Your Heart Depends On You: Take Charge Of Your Health

Genetics and side effects of medication can account for some of our wellness problems, and the same is true when it comes to our lifestyle. Scientific research continually shows us ways that we can improve our wellbeing, so are we all doing enough to boost our heart health?

Reducing risk

The health of our hearts can depend on many different factors. If we smoke, have high cholesterol, drink excessively and live very sedentary lives then we are increasing our chances of getting heart disease, and lots of other wellness problems, like hypertension and diabetes. It’s not always easy to listen to the advice of our doctors, especially if we feel well at present. So just changing one aspect of our lives could make a difference to our wellbeing.

Change your thinking

Educating ourselves about our heart health may be all we need to adapt our lifestyles so we protect our wellness from present and future problems. Take cholesterol for example – this is a substance in our body that we make, or we eat. It’s needed to send messages around our bodies. There are two different types, HDL and LDL, with LDL being the one we need to decrease.

Knowing these simple facts mean we can concentrate on buying and making foods that help lower our cholesterol. Changes like these can have a ripple effect on how we see our heart health and may encourage us to give our lives a healthy boost. If we prefer, we can instead just start walking for 15 minutes a day. The feel good hormones we get from this may motivate us to give up smoking or drink more moderately.

Swap your shopping list

We might also experience knock-on effects from changing our diets slightly. Making an effort to swap sugary snacks for fresh fruit, smoothies and juices could get us feeling more energised and encourage us to buy other healthy snacks. Eating in moderation, these foods can also help lose weight if we need too, which can ward off diabetes and strokes. Our GPs can give us more tips on making simple lifestyle changes that can have massive results for our heart health.