Lifestyle changes: Let’s say that you have hypertension and you’d like to figure out what to do about it. There actually is a lot of good news here. There are about four major lifestyle changes I can think of that you can do to help reduce hypertension. Fairly easy things you can do in your own home with a diet.
Dietary Approaches to stop hypertension
Dietary Approaches to stopping hypertension basically mean that you can actually use your diet to help reduce your blood pressure. Few different groups have actually come together and endorsed this set of guidelines.
The American Heart Association and the Mayo Clinic actually went through and trying to figure out exactly, what diet would recommend for me. So I’m going to draw for you an imaginary plate. If you can imagine all my meals in one day on one plate of food.
This is what the – diet would recommend, this is one day and I take about 2,000 calories in a day. So the DASH diet suggests that for me, I should have about 5 fruits in a day. I should have 5 vegetables in a day. Total of 10 fruits and vegetables.
Then on top of that about seven grains of which 3 are whole grains. The remainder of my plate suggests two dairy products. So that would be something like nonfat milk or low-fat milk products like yogurt, cheese, and two meat products.
It’s not required that you eat meat in fact it’s not necessary at all. If you do the recommendation is to have no more than two meat servings. If you are going to have meat definitely like a slice of lean meat. These are the servings in one day that it recommends. On top of that in a week it says I should probably have about four servings of nuts and seeds.
I should probably kind of limit, how many sweets I take in this would be like candy. Any sort of fatty food or oil so fats and oils. This would be like potato chips or fries things like that it’s really trying to limit those things. If you do this for a couple of weeks you’re actually shown in studies to have lower blood pressure.
Fruits, Vegetables and Grains (Lifestyle changes)
At the end of two weeks, this starts it you know to make a difference which is pretty phenomenal. You can tell based on the way I’ve drawn this out that is really stressing fruits and vegetables. Lots of fruits, vegetables, and grains it’s also mention in the – diet. You should be on a low sodium diet so low sodium which is a limit of 1500 milligrams of sodium in a day.
Dash diet says that if you drink alcohol you should really try to limit your alcohol to less than two servings of alcohol in a day in addition to diet there are a few other things you can do as well so you could exercise.
Daily Exercises – Lifestyle changes
Exercise is actually very important in trying to reduce your blood pressure. There are a few different types of exercise. Resistance training with weights, stretching as folks that do yoga can tell you. The type of exercise that’s probably most helpful for hypertension is aerobic exercise.
You want to try to stress aerobic exercise when I say aerobic exercise. I mean things like I going for a swim or you’re going for a jog. Maybe even a brisk walk.
If that suits what you enjoy or a bike ride or something like this that really gets your heart pumping and flowing blood all or getting blood to flow all the way throughout your body instead of just one muscle group.
Aerobic actually is really important and in terms of how much aerobic exercise, a rough rule of thumb that I use is suggesting about 30 minutes per day for about five days a week and I find that’s a very reasonable thing that a lot of people can do and find enjoyable.
Losing Weight – lifestyle changes
If you’re doing these two things you’re likely to be losing weight and I’m going to talk about weight in terms of a BMI. If you’re hypertensive it’s a really good idea to try to get your BMI in a healthy range and for adults that would be between eighteen point five and twenty-five.
It’s a very healthy range of BMI and it’s actually really important that you get there especially if you’re on the high side. Let’s say you’re obese and your BMI is over 30 or you’re slightly overweight over 25 getting that BMI down below 25 is really critical and finally for smokers, it’s really important to try to quit smoking.
This is a fantastic time to kind of take your health into your hands and finally quit smoking or using tobacco products and nowadays we actually have so many medications that really help with this as well as counseling that it makes it much easier to try to quit smoking it’s never an easy thing to do but it’s certainly a lot easier when you have medications and counseling to help you and you have a good reason to do it like you have hypertension.
These are the four kind of lifestyle changes to keep in mind in terms of things you can do at home
