Chapter One
The Myth of Perfect Health


What woman can't rattle off a list of to--do items for healthy living? Exercise for a healthy heart; train with weights to build muscle and bone; stretch to maintain mobility; eat meals that are carefully designed for good artery and bowel function; drink one glass of red wine daily to avoid heart disease; resist the temptation to drink two glasses of said wine to avoid breast cancer; get a full night’s sleep to promote immune function; expose the skin to sunlight for ten minutes to absorb vitamin D, then immediately apply sunscreen to avoid skin cancer; relieve stress to strengthen the immune system; build a social support network to ward off Alzheimer’s; book appointments with our mates for healthy sexual pleasure; and, of course, maintain a body mass index that falls exactly within the “healthy” range listed in every women’s magazine.

And don’t forget the Kegels.


This list is so impossible that it leaves most women either consumed with panic or doubled over with laughter. Yet if you have picked up this book, chances are you feel at least some obligation to follow what we’ll call, with more than a dab of irony, the “health rules.” The individual rules themselves may change with unsettling frequency—by the time you read this book, at least one of the rules we listed will probably be out of date—but one thing remains constant: Every time you turn on the television or read a magazine, you are bombarded with a highly specific set of dos and don’ts for staying healthy. Of course, you want to be healthy. And if you do get sick, you definitely don’t want people to say, in ...