Fitness And Being Toned Help Combat Snoring

LIZETTE ALVAREZ pens a a cute and insightful piece on snoring
and the huge impact that it can have on relationships in this
extensive article. Setting aside surgery and breathing devices,
guess what the recommended treatment is: lose weight and stay
toned.

For millions of women, snuggling up to a partner for a good
night's sleep is as improbable as stumbling across a Chanel suit
on a Kmart rack. Snoring is rampant, with some statistics
showing that as much as 20 percent of the population snores. And
there is no question that men snore a lot more than women; some
experts say they are eight times more likely to than women.

In large part that has to do with men's thicker neck muscles,
since snoring is what happens when air passes relaxed tissue in
the throat, causing a full-throttle vibration. Indulging in too
many cocktails makes snoring worse for the simple reason that it
over-relaxes the body. Growing older, and less toned,
exacerbates the problem. Sometimes genes are to blame; some
people are just born with a flabby or narrow airway.

Weight gain, too, worsens snoring because the neck grows
thicker. As America has gotten fatter, it also appears to have
gotten louder, at least during sleep hours. Nowadays, though,
many exhausted partners are refusing to sacrifice a good night's
sleep.

The result, doctors say, is a modern version of musical beds,
featuring legions of annoyed women stomping into the guest room
or bleary-eyed men shuffling away after being banished to the
couch. A number of sleep-famished, stressed-out partners skip
this prelude altogether, preferring to sleep in a separate room
to get a night of undisturbed rest.

In many snoring marriages, this arrangement is an open secret:
not exactly hidden, but not readily divulged. "It's amazing how
many people move to another room," said Dr. Michael J. Thorpy,
director of the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center at Montefiore
Medical Center in the Bronx. "People do it for months, if not
years. People don't talk about it to others. There is some
embarrassment. It's a feeling of failure that we can't handle
this, and it comes really from the fact that snoring was not
looked at as a medical problem, but something to be laughed
about. We are starting to move away from that."

In a survey of 1,506 randomly chosen people released this year
by the National Sleep Foundation, 35 percent of those living
with a snoring or fitful partner said they experienced
difficulties in the relationship because of the disruption, 26
percent lost an average of 49 minutes of sleep a night and 23
percent acknowledged sleeping in a separate place.

Doctors are quick to point out that snoring can cause more than
disharmony in a relationship. More than 12 million Americans
suffer from sleep apnea - in which the soft tissue at the back
of the throat repeatedly collapses during sleep and blocks off
air - and a large number of these people find themselves sleepy
at work or behind the wheel, irritable and unable to
concentrate. In the most serious cases, apnea can lead to high
blood pressure, and less commonly to stroke or heart attack as
the body struggles for oxygen.