Take the President's Active Lifestyle Award Challenge, Get Fit and Improve Your Fertility

Medical research has proven that numerous lifestyle factors strongly influence fertility (not to mention overall health and well-being). Taking preventive care of your health can save you time, money and even painful medical procedures down the road. We know you've heard this over and over - so one more time won't hurt, right?

Did you know that just about anything that affects your health can affect your fertility? And while any one unhealthy choice (e.g., alcohol consumption) may not necessarily cause great overall harm your health or fertility, just a few unhealthy lifestyle choices can cause a lot of minor health problems to start to snowball into something much more serious. That's because many of the different factors that can adversely influence your health cause similar diseases and problems to one another. So the less you take care of yourself, the more you're compounding the likelihood of serious health problems down the road (including issues with fertility). Don't believe me? At the end of this article is a neat bullet-point list of some of the health consequences of the lifestyle choices that we make all the time. You will be surprised.

The great thing about health is that it's never too late to start making changes. And even small changes can yield tremendous results in health and well-being. I recently joined Sharecare.com as an expert in oncology and infertility nursing. Sharecare.com is an interactive website created by, among others, Dr. Mehmet Oz, Harpo Studios, HSW International, Sony Pictures Television and Discovery Communications. Sharecare.com is challenging you to improve your health by getting moving - today.


Now is a great time to Challenge Yourself: get up and move for 30 minutes per day, 5 days per week for 6 weeks. You have until the end of August to start the Challenge, and when you're finished you'll earn your Presidential Active Lifestyle Award (PALA) - you'll receive the PALA award from President Obama and Dr. Oz as well as a PALA badge on Sharecare. This isn't an ad or paid placement, by the way - this is the fundamental healthy living that IVFConnections.com advocates for every day.

Still not convinced? Tally up some of the lifestyle choices you've made and take a look at possible health outcomes. We're not exactly trying to pull a Scared Straight move; if we were going to do that, we'd have to tally up all of the financial costs of all of these problems, too! And you may notice that ev en though the list below is scary, it isn't comprehensive -- it is representative of what can happen when we make too many bad health choices.

If you decide to click through and challenge yourself, you can skip the list below. If you're still not sure, take a gander:




Of course some of these factors are easier to change than others - it's way easier to give up a habit than it is to move across country to reduce your exposure to air pollution. But look how much of an impact you can make by changing one little habit:

And that's just one can of soda or beer a day. What other risks are you taking with your health? Come on, get moving and make some positive changes. You can counteract some of the consequences of your other health choices, plus you can undo other damage that has been done.

Challenge yourself. It may seem silly or a waste of time, but it's not. You'll feel better and you'll consciously be doing something good for your body. And you'll have a silly piece of paper at the end of it with two cool signatures attached: Oz and Obama.


The following sources were consulted to construct the list of health consequences, above: