On September 4, during the famous Venice Film Festival, an outstanding breakfast hosted by Elledgy Media Group and its founder, Elvira Gavrilova, and Charlotte Tilbury, attracted 35 successful women worldwide. The event served as a unique platform to celebrate the intersection of beauty, science, and technology.

Charlotte Tilbury introduced the brand’s latest beauty products. At the same time, guests enjoyed a live makeup tutorial led by the brand’s expert artist, who shared professional insights and tips.

The breakfast also featured an exciting presentation by Meta Force Space DMCC, which unveiled its revolutionary life extension project. Combining genetics, AI, and the creation of digital avatars, this concept is set to redefine personalized biohacking and longevity strategies.

Addressing the future, Elvira Gavrilova remarked: “We are standing at the point of a new era where technology and health seamlessly blend. Our goal is to bring a future that’s both advanced and fulfilling.”

Actress Ornella Muti was among the notable attendees, voicing her fascination with the biohacking innovations presented. The event also showcased Austrian company Dayholi VR, which offers a fully immersive virtual travel experience in stunning 8K. Actor Kevin Costner expressed keen interest in the potential of this virtual technology.

This exclusive event highlighted the synergy between beauty, technology, and pursuing a longer, healthier life, inspiring attendees for the future.

Disclaimer
The Content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

Since 2006, Mira has studied and trained around the globe with the world’s leading Pilates minds and teachers. She grew up as a dancer holds a Bachelor of Arts in dance, and has multiple Pilates certifications, the most important completing the prestigious BASI Pilates Legacy program. As a teacher, she has helped hundreds of students at all fitness levels find happiness and their absolute best through her Pilates teaching.

She says “Pilates is for everyone, and I have seen how Pilates change life for the better. Your practice is not a hunt for perfection; it’s about committing to yourself and staying open to where your flow takes you. A small daily practice can build balance, strength, flexibility, and find freedom within your body.”

Get ready to look inside what makes Mira Hassan and her Yoga journey truly remarkable.

Namita Nayyar:

Mira, your Instagram handle @flow.with.mira is a testament to your dedication to Pilates. Can you share with us how you discovered Pilates and what motivated you to become an instructor?

Mira Hassan:

Pilates: A Journey from Confusion to Commitment

The word “Pilates” initially made me chuckle – a typo for “py-lates” perhaps? Little did I know, this unfamiliar term would mark the beginning of a transformative journey? At 19, while pursuing my undergraduate degree in dance at the Victoria College of Arts in Melbourne, Australia, Pilates became a mandatory conditioning class for all dance students. It was a weekly mat class, and while our pirouettes, Rond-de-Jambe, and swans were graceful, the “hundred” and “teasers” left us feeling thoroughly humbled.

This initial encounter with Pilates was a revelation. It exposed limitations in my strength and control, despite my dance training. It sparked a desire to delve deeper into this practice. My exploration continued beyond the dance studio walls. I enrolled in equipment classes at Infinity Studio by Kerrie Murphy in Melbourne and participated in group reformer classes at a local gym near my home.

From Dancer to Pilates Instructor: A Journey of Passion

Pilates played a pivotal role in refining my dance technique during my undergraduate years. It wasn’t just the physical benefits that captivated me; it was the emphasis on mindful movement and body awareness. After graduation, this passion for movement propelled me to delve deeper into the Pilates method. I craved a deeper understanding of how to harness the power of proper body mechanics and connection. Initially, the thought of teaching wasn’t on my radar – I wanted to expand my knowledge.

Following my first Pilates certification, however, the opportunity to teach arose. Witnessing the positive transformations in my clients, from improved flexibility to a newfound sense of control, ignited a newfound passion within me. As demand for my classes grew, I gradually increased my teaching hours.

Namita Nayyar:

How has your Pilates practice evolved over the years, and what key milestones or achievements stand out to you?

Mira Hassan:

Beyond the Moves: A Commitment to Empowering Wellness

Continuous learning is at the core of my approach to Pilates instruction. I don’t want to just ‘teach/instruct’ exercises; I strive to be a teacher, one who empowers clients to achieve their wellness goals. This responsibility weighs heavily on me. My clients entrust me with their fitness journeys, any physical limitations they may have, and ultimately, their overall well-being.

To best serve them, I believe a deep understanding of human anatomy and physiology is crucial. It’s not enough to simply guide clients through the motions. I want to empower them to understand their bodies, ensure proper form to avoid injury, and ultimately, experience the transformative power of Pilates. This dedication to knowledge extends beyond Pilates itself, encompassing a holistic approach to self-improvement.

A Dedication to Continual Growth: My Pilates Certifications

My Pilates journey began with my first certification in 2005. Since then, I have 3 comprehensive Pilates certifications. One of them is BASI Pilates. I have also completed the BASI Pilates Legacy Program, the highest honor bestowed by BASI, under the esteemed guidance of RaelIsacowitz (Mentor, Master I & II and Honors). I’m incredibly excited to be retaking the Honors Program with Rael himself later this September in the US!

My dedication to learning extends beyond foundational certifications. Over the years, I’ve pursued specialized education in various areas to better serve my clients. These include:

• Injuries
• Pre and Postnatal Pilates
• Pelvic Floor Health
• Scoliosis
• Fascia and Anatomy in Motion (by Anatomy Trains)
• Lymphatic system with Dr. Perry Nickelston

These ongoing educational pursuits allow me to offer a comprehensive and informed approach to Pilates instruction. I am also a member of the faculty of BASI Pilates.

Full Interview is Continued on Next Page

This interview is exclusive and taken by Namita Nayyar President of womenfitness.net and should not be reproduced, copied, or hosted in part or full anywhere without express permission.

All Written Content Copyright © 2024 Women Fitness

Disclaimer
The Content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

WASHINGTON, September 18 — HealthyWomen, the nation’s leading independent nonprofit health resource for women, today came together with a diverse group of some of the nation’s most prominent women leaders on Capitol Hill to advocate for comprehensive obesity care and improved coverage. The fly-in commenced on the same day that the House Ways & Means Committee convened a hearing on investing in chronic disease prevention, for which obesity is a leading driver.

“For years, HealthyWomen has been working to educate women, reduce stigma and advocate for better treatment options and healthcare coverage for obesity,” says Beth Battaglino, RN-C, CEO of HealthyWomen. “I’m thrilled to be joining forces with other leading organizations who recognize obesity is a chronic disease and its causes go beyond lifestyle choices. It is important to remember that, like most chronic diseases, obesity requires a full continuum of care for effective treatment.”

United in their mission to advocate for comprehensive obesity care and improved coverage, the coalition of women leaders includes representation from the physician and patient community, as well as policy and advocacy experts. Among those making the case for expanded obesity coverage is Nancy Glick, director of food & nutrition policy at the National Consumers League, who shared insights on why it’s crucial to modernize obesity policy.

“Obesity is as big a health hazard as smoking, as deadly as opioid addiction, and it worsens over 230 chronic diseases, including heart disease and diabetes,” says Glick. “And yet, most Americans with obesity continue to be stigmatized and discriminated against, and fall through the cracks in our healthcare system. But we are not powerless in this fight. By moving past outdated policies and addressing obesity as the complex, chronic disease that it is, policymakers can improve lives and break down the barriers preventing far too many people from obtaining the quality care they deserve.”

Participating in today’s fly-in were leaders from the Society for Women’s Health Research, The American Medical Women’s Association, The National Menopause Foundation, The National Council on Aging, the Community Liver Alliance, and National Consumers League — whose voices carry a message on behalf of scores of organizations with an interest in the impact of obesity on women’s health.

Their goal is to catalyze tangible improvements in healthcare coverage, access to treatments and the overall quality of care for individuals living with obesity. By raising awareness and driving change, the group seeks to create a world where obesity is approached with empathy, understanding and comprehensive support.

Approximately 42% of American adults (more than two in five) have obesity, but women are disproportionately affected by the obesity epidemic — both in terms of their health outcomes and the economic costs of the disease. Prevalence rates of obesity among U.S. women are stunningly high and steadily climbing. According to statistics published by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), 56.9% of non-Hispanic Black women, 43.7% of Hispanic women, 39.8% of non-Hispanic white women and 17.2% of non-Hispanic Asian women are living with obesity.

While obesity in both men and women increases the risk of several health conditions, including cardiovascular diseases, high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, stroke, mental illness, body pain and premature death, a 2021 Journal of Midlife Health article found that “women are at higher risk for developing obesity-related physical and psychological comorbidities and have a twofold higher mortality risk than overweight men.”

There has been a lot of progress in the way obesity is being viewed and discussed today, yet care and coverage for this chronic disease are still profoundly lagging.

But there is hope. This past July, the House Ways and Means Committee passed an amended version of the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act (TROA / H.R. 4818) and that is why these dynamic leaders devoted their time to Hill engagement this week. Their goal was to ensure that members of both the House Energy and Commerce and Senate Finance Committees understood that they had stakeholder support and the urgency of continuing to move TROA forward.

This important legislation would provide access to effective and evidence-based interventions for the chronic disease of obesity for many Medicare beneficiaries. It is a critical step on the pathway to ensuring equitable access to evidence-based care and support for all.

