Measure your waist to gauge your health

If you're not measuring your waist more often than you step on the scale, you didn't get our "waist is more important than weight" message the first 100 times we said it. Maybe this shocker will do the trick: A big nine-year study recently found that, regardless of weight, not only do older Americans with extra-large waists double their risk of dying sooner, but the link is strongest in normal-weight women!

This news makes our plea more urgent than ever: Size counts. Get out your tape measure.

If your waist is bigger than 37 inches (women) or 40 inches (men), ask yourself three things:

What's in your fridge? Our guess is that it's stocked with steak and chocolate-chip cookie dough. No? How about sausage pizza and blue-cheese salad dressing? Thought so. You're getting too much saturated fat from somewhere, and it's not from fruits and veggies. Track down foods saturated with fat and toss 'em. You just started losing your belly fat and power-washing your arteries, too.

What's on your "must do" list? It should include walking 10,000 steps a day and doing some strength training 30 minutes a week. No? Buy a pedometer, some stretchy resistance bands or a "YOU: On a Diet" DVD workout (no equipment needed), and get a move on.

How's your stress level? The bigger your waist, the higher your stress. Take five-minute breaks several times a day to do some deep-belly breathing. Releasing tension also will ease stress eating. Ahhh.

The 10-Minute Workout: You've got 10 minutes to kill before your kid's tuba lesson ends. Will you:

A. Take a quick walk.

B. Catch up on the YOU Docs Daily columns you missed last week.

C. Curl up with a triple-espresso-caramel-macchiato and a blueberry muffin.

We hope you picked A Not B, because you already read those columns. And you certainly don't need the fat, sugar and calories in C.

Why A, a "quick" walk? In a study so high-tech that it sounds like science fiction, researchers measured 200 compounds in the blood of super-fit runners who'd just run the Boston Marathon and of regular walkers right after they hopped off a treadmill.