 10-minute-a-day meditation practice can clear the path to calming your emotions. So can a dozen red roses — but meditation is free.

ENERGY EXPRESS-O! FROM MY HEART TO YOURS

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return." — Eden Ahbez

Marilynn Preston — fitness expert, personal trainer and speaker on healthy lifestyle issues — is the creator of Energy Express, the longest-running syndicated fitness column in the country. She has a website, http://marilynnpreston.com and welcomes reader questions, which can be sent to MyEnergyExpress@aol.com. To find out more about Preston and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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