Let’s stand together in this movement to champion obesity care and coverage to shape a more inclusive and compassionate future for all.

Join the fight to increase access to obesity treatment by visiting HealthyWomen’s website!

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About HealthyWomen

HealthyWomen is the nation’s leading independent, nonprofit health information source for women. HealthyWomen.org was the first website to comprehensively address women’s health and wellness issues and continues to educate women to make informed health decisions by providing objective, fact-based information. For more than 30 years, women have turned to HealthyWomen for answers to their most important healthcare questions. To learn more, please visit www.HealthyWomen.org. Follow HealthyWomen on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.

As told to Jacquelyne Froeber

September 25, 2024, is World Dense Breast Day.

After the mammogram, I sat in the waiting room wearing that god-awful paper gown.

The lump surprised me. It was big enough for me to feel during a self-exam, about the width of a fingertip. But I wasn’t too worried — I’d had my annual mammogram two months earlier and everything came back “normal.” Plus, I ate healthy, exercised and did my self-exams between mammograms. I thought I was doing everything right.

The technician finally returned, and I glanced at my watch thinking I would head to work as soon as she confirmed all was OK. “We didn’t see anything,” she said.

I thought she came back into the wrong room. “I’m the lady with a lump so big I can feel it,” I said. “Oh,” she looked at the chart. “You have dense breasts. That’s going to be a very hard find for us.”

“Wait, what?” I sat back confused. Dense breasts? “What does that mean?”

I was then sent for an ultrasound because what I felt did not show up on the mammogram.

The lump clearly showed up on ultrasound and on the MRI that followed, though. I had breast cancer. And because it was missed year after year on my mammogram, it was no longer early stage.

Finding out that I had breast cancer, dense breasts, and that the cancer was missed because of dense breast tissue — all within one afternoon — left me speechless.

When I got home, I researched “dense breasts.” I learned that 4 out of 10 women of mammography age have dense breasts and that dense breast tissue can hide cancer on a mammogram. I couldn’t quite grasp that no one had felt the need to share this with me at any of my previous mammograms. Shouldn’t the 40% of women with dense breasts be aware of this? Surely every patient should understand the realistic limitations of a test in their circumstances.

In the aftermath of the diagnosis, there was no time to process this. My focus was on the surgeries, treatments and navigating insurance issues. Because of the size and advanced stage of the cancer, my treatment involved eight surgeries, eight rounds of chemotherapy and 30 rounds of radiation after the cancer came back.

In 2010, with the bulk of the treatment behind me, I caught my breath and began researching dense breasts and cancer detection. Like me, most women I spoke to had no clue if they had dense breasts or not.

When a woman has a mammogram, her breast density is rated into one of four categories. I was shocked to learn that in women with the densest breasts, cancer will be missed about 50% of the time. A coin toss.

Certainly if I’d known this, I would’ve asked about other tests. The fact that I didn’t know effectively denied me the opportunity for an early-stage diagnosis.

In my research, I learned that, thanks to the work of a patient in Connecticut, the state had a law requiring that women receive a general notification about breast density after their mammogram. It had been a long time since 10th grade civics class, so I Googled, “How do you pass a law?” and got to work.

I reached out to my state senator in New York to ask if he would consider sponsoring the state legislation and he agreed. The comprehensive bill was drafted to include information all women should know: that she has dense breasts, that it can hide cancer, can increase her risk of developing breast cancer and that a woman with dense breasts should speak to her provider about additional screening tests after her mammogram.

I devoted all my time and energy to get state legislators to support the bill and spent many days in the state capitol visiting offices, making phone calls and sending emails.

In a win for New York women, the bill passed both the New York State Senate and Assembly unanimously, and was later signed into law. New York’s “density inform” law became the first to require that women with dense breasts be told specifically and unambiguously “Your breast tissue is dense.” Many other states used the New York bill as a template for their own laws.

While this was a huge step forward in the protection of New York women, my situation was not unique to my state. There were women all over the country going for annual mammograms, yet a hidden cancer was growing undetected in their dense tissue — and a later stage cancer was the result. Some of these patient advocates fought for their state legislation while in chemo chairs, getting infusions, typing to their legislators to request sponsorship of a bill.

Patient advocates were successful and there was a growing number of state “inform” bills, but they varied widely in the information each provided to women. Certainly, all U.S. women deserved the same actionable information and opportunity for an early stage diagnosis. A single national “dense breast” reporting standard was needed.

A national reporting standard could have been accomplished by federal legislation or federal regulation. I initiated efforts on both. I reached out to my representative in Congress, and he agreed to draft a federal bill that would standardize the information women got when they were notified that they had dense breasts.

