10 Warnings Signs Of HEART ATTACK A Week BEFORE It Happens

Hello, "Health Champions. " Today, we're going  to talk about warning signs that you could experience before a heart attack. The first  sign is that you would have unusual fatigue, meaning you're tired for no specific reason. 

If your heart isn't working all that well, then you could have what's called edema—that's  a very common term related to heart problems, and it simply means lack of blood. The blood, of  course, carries the nutrients and the oxygen to all the cells in the body, including the heart  and the heart muscle. If the heart isn't getting the resources that it needs, then, of course,  the heart's going to be struggling because it's still asked to perform the same work.

But if it's  struggling, then there's going to be less blood provided to the body, and if the body doesn't  get the blood and the oxygen, now there's going to be less energy produced for all the cells  in the body, and this could lead to fatigue. But this fatigue is different than just  sleepiness; it's more of a physical fatigue where you're just tired, especially with exertion. But  in severe cases and later stages, you could also have this fatigue at rest.

So at first, it would  be that you're tired when you try to do something, but it's not the same thing as being sleepy. Also,  this is general and persistent, so it's not just like one body part now and then—it's pretty much  all the time, and it affects the whole body. Another thing that can happen is mild angina,  which is chest pain, chest pressure, or chest discomfort.

If you have edema, if there's not  oxygen and resources delivered to the heart and it's struggling, then you can also get this  discomfort and this pressure. And, of course, both of these are now problems that can progress  to a heart attack. These first few symptoms I'm marking in yellow because they are mild, and  that means that they would probably happen a lot longer before a heart attack.

That's key that  we need to understand because a lot of times, we hear people say something like, "He was  healthy as a horse; he was doing just fine," and then he had a heart attack. And that's not  true. He wasn't fine.

If you have a heart attack, you were not healthy the day before the  heart attack because that's a disease process that takes decades. And some of these  signs are going to show up years and years before, whereas some of the more severe ones could  be happening maybe just a week before. Sign number three is shortness of breath.

So  again, we have a lack of blood to the body, and if the body doesn't get oxygen, now  it's going to be looking for more oxygen, so of course, you're going to be trying to  breathe faster, but you're going to feel like you can't catch a breath. But there's one more  thing that happens. If the heart is struggling, if it's not pumping and circulating that blood  properly, now there's going to be a backlog, and that backlog is going to create an increase in  pressure to the lungs in the pulmonary veins—the veins, the blood vessels that take the blood from  the heart to the lungs.

And if that is backing up, now there's going to be increased pressure in this  vein, and we're going to have fluid seeping out; it's going to leak out into the  lungs into the tissues there. And the lungs, of course, have the purpose of  absorbing oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide. And we need these little compartments, the  alveoli of the lungs, to be humid, to be moist, but not wet.

And by the way, if you spread  out the total surface of these little alveoli, it's about the size of a tennis court,  so it's a huge surface. But if we have leakage, now there's going to be less of a gas  exchange; the surface area is going to be reduced, and we're not going to have the same capacity to  absorb oxygen and get rid of carbon dioxide. And again, with these mild signs, they may only  show up in the beginning during exertion, when you climb stairs or when you do a workout  or something strenuous.

But as this progresses, then these signs could show up even at rest. Sign number four is that you could be sweating  even though you're at rest—you’re not exerting yourself, you're not exercising, and yet you're  sweating. And the reason is that when your heart has stress because it's not getting the resources,  now we have a stress response because when the heart is stressed, that's a significant stress on  the body.

And we activate the sympathetic nervous system, and part of that sympathetic nervous  system is increased sweating, just like during a fight-or-flight response. So if you have a bear  chasing you, or if you're running, then it's normal for that sympathetic activation to happen,  but it can also happen if the heart is stressed. Number five is unexplained weakness,  and now we have shifted to orange, meaning that these are more severe.

These are  like moderate severity of signs and symptoms, and this is different than the general  fatigue. This is more of a physical weakness, and this often can be more localized, so it's  almost like your legs don't carry you or your arms won't perform the work. And it could also  be a sudden onset, and if you get any of these signs more suddenly and more severely, then this  could signal that a heart attack is on its way.

Sign number six is nausea and vomiting. And  why could that happen with heart stress? Well, it's due to the vagus nerve.

