Have you been diagnosed with heart disease? Are you worried about developing the condition and want to do something about it beforehand? Fortunately, the answer to both questions can be addressed by changing one’s lifestyle and habits. And there are working strategies that consistently improve people’s health, according to Dr. Ian Weisberg, regardless of background or current status of disease development.
Why Bother Once Diagnosed?
Heart disease risk is reversible. While some people are far more prone to the risk than others thanks to hereditary history, gender or their current age, it doesn’t mean that person is stuck with heart disease forever once diagnosed. It can be helped and with noticeable results very quickly.
Strategy 1 – Stop Smoking & Drinking
Both smoking tobacco and consuming alcoholic drinks on a regular basis are essentially introducing toxic chemicals to the body. While the lungs and liver do an incredible job of filtering, they can only do so much. Eventually, the regular use of tobacco and alcohol begins to poison the body. By stopping this regular exposure, the heart can heal faster and begin to put energy into recovery versus continuing with additional damage from smoke and drinking.
Strategy 2 – Increase Physical Activity
Movement causes the heart and circulatory system to work harder. That creates multiple benefits, including flushing out waste and plaque, increasing the resilience and strength of the heart, and exercising its pumping capability to work harder. All three directly improve heart health, especially if weakened over time from heart disease or cholesterol or inactivity.
The best way to start, if moving again for the first time in a while, involves brisk walking only. Don’t try to run a marathon the first week. Instead, walk at a clip so that the body gets about 150 minutes of movement a week. Then, shift to jogging in a few weeks.
Strategy 3 – Improve Your Diet
Shifting to a plant-based diet with heavy vegetables and fruit, restricting red meat consumption to maybe only once a month, and eliminating fatty fried food and processed products are key to eating healthily for the heart. Not only will it reduce weight gain, liver and digestive irritation and the risk of diabetes 2, it will also help the heart work easier over time. Ian Weisberg notes salt should also be significantly reduced. Most preserved food is heavy in salt, and then people add more at the table. Eliminate salt, and problems like peripheral edema go down noticeably.
Strategy 4 – Lose Weight
If a person’s body weight is well over 165 pounds, for most people, that is excess weight gain. It’s time to lose it. If over 200 pounds a person is obese and definitely needs to reduce weight gain. Doing so directly relieves the heart from working harder, constant strain that can push it to a heart attack.
Strategy 5 – Reduce Stress & Sleep More
Sleep is the most overlooked, easiest way to help the heart repair itself. Regular sleep is a must, and to get that, stress needs to be reduced as well. Doing both gives the heart a chance to recover and the body to heal. Chronic stress stops the healing process and disrupts deep sleep with worry and anxiety. Changing daily life routines to remove these risks will directly pay off with less heart attack and stroke risk.
