Dr. Renee talks Heart Health with Dr. Catherine Harmon Toomer

Ask Dr. Renee talks with Dr. Catherine Harmon Toomer About Heart Health and Weight Loss

Question: When the heart effectiveness is measured, what is ejection fraction?

Dr. Catherine Toomer: Ejection fraction is pretty much your heart pumps blood, it fills, then pumps, then fills, then pumps… generally when your heart fills with blood and it pumps, it usually pumps out about 55 to 65% of what it fills. And so it’s called the ejection fraction. Mine was at 15, so my heart was filling, but only 15% of what it was filling with was coming out. And so that’s why it’s called congestive heart failure because my heart was failing and that liquid was congesting.

Question: Is there a connection between heart disease and depression?

Dr. Catherine Toomer: I was trained that if someone has heart disease, if they’re diagnosed, you automatically start treating for depression, either with medication counseling or both. The problem with depression is that it zaps you of motivation. All the things a person knows to do to get better, gets halted by being depressed. I had postpartum depression, I had a diagnosis of depression. I had cardiac depression and I had mild chronic depression. The patient should be treated for both as I was trained.

Question: Are there some things to be aware of when losing weight?

Dr. Catherine Toomer: Not all weight loss is good weight loss. So it’s really fat loss that we’re looking for because you can lose muscle while you lose weight. And we don’t want people to lose muscle. The reason why is that so many lose weight and they can’t keep it off…it comes right back…because they lost too much muscle during that process. And they didn’t do it in a way so that they maintain their muscle mass. What people should really try to do is lose fat because fat in your body causes inflammation.

Dr. Toomer shares her personal history with weight, depression, diabetes, heart disease in this facebook live. Click the link for more of her story.