Written by Dianne Charles VanFulpen, Guide to Contented Hearts is an up-to-date survival guide with simple but expedient tips that lead to improved quality of life. VanFulpen zeros-in on heart disease, right up there with cancer and stroke in mortality rates. This book gets to many points quickly, so potential victims can get on with it. The author identifies the six major risks most closely associated with heart disease. Mark them off: smoking, excess weight, high stress lifestyle, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and physical inactivity. Most of these can be changed most of the time.

With a foreward by cardiologist H.L. Brammell, M.D., healthcare communications specialist D. Charles VanFulpen explains how a simple 10% change in lifestyle can achieve a 20% benefit to your heart and your quality of life by reducing risks found in a continuing US heart study: too much stress, excess weight, physical inactivity, high blood pressure & high cholesterol. A former journalist, working with a cardiologist, nutritionist, exercise therapist & behavioral psychologist, VanFulpen provides a complete risk management program including a Lifestyle Quiz cardiac risk analysis test, food diary & analysis, menus & recipes, an exercise program that sticks, a fat screening quiz & how to cope in today's world of high stress and higher fear.

This is a survival kit for improving quality of life to do all the things you want to do when you want to do them. It helps you to make small changes in your lifestyle to provide a profound impact on your heart and possibly reduce healthcare costs. Short case studies about real people managing change are presented: a millionaire, a poor black woman, a factory worker and his wife, and a single woman who lost and gained-back 100 pounds, then took it off using Contented Hearts method.