10 Tips For A Healthy Heart

A healthy heart is essential if you want to live a long and active life. The modern way of living is really taking its toll and could harm your little ticker considerably if you’re not careful. Long working hours, lack of exercise, chomping on convenience foods and bad habits like smoking and drinking are creating an unhealthy environment for our hearts, which means that it’s less likely to last the average life span of 66 years.Keeping your heart young and healthy should be one of your main priorities in life; so if you’re going to do your best for your little muscular organ these are all essential:
Healthy eating: Eating a healthy, balanced diet is essential if you want to maintain all aspects of your general health. Most importantly, it will keep your heart going for longer. When maintaining a balanced diet it’s a good idea to keep a food diary so that you know exactly what you’ve eaten and when you ate it. Make sure you eat plenty of fruits, vegetables and whole grains along with a small amount of red meat.
Body weight: Making sure that you’re a healthy weight is essential if you want to keep your heart healthy. A BMI between 20 and 25 means that you fall into the optimal weight category and should strive to maintain this. Maintaining a healthy weight will not only improve your heart’s chances but will also reduce your risk for diabetes and high blood pressure.

Exercise: Exercise is essential even if you don’t have the time to go to the gym. Take a spinning class or doing yoga just 30 minutes will improve your heart rate which will help to make it stronger and healthier. Exercises like yoga are not only beneficial as they help to keep your entire body healthy but they also relieve stress which helps to calm your heart too.
Active: With some careers it really isn’t easy to fit in regular exercise which makes it even more important to make sure you’re active throughout the day. If you make a conscious effort to walk up the stairs rather than taking the lift or to walk to or from work then you’ll be making up for some of the time that you can’t exercise as well as transforming your sedentary job into one that’s a little more active.
Bad Habits: Bad habits,like drinking and smoking aren’t good for your overall health or your heart. Although habits and addictions are hard to break, cutting back and quitting slowly is much easier and you’ll be improving your health as you go.
Stress: When things in life go wrong, people tend to turn to comforts like bad foods, drinking and smoking. Because none of these things help you manage the stres,s it will continue to build, slowly knocking years off your life. If you want your body and heart to remain healthy through stressful times, it’s essential to learn to manage your stress levels. Rather than choosing comfort foods and bad habits, make an effort to go out and socialize with friends or go away for a relaxing break.

Neil O’Callaghan has a family history of heart disease so follows all of these steps along with advice from the London Cardiovascular Clinic to keep his heart healthy.