Three Cool Tips For Living Healthy

Simple Living Healthy Tips

Start Small

Baby steps, that's our first living healthy tip. Make small changes in your lifestyle. People are usually resistant to drastic changes. That's why crash diets usually don't work.

So unless you have a health problem and need medical intervention, make incremental changes only. For instance, if you're not getting enough vegetables in your diet, include a couple of servings in just one meal every day for starters. Progress to both lunch and dinner later. Then add fruit to your breakfast.

If you're prone to snacking, wean yourself away from greasy items and replace them with healthy fast food like a lean meat sandwich or a tossed salad.

But like we mentioned earlier, exercise is one of the two essential ingredients to living healthy. A lot of us have sedentary lifestyles. We sit at desks in front of a computer for hours at a stretch, five or six days a week.

Keep Going

But the body needs movement to keep it healthy. It's what keeps the motor running. Those who live active lifestyles and love adventure sports, hiking and trekking have a greater chance of being healthy.

Sign up for a swimming class, water and mow the lawn twice a week, walk to work instead of taking the bus, if its not too far, or take the long route to the tube station rather than the short cut!

Physical activity keeps the heart pumping, the blood circulation going and reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease. It keeps your joints fluid, maintains bone mass, reduces stress and raises self-esteem.

So you see, it's not just about weight loss. Living healthy tips suggest small changes that simply keep your body fit.

Eat Right

Our second living healthy tip is to eat well. This essentially means two things - getting the right quantity of food and getting the right nutrients in a balanced diet. Here are a couple of questions you could ask yourself: are you eating enough fresh fruit? Are you getting enough vegetables? What about cereal, roughage and fiber?

If you're following our living healthy tips, perhaps you could switch from full-fat and whole milk to skimmed milks and other low-fat dairy products. This goes for cheese too.

Live Healthy - Six Steps To A Healthy Life

Six steps we can take to reduce our risks for heart disease

There are certain steps that we can take to reduce our risks of ever getting heart disease and having a heart attack.

For people like me who already have heart disease we can only do two things.

    Follow these steps in order to prevent the progression of our disease.
    Hope that a cure will be found to unclog our arteries before it's too late.

For all others you don't have to wait.

You can begin taking these steps now. You can ensure yourselves that you are reducing your risks of getting a heart attack and of developing heart disease. In the process you will be improving the way you look and feel today and live a more satisfying life.

Step number one- decide that you want to live healthy with pleasure, instead of being ill and suffering in pain

Daily we make decisions that affect our health; we decide whether to smoke, what to eat, whether to relax and whether we will exercise.

These decisions, done repeatedly, become our habits and determine our health, lifestyle and the quality of our life.

The first step we must do to change our bad and unhealthy habits to good and healthy ones is to associate pain with the bad habit, and pleasure with the good one.

When we are aware, know and realize that our bad habit will create pain disease and suffering we implant that idea into our mind and consciously and subconsciously begin to abstain from doing it.

When we create the same awareness and association, that pursuing the good habit will bring us pleasure joy and health, we implant that image into our mind and consciously and subconsciously we begin to pursue it.

So to begin, we must realize that living unhealthy is a cause of heart disease, heart attacks and death, and living healthy is a cause of happiness, success and wellbeing.

Step number two - We must begin by stopping the worst and most harmful habit of them all smoking

Quitting smoking is the next necessary step we must take. Smoking, beside for being a direct cause of heart disease, lung cancer and other diseases, inhibits our ability to do cardiovascular exercises.

Stopping to smoke is difficult for two reason, one since it becomes such an ingrained habit we cant see ourselves existing with out a cigarette, we define our existence and being as a smoker.

Another reason it is so difficult is because of the nicotine included in the cigarette which is very addictive, we feel we need it and we cannot live with out it.

Conversely, if we can convince ourselves that by continuing to smoke we are really shortening our existence and by continuing to smoke we soon won't exist at all.

If we can also implant the true idea in our minds that our existence as a smoker inhibits our ability to live life to the fullest and robs of living a really satisfying happy active life. We can begin to fantasize of what an active healthy full lifestyle is, and begin to crave it.

When our cravings for the good life increases our cravings for cigarettes decreases, and slowly but surely we can replace the bad habit smoking with a good one exercising.

Step number three- Begin living a active lifestyle by starting to do cardiovascular exercises

Exercising besides for the obvious benefit of getting us into shape, it also relieves stress, tension, and feelings of depression. All three, stress, tension, and depression are leading causes and risk factors for heart disease.

Once we have stopped smoking we have the ability to begin exercising, we can begin gradually by walking 30 minutes to 45 minutes every day. Since as a smoker leading a sedentary lifestyle we never walk, just walking will already increase our wellbeing.

Gradually as we get used to walking and we don't feel the effects, we can gradually increase our pace turning our leisure walks into brisk walks. By this time we should be feeling healthier and more courageous; we can now begin a real cardiovascular exercise regimen, keeping our heart rates elevated within our target heart rate zone for 20 minutes 3 to 5 times a week.

Step number four - Begin feeling good about ourselves

Now that we stopped smoking and are exercising three times a week for twenty minutes we start feeling good about ourselves. We don't feel stressed, we don't feel tensed, and when we do, we just take a walk or exercise and get immediate relief.

We feel accomplished we feel we can do anything and want to do everything. We feel that we want to live healthy for many years to come, we don't want things to change we don't want to age. We begin to search for ways to achieve it.

Step number five- Begin to watch our diets and our eating habits

Looking for ways to make sure we remain healthy.

We start watching the types of food we eat. Make sure not to eat fatty, fried foods, saturated fats and Trans fats, red meat and anything that is detrimental to our health.

We control our processed carbohydrates and begin looking for whole grains. We start eating fiber, fruits, vegetables, legumes. We eat lots of fish and essential fatty acids. We drink a glass of red wine every day

Step number six - we enjoy every moment we live healthy

By doing all of the above steps we can feel accomplished and enjoy every moment knowing that we did everything that we can to control our risks of getting heart disease and dying of a heart attack.

We stopped smoking, we lost weight, we reduced our LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, we increased our HDL, and we aren't stressed, tensed and depressed. We are leading a happy active satisfying lifestyle and live healthy.

At age 37 I had a heart attack. I wish I would of taken the necessary steps before that fatal day.

I have commited myself to educating and inspiring others to begin living a healthy active lifestyle, before the heart strikes.