The next step was the FDA. The letter women get after their mammogram is federally mandated by the FDA. So I wrote to them and asked them to consider a requirement to include information about a patient’s breast density in that letter.

To my relief, the FDA agreed to add the topic to the agenda of their next meeting of the National Mammography Quality Assurance Advisory Committee in 2011. I was invited to testify at the meeting and was joined by fellow patient advocates. Our message was clear: Every woman should be told about their own breast density and every woman deserves the same level of information regardless of her ZIP code.

The FDA advisory committee agreed.

In the years following the meeting, I continued to correspond with the FDA on the need for a single reporting standard for all U.S. women.

I’ve also continued to mentor advocates around the country working on legislation. And to address the new patient and healthcare provider conversations that begin with the question, “I have dense breasts, now what?” in 2015 I co-founded the website DenseBreast-info.org. The website is now the world’s leading online resource on the topic, is medically sourced and provides education to both people with dense breast tissue and healthcare providers.

Finally, earlier this month, more than 13 years after first testifying in front of the FDA, the federal breast density notification rule went into effect.

(Photo/Courtesy DenseBreast-info.org)

Reaching the finish line for a national “dense breast” reporting standard is bittersweet. I’m grateful, of course. I know this information will save lives. But there are so many women who fought for their own state laws that are no longer with us to join me in an exhale of relief.

So while we all share a hallelujah that this has finally come to pass, to quote Leonard Cohen, for some of us, “It’s a cold and broken hallelujah.”

But a hallelujah it is.

Have a Real Women, Real Stories of your own you want to share? Let us know.

Our Real Women, Real Stories are the authentic experiences of real-life women. The views, opinions and experiences shared in these stories are not endorsed by HealthyWomen and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of HealthyWomen.

McKenzie exercises are a series of movements designed to alleviate back pain, particularly related to disc problems, sciatica, and general lower back discomfort. They focus on spinal extension and can help with conditions like a herniated disc by encouraging proper posture and disc alignment.

6 Basic McKenzie Exercises for Back Pain

1. Prone Lying

• Lie face down on a flat surface with your arms by your sides.
• Purpose: Helps relieve pain by positioning the spine in extension, allowing the discs to move back into place.
• Hold for 1-2 minutes.

2. Prone on Elbows (Cobra Stretch)

• Start by lying face down. Slowly lift your upper body onto your elbows, keeping your hips and legs flat on the floor.
• Purpose: Provides more spinal extension to relieve lower back pain caused by disc issues.
• Hold for 5-10 seconds, repeat 8-10 times.

3. Prone Press-Ups

• From the prone on elbows position, press your hands into the floor and straighten your elbows to raise your upper body further. Keep your pelvis on the ground.
• Purpose: Increases extension of the lower spine and helps reduce sciatic symptoms.
• Reps: 8-10 times.

4. Standing Extension

• Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and place your hands on your lower back. Lean back gently as far as you can.
• Purpose: Helps reduce pain in the lower back and upper buttocks.
• Hold: 1-2 seconds, repeat 8-10 times.

5. Flexion in Lying (Knee to Chest)

• Lie on your back and bring one knee up to your chest, holding it for a few seconds. Switch to the other knee, and eventually bring both knees to your chest.
• Purpose: Stretches the lower back and helps with disc issues.
• Hold for 5-10 seconds, repeat 8-10 times.

6. Flexion in Standing

• While standing, slowly bend forward as if to touch your toes. Don’t force the stretch.
• Purpose: Stretches the hamstrings and lower back muscles.
• Hold for 5-10 seconds, repeat 8-10 times.

These exercises can be helpful for people with specific types of back pain but should be done cautiously, especially for those with acute symptoms. If your pain worsens or persists, consult a healthcare professional or physical therapist.

Disclaimer
The Content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.

English

La mayoría de pruebas del colesterol usualmente miden los triglicéridos, pero estos no son un tipo de colesterol. Sin embargo, los triglicéridos se asocian a los dos tipos de colesterol: LBD y LAD. Al igual que el colesterol, los triglicéridos son tipos de lípidos (grasas) que se trasladan a través de la sangre para realizar funciones esenciales en el cuerpo. Y al igual que para el colesterol de LBD, niveles altos de triglicéridos pueden implicar riesgos para la salud cardiaca.

Nos comunicamos con la cardióloga de Nueva York y miembro del consejo de asesoría de salud de la mujer de HealthyWomen Nieca Goldberg, M.D., para conversar acerca de lo que podemos hacer para manejar niveles altos de triglicéridos.