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As we age, it becomes more and more important to focus on improving our health to help reduce our chances of developing diseases and eliminating common medical conditions, like joint problems and high cholesterol. Managing your health doesn’t always require a complete lifestyle makeover. Sometimes, it just requires small tweaks to your current behavior. It’s never too late to start taking care of yourself, but the sooner you begin, the sooner you will start feeling its effects. Below are some easy tips to start incorporating into your daily routine in order to improve your health.
Proper nutrition
Proper nutrition is key to maintaining your overall health. Ensuring adequate nutrition is not entirely about counting calories, eating less, and watching the scale tick down with each lost pound. Achieving proper nutrition is about fueling your body with the energy it needs by balancing your intake of fruits, vegetables, lean protein, dairy, sugars, and carbs. In addition, you can fill in any gaps in your diet by taking vitamins and supplements, such as calcium, Vitamin C and Omega-3.
Adequate sleep
Sleep is just as important as exercise and diet in trying to optimize your overall health. A good night’s sleep can help you achieve weight loss goals, improve cognitive ability, and increase energy. For those who have difficulty sleeping, focusing on improving the quality of sleep either by taking medication or changing your lifestyle to prioritize sleep can have powerful impacts on quality of life and cognitive function. A proper night’s sleep is essential as it allows your body and mind to recover and gain the energy required for the next day’s work. Your sleep habits can have both short-term and long-term effects on your aging body. Insufficient sleep over a long period of time can contribute to medical conditions and diseases such as obesity and cardiovascular disease. Sleep is not just a luxury. It is a necessity.
Less stress
Stress affects everyone differently, but we all experience it. Stress can cause serious, long-term issues if you do not take steps to minimize it. Stress affects how we function in our day-to-day lives and how we manage relationships with others. It’s important to acknowledge when a situation or atmosphere is causing you extensive stress. By recognizing stress triggers, you can take steps to address it head on. Breathing techniques can help get you through the stressful moment. At times, you may have remove yourself from the stressful situation altogether. You can also seek professional help to learn techniques to better handle stress.
Regular check-ups
It’s important to visit your doctor regularly to help maintain your overall health. Annual physical exams, along with specific scans based on your age, can help identify the onset of medical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and breast and colon cancer. Many insurance plans cover preventative care. Seeing you regularly, your doctor will have a baseline to compare your health with at each visit. Your doctor can advise you of ways to lower your cholesterol or blood pressure, and of appropriate nutrition and exercise.
Nutrition is a key element for maintaining health. One of the most important things to do is to read labels carefully. i.e. a sugary soda can have up to 40 gms or more of sugar.
Food additives are bad too. Most physicians will advise eliminating processed foods in favor of raw fruits/veggies, seeds and nuts.
A good multi-vitamin is important to put into place vital micro-nutrients like copper, magnesium, manganese etc. Powerful anti-oxidants are important too. Examples include tumeric, cayenne pepper and garlic. Supplements like black walnut husks increase the all-important HDL or good cholesterol in the blood.