By changing her diet, improving how she handles stress, and sleeping more, Rosa DaGraca lowered her blood pressure to a healthy level—in just 40 days.
ROSA DAGRACA, 56HER GOAL: Lower blood pressure, without medication
START: 140/90
FINISH: 128/70
YEARS YOUNGER: 3
A few months ago, ROSA DAGRACA looked like the poster woman for good health. The daughter of Portuguese immigrants, she grew up in Newark, New Jersey, eating a Mediterranean diet—plenty of fish, soups, beans, rice and olive oil—and as an adult she con-tinued to make smart food choices. When the corporation she works for as a merchandising planner opened an on-site gym nine years ago, Rosa started exercising there every work-day at six AM. The svelte divorcée also walked or ran each Saturday and Sunday.
Yet when More first caught up with Rosa, she acknowledged a few health problems in her life, such as an abundance of stress. “I can get 200 e-mails a day at work,” she said. “On days like that, my heart starts racing. Sometimes I’ll notice that my fists are clenched when I’m driving.” Because there’s so much she wants to accomplish—this is a woman who worked two jobs for 12 years to put her son, Patrick, through school—she slept only five to six hours a night. And all that exercising? Turns out you can have too much of a good thing. (More on that later.)
Over the past six or seven years, Rosa’s blood pressure crept up to 144/90,
with an occasional spike to 154/90 (120/80 is considered a healthy score). Because high blood pressure, aka hypertension, greatly increases the risks of kidney disease and stroke, among other concerns, her physician prescribed a medication to bring her numbers closer to normal. The drug caused no obvious side effects, but Rosa stopped using it; she wanted a more natural ap-proach. Which is just what Roberta Lee, MD, medical director of the Contin-uum Center for Health & Healing in New York City, came up with when Rosa joined More’s antiaging program.
STEP ONE: MANAGE STRESS BETTER
As a mind-body expert, Lee suspected that reducing Rosa’s stress level would also lower her blood pressure. Under the doctor’s direction, Rosa learned how to calm down on the job by visual-izing her “happy place” (she imagined a beach) or leaving her desk and walking around the building. Lee also pre-scribed daily sessions on a biofeedback machine called Resperate. Not a cheap gizmo (it sells for $290 on amazon.com), the machine analyzes your breathing patterns and guides you, through aural and musical cues, into slow-ing down your breathing. Preliminary evidence suggests that using it daily for 15 min-utes can significantly lower blood pressure. Rosa ended up working with the machine four to five nights a week.
