What can you do to prevent cancer from coming back?

While many risks cannot be changed, one important risk factor you can control is your weight. In fact, women who lose weight and keep it off reduce their risk of breast cancer recurrence by 25 to 40 percent. They also reduce their risk of dying from breast cancer by 50 percent.

Why Your Weight Matters

Achieving and maintaining a healthy weight is important for a number of reasons:

• Your body needs to heal. The baggage of extra weight stresses your heart and puts you at risk for diabetes.
• Extra weight combined with hormone therapies (such as tamoxifen and letrozole) leads to painful joints.
• There is evidence that fat cells act as a breeding ground for cancer cells.  

That is why two of your most effective weapons in your battle for a cancer-free future are exercise and a healthy diet.

Get Up, Get Out and Move

Thousands of women were studied after their breast cancer diagnoses to determine the impact of lifestyle changes on cancer recurrence. Women who exercised had a lower risk of breast cancer recurrence than women who did not.

There are lots of ways to add exercise into your life. Walk, run, take a class, ride your bike, join a gym. The goal is to increase your activity and to challenge yourself to do more. You’ve survived breast cancer treatment! Compared to that, a brisk 30-minute walk is easy!

Eat Healthy, Whole Foods (That You Can Pronounce)

Making healthy choices about what you eat is the other part of the lifestyle equation. Here are a few guidelines:

• Avoid sugar. Sugar breaks down in the body and is stored as fat (the cancer welcome mat). Sugar also acts as an inflammatory substance, further irritating sore joints. Eliminate the obvious, such as soda and candy, as well as empty-calorie processed foods like pasta and white bread.
• Eat more protein. Protein feeds muscles, and muscles burn calories more efficiently than fat. Skinless chicken, lean meats, eggs, peanut butter, legumes, and Greek yogurt are all healthy choices that feed your muscles.  
• If you can't pronounce it, don't eat it. Chemicals in food are foreign to the body’s digestive system—it doesn’t know what to do with them, so they get stored (usually as fat). Try to avoid processed foods, which just leave you feeling hungry anyway!

Count Those Fat Grams!

You may be used to checking the carbs and calories on food labels frozen dinner; take a look at the fat grams, too. A 2005 study showed that women consuming 33g or less of fat per day lowered their risk of recurrence by about 20%, compared to women consuming 51g or more.

These simple steps make a big difference--not just in your survivorship odds but in how you feel everyday. You’ve come this far…make the most of it!