One of the worst things you can do if you're worried about breast cancer is to cook beef, pork, fish or poultry at a high temperature - which includes frying, grilling and roasting.
I always sort of thought, 'I'm probably going to get breast cancer. There's a really good chance.'
I have a lot of breast cancer history on my mother's side of the family.
No one has all the answers, so whatever a woman who has the BRCA mutation chooses to do requires courage and an element of faith. And a lot of love and support.
Having the BRCA mutation significantly increases the risk of breast cancer, but it is not always the only factor. Lifestyle choices may increase or decrease the risk of breast cancer, but that knowledge is an opportunity to empower ourselves, not to blame.
Although even light exercise is associated with a lowered risk of some other types of cancer, for breast cancer, it appears that leisurely strolls don't appear to cut it.
I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.
My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87 percent to under 5 percent. I can tell my children that they don't need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.
Three women in my family, close relatives, have had breast cancer, and two have died from it, and still I never thought it could happen to me. I didn't even regularly check my breasts.
Part of the problem with the discovery of the so-called breast-cancer genes was that physicians wrongly told women that had the genetic changes associated with the genes that they had a 99% chance of getting breast cancer. Turns out all women that have these genetic changes don't get breast cancer.
On the morning of May 1, 2018, I woke up knowing that the day I had anticipated for nine years had finally arrived. It was the day of my preventative double mastectomy - the day I would attack my BRCA 2 genetic mutation head-on and take my chances of breast cancer from 84 percent to virtually zero.
