Lifestyle Choices

Your Life and Lifestyle Choices

You are what you eat. Our daily lives involve the work we do, our jobs and responsibilities and our routines eating and sleeping that we carry out in our lives. These involve our eating, sleeping routines as well how much do we take care of our health and body.

 

Importance of Lifestyles:

The way we live, the hobbies e engage in and the habits we have largely impact our health. There are good lifestyle choices and bad lifestyle choices and everyone is guilty of making them one time or the other in their lives consciously or unconsciously.

These choices are made due to stress, exhaustion, learned habits and even timeliness. When your making wise and more importantly healthy life choices, you can prolong your life and also be able to keep numerous illnesses at bay.

You need to adopt a healthy lifestyle.

Furthermore, lifestyle choices affect your psychological, physical, nutritional, skeletal, cardiovascular and neurological health. Unhealthy eating habits, being lazy and other habits like not getting sufficient sleeping, alcohol consumption and smoking,  leads to stroke, cancer and heart diseases.

Good Lifestyle Habits:

Listed below are few of the healthy habits of a good lifestyle, will help you achieve your better health goals.

• Regular Exercise & Physical Activity

Engaging in regular physical activity whether in form of sports or exercise is the healthiest you can adopt. People who tend to be active about 7 hours a week have about 40% lower chances of getting serious diseases as well as early death as compared to those who exercised less than 30 minutes a week or none at all

Exercising regularly lowers your cholesterol and blood pressure. It reduces risk of cancers like breast cancer and colon cancer, heart diseases and type-2 diabetes. You need to start at a slow rate if you wish to adopt regular exercise as a habit. For starters, brisk walk is recommended as an excellent exercise as it provides aerobics and you can increase the time duration as well.

• Sleep:

We feel terrible if we do not get a good shut-eye at night. Sleep is extremely important part of a healthy lifestyle. When you sleep, the body restores the repairs the damages of the body. Getting a good sleep also digests your food efficiently. For a healthy life, both adults and children need to get 7-9 hours of sleep. Unable to get sleep results in fatigue, moodiness, weight gain, difficulty in focus and lessens decision making power.

• Healthy Diet with Fruits and Veggies:

Fruits and vegetables not only keep you healthy but may extend your life as well. According to a study conducted by Harvard School of Public Health eating plenty of fruits and vegetables reduces high blood pressure, prevents heart disease, eye diseases and number of cancers.

Eating about 5-13 servings or at least 2-6 cups of fruits and vegetables each day is extremely beneficial. It not only cleanses your body, gives your body health but fulfills your appetite as well.
It is necessary that you take a diet that is rich in vitamins and nutrients. These are essential in order for efficient and sound functioning of your body. You need to eat from each food group of the food pyramid so that you do not miss out on anything.

If you have some particular dietary requirements, it is wise to consult your physician before you start your nutritional supplements.
A diet whether for remaining fit or for weight loss, does not mean to starve oneself. If you not getting a proper diet or take up a diet you might end up gaining weight more than before and become prone to diseases of the heart or diabetes.

 

Yo-Yo Diet:

While on the subject of diet it is essential to know that for a health well-being and weight loss,  A yo-yo diet is not suitable. Yo-yo diet has been popular for sometimes but it is more of an obesity epidemic. There are basic two types of this diet.
One is when you successfully lost weight by smart eating and moderate exercise but then you quit suddenly and gained the lost weight right back and likely more.

In the second scenario, you lose weight by deciding to crash diet and simply living on food like almonds, kale sticking to 1000 calories a day. This is not maintainable and when you go back to eating normal, you regain your weight back, plus more.

What happens in yo-yo diet is that you metabolism slows down when you drop calories. After going back to eating normally, your metabolism has already slowed down that makes you gain weight. Even if it is not permanent, and by the time it sets right you might have gained 10-15 pounds!

You need to understand that these extreme diet plans, miracle pills do not benefit in the long run. They cause more harm than good and are often unsafe. Our body is a machine and we need to have a conscious behavior of what we put in.

Bad Lifestyle Habits:

Here are some habits of an unhealthy lifestyle habits:

Smoking:

Smoking is a very unhealthy habit that accounts for 90% of lung cancer deaths and 80-90% of chronic bronchitis and emphysema. When you smoke a cigarette, the smoke contains about 4,800 chemicals and out of them about 69% of which are known to cancer. Smoking also contributes a great deal to hear

• Drinking:

Alcohol is little amount is alright but having an alcohol addiction or a habit of consuming lot of alcohol can pose serious threats to your health. These may include stroke, high blood pressure, cirrhosis of liver, cancers and a higher risk of accidents or injuries like drunk driving or falling/slipping down somewhere. Moderate drinking is acceptable.

Studies suggest that women should consume only one drink a day and men should not indulge in more than two drinks a day.

• Overeating:

Overeating results in obesity, heart diseases, type-2 diabetes and cancers. When you consume more calories than required by body, the excess is stored as fat that leads to overweight. Eating fatty and sugary foods, late night eating, large helpings at dinner lead to weight problems.

When you gain weight it becomes difficult to be active or energetic. Lack of physical activity is a problem on its own.
Hope you find this useful in making healthy choices for a healthy lifestyle

 

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You can contact me at: cowboyjames@lifestyle-change.net