Vagus means wanderer  because that nerve is wandering all the way from the cranium—it's a cranial nerve—and it goes  all the way down into your belly. And it is the parasympathetic outflow, meaning the opposite  of the fight-flight. And that means it's the feed-and-breed or the parasympathetic nerve, so  it slows things down.

So the vagus nerve is the nerve supply that slows down the heart—the  fight-flight speeds it up, and the vagus slows it down. But when it is slowing down,  when we don't have a fight-flight response, that's also when we're trying to get resources to  the gut to digest food. That's when we're getting the blood flow to the digestive tract.

But if we  have a lot of stress—extreme stress on the heart, for example—now we're firing off these nerves  with very high signals, high frequencies, and there can be a little bit of an overflow  on these nerves, so the signals get mixed up, and the heart signals and the gut signals aren't  separated as clearly, so they start affecting each other. And now, if we have heart stress,  the body is reacting with nausea and vomiting. Sign number seven is that you could get dizzy  or lightheaded.

And why is that? Because we said that when the heart doesn't get the resources, it  decreases the output. And the hardest place to get the blood to flow is, of course, against gravity,  and the head is the furthest away from the heart in terms of gravity.

So if we reduce the cardiac  output, now the brain can suffer because there's less blood flow to the brain. If there's less  blood flow, there's less nutrients, less oxygen, and we could experience some lightheadedness.  So some of these signs are early signs, and some are medium or moderate signs, and we really  want to do something as soon as possible because once we get into the severe signs that we're  going to talk about, very often it can be too late.

It may just be the time that we're having  that heart attack the same day or the next day. And if we understand that the degeneration  of the heart is closely linked to metabolic disease, to the foods we eat, how we exercise,  to the stress we have—all the different things that I talk about on this channel—we talk about  chemical stress, which is environmental toxins and good food or bad food. We talk about exercise,  which is sedentary living versus movement, and we talk about stress, which is where you  have peace of mind versus feeling overwhelmed.

So if we do something about this early,  if we understand how it affects the body, then we can prevent this, or we can restore health  to a degree. And while it's not the only factor, the number one cause is insulin resistance and  metabolic disease, and that's why I talk so much about it on this channel. And there are also  5,600 other videos that talk about these concepts so that you can understand them properly.

And  if you really want to dig into the details, I've also done a blood work course where we  analyze this stuff in a little bit more detail, and I put a link down below for  you if you want to check that out. Sign number eight is severe pain  or pressure across the chest, and some people have described this as if an  elephant is sitting on them—a crushing chest pressure. And this is because of significant  blockage; there's a significant reduction in blood flow to the heart, and now the heart is  really suffering.

And when it gets this severe, that could be that final warning. So if  you have experienced something like that, don't ignore it. Make sure that you get  checked out and you do something about it.

Sign number nine is also very severe. It  is when you have pain, and it's radiating out into the left arm, and you could also  have this pain in the jaw, in the neck, or in the shoulders. And the reason that  we get this is called referred pain, and it's kind of like the vagus—that nerve  signals can get mixed up if they're close to each other and where they're coming off the  spine.

And if there is intense stimulation, such as during a heart crisis, the reason  is that these body parts we talked about, they have shared sensory pathways with the heart.  They all come off the spinal cord somewhere in the upper thoracic and the lower cervical area. And  this represents significant heart stress.

We are probably going to have some tissue damage because  we're depriving the heart severely of blood flow and oxygen, and again, this is a very serious  sign that you absolutely do not want to ignore. Sign number ten is severe shortness of breath.  We mentioned before that you could have some mild shortness of breath with exercise.

Well, when  it gets severe, you're probably going to have it all the time, even at rest. And now we have  two big problems compounding. We have this fluid buildup in the lungs that we talked  about, but now it's getting more severe, so we have less gas exchange, less oxygen in  the blood.

But at the same time, we have a heart that is weaker and weaker, so we reduce that  cardiac output, so it's pumping even less blood, and there is less oxygen in the blood that is  being pumped. So it's like this vicious cycle now, and we have a severe compromise of our  cardiovascular function, and that heart is in severe distress. And if we haven't already,  we really need to get some help right away.

And the solution, of course, is to change your  lifestyle on many different levels as soon as possible, as early as possible in this disease  process. And I have hundreds of videos that talk about just how to do that. If you enjoyed this  video, you're going to love that one, and if you truly want to master health by understanding how  the body really works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell, and turn on all the notifications  so you never miss a lifesaving video.