How Healthy are You?

Having had a baby just four short months ago I've been quite aware of my personal health. I had a terrible time during my pregnancy, suffering from SPD and anxiety and then had a scary time with a post-partum haemorrhage following Little Miss' birth. I then had a blood transfusion to help my iron levels recover so my health has been in focus.

Four months on and I am feeling well recovered but I still haven't managed to start doing any exercise and, whilst we're on a no takeaway drive for January, we sometimes don't eat quite as well as we should. I'm also breastfeeding Little Miss and I have to look after myself to make sure her nutritional needs are met. I was therefore interested to read about a new online health check tool from Patient.co.uk. Their 'My Health' questionnaire takes about ten minutes to complete and you answer a series of questions about your health and wellbeing. On completion the handy little tool generates a score out of 100 to show you how healthy you are. Imagine a queue of 100 people, you want to be as close to the back as possible so high scores are good, low scores bad.

I took the time to complete the questionnaire and came up with a score of 60. This is just inside the 'safe' area, which actually starts at 60 and runs through to 100. The tool also generated a letter to my GP as it indicates that I am at risk of cardiovascular disease, based on my waist to hip ratio and a family history of heart disease. I'm actually well aware of these risks and have spoken to my GP about it in the past so I don't feel the need to book an appointment but I think this would be really useful for someone who wasn't aware of the risk factors. Once your score is generated you can then click through to identify steps to improve your health score. I had seven of these, four of which to were maintain current levels. The three areas I need to improve on, as I suspected, are to increase my physical activity levels, improve my diet and reduce my body weight. You can then set these as targets and click on them to get a clear breakdown of what they mean to your overall health.

I was quite impressed with this tool. It offered me some information on areas which I need to improve and ways to do so and, I think will motivate me to do more. I need to find an evening exercise class lasting less than 90 minutes so I can leave the children to do it and I definitely need to work on getting a few more vegetables into our family diet. It was reassuring to know that the information offered was in line with UK clinical references and guidelines too.