The heart is an important organ of our body and maintaining its health is equally important. Heart diseases at any time can cause death. But, you cannot accept it merely as fate. You cannot change the risk factors like family history, sex or age, but, can definitely take the necessary precautions to prevent your heart from the risk. Prevention of these heart diseases means you need to make smart choices. These smart choices would be helpful for the rest of your life. Sometimes, age doesn’t matter but lack of exercise, a poor kind of diet as well as other unhealthy habits can worsen the situation. You can easily protect your heart from various Heart Diseases by making the following changes to your lifestyle.
Follow a heart-healthy diet
In order to protect yourself from heart diseases, maintaining a heart- healthy diet is important. You should include fruits, vegetables and whole grains in your diet. You need to focus on fibre-rich whole grains, fish, nuts, legumes as well as seeds. These are the super foods for a healthy heart. Also, avoid including too much salt and sugar in your diet and limit certain types of fats like saturated and trans fat.
Improve cholesterol level
Maintaining Cholesterol level is equally important for preventing any heart disease. Heart diseases are likely to be if you have a total cholesterol level above 200, HDL cholesterol level under 40 i.e. the good cholesterol level, LDL level under 160 i.e. the bad cholesterol level. As an adult, you should get your cholesterol measured at least once on an average out of every five years. These five years shall be counted from the age of 18 only. In order to lower your cholesterol levels, eat a diet that is low in saturated fats and refined sugar.
Quit smoking
Smoking is one of the major causes of heart diseases. Chemicals present in tobacco can create a damage to your heart as well as blood vessels. So, if you smoke, you are more prone to heart diseases compared to a non- smoker. You would increase the risk by increasing smoking consumption. Even those smokeless tobacco, low-tar and even low-nicotine cigarettes can be risky.
Exercising
Exercising is also one of the necessary things to prevent heart diseases. Get yourself accustomed to regular and daily exercise in order to protect yourself from heart diseases. Whenever you combine your physical activities along with other lifestyle measures like weight management, this would be a win-win situation. Physical activity surely helps you controlling weight along with maintaining blood pressure.
Manage stress
Along with other changes, managing stress is also important to prevent heart diseases. Many people try to cope up with stress in probably unhealthy ways that include overeating, drinking or even smoking. Rather than getting into all these, find good options to cope up with stress. Physical activities, exercises for relaxation and even meditation in their own way can help improve health.
So, adopting these positive lifestyle changes will surely benefit your heart. Many of you might have been popping pills to get rid of heart diseases. But, as we all know that prevention is better than cure. So, instead of trying to cure, focus on prevention on the initial stages. These changes can definitely reduce the risk of heart diseases by almost 80 percent.
