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Stretched Too Thin
Health and Fitness for Caregivers By Sue Marquette Poremba
If you are a woman, at some point in your life, you will be a caregiver. Care giving happens throughout life, both in expected andunexpected places.
Most of us think of ourselves as a caregiver in two distinct ways: first as a mother raising children, and later nursing a parent or another elderly relative. Yet there are countless other situations that call on us to leap back into the role of caregiver the husband who acts helpless in the kitchen, the dog that needs to be walked and fed each day, the boss who can neither make a pot of coffee nor fix paper jams in the copy machine.
At the end of the day, we crawl into bed, exhausted from all the work we did taking care of others or overcome by the guilt of not doing enough.
Of course, there are many men who pick up the role of caregiver, but the reality is, the bulk of care falls on the shoulder of women.
"Women are hard-wired for empathy and everything has connections, while men tend to compartmentalize things," says Debbie Mandel, author of Changing Habits: The Caregiver's Total Workout(Catholic Book Publishing, 2005). Women become caregivers largely because they are physiologically built for the job.
However, women who are caught up in their role as caregiver too often forget to take care of themselves. A woman professor in a male-dominated field spends so much time mentoring her female students that she forgets to eat lunch or grabs a bag of chips from the vending machine. The woman stuck in a sandwich generation gets her exercise dashing from work to ball practice to her elderly father's house. Consequently, women who run themselves ragged risk physical and mental illness. Exercise is often the first thing to get scratched from her busy schedule, which is a mistake. According to the book eDiets Weight Loss Solutions and Daily Progress Journal
