Preventive Care: Simple Steps for Staying Healthy
Your habits have a direct impact on your overall health. Healthy choices can help you prevent illness and disease while fighting infection and helping you feel your best. Of course, eating right and exercising can’t prevent all illnesses, but there are several ways to improve and maintain your health to prevent serious diseases later in life. Wondering how to promote lifelong wellness? Just follow these simple steps:
Move More
Exercise is good for your mind and body, so if you want to be and feel healthier, you need to engage in physical activity. Regular activity, whether it’s walking, running, or going to the gym, can help you maintain your weight. Bring your dog with you running or walking can also be a great way to stay motivated and spend more time with your furry friend. By maintaining your weight, you help prevent health issues associated with obesity, like heart failure and diabetes, while boosting your feel-good hormones to make you happier and more confident.
If you hate exercising, don’t worry. You should only aim to exercise for 150 minutes a week, which breaks down into 30 minutes a day for five days. That means you can take weekends off and enjoy yourself. Even something as simple as brisk walking or riding a bike counts as exercise and can quickly add up throughout your day. Household chores like cleaning, gardening, and yard work also count because they require physical exertion, so getting enough physical activity in your day isn’t as tough as you think.
Why is exercise a form of preventative care? Ultimately, keeping a healthy weight and supporting heart health can prevent chronic disease later in life. It also strengthens your bones, keeping you strong as you age.
Eat Less Junk Food
You don’t have to replace every meal with a salad, but it’s true what they say—a healthy diet can prevent illness. An apple a day might not keep the doctor away, but it can improve your overall health by providing your body with essential nutrients to fight infections and illness.
On the other hand, junk food is heavily processed and contains added chemicals or ingredients that aren’t good for your health, such as grease, oil, preservatives, and salt. Eating less junk food and replacing it with whole foods can help you maintain a healthy weight and ensure your body has all the nutrients it needs to function. Healthy meal kits are a great way to get fresh ingredients into your lifestyle while also being extremely convenient.
Processed foods are associated with serious illnesses, including cancer. Unfortunately, changing your diet can’t completely prevent cancer, but it can make you less likely to get it in the future. Eating better makes you feel better, so there’s no reason not to try it.
Improve Your Sleep Quality
Sleep should be one of your main priorities. Everyone needs sleep. Moreover, everyone needs quality sleep that allows their body and mind to relax and recuperate. If you’re not getting enough sleep, you leave yourself vulnerable to illness and mental health issues because your brain performs essential functions during this time, like storing information and improving memory.
Most experts agree that adults need at least seven hours of sleep, but that doesn’t mean light sleep. Instead, you need quality sleep that allows you to go through every stage of the sleep cycle to ensure you wake up feeling refreshed and rejuvenated.
If you don’t get enough sleep, your body can’t heal, making you more susceptible to illness and other health issues. Even mild sleep deprivation is bad for your body and mind and can lead to diabetes, mood disorders, and a weakened immune system.
Not getting enough quality sleep and finding yourself waking up throughout the night? Improving your sleep environment may help. For example, sleeping in a dark, cool environment on a comfortable mattress can help you get the sleep you need. However, if you’re still struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep at night, consider consulting your doctor for advice.
Drink More Water
We’ve all had those days where we needed extra caffeine to get through the day, so we drank coffee or energy drinks instead of water, leaving our bodies seriously dehydrated. Unfortunately, even minor dehydration can have consequences like fatigue and headaches. On the other hand, staying hydrated can help your body fight illnesses and diseases because it needs water to effectively perform functions like maintaining temperature, improving digestion, and aiding in the absorption of nutrients.
Leaving yourself dehydrated for too long or letting yourself get too dehydrated can be dangerous and lead to heat stroke and death. Of course, as long as you have access to clean drinking water, you probably won’t let your dehydration get this severe. However, you should still aim to drink enough water every day, depending on your weight. There are different recommendations, but you can usually tell if you’re dehydrated based on the color of your urine. If it’s light yellow, you’re adequately hydrated.
Remember that how much water you should drink per day also depends on various factors like exercise, the temperature outside, time spent in the heat, and being ill.
Visit Your Doctor
A crucial part of maintaining your overall health is visiting your doctor for preventative care to ensure your health and devise treatment plans whenever necessary. Unfortunately, many people visit their doctors after they’re already ill and in need of home care, but if they went to their annual physicals, they could prevent serious health issues. Seeing your doctor every year can help you catch chronic diseases before the symptoms worsen, and being proactive and consulting a doctor about your health can ensure you have a life-long health plan that can keep you feeling your best.
Manage Stress
We all experience stress, but we all cope with it differently. Stress is normal and can benefit you when it’s short-term. For example, stress about an exam might make a college student study a little more. However, chronic stress is an entirely different story and can affect your mental and physical health. For example, did you know that stress can lead to weight gain even if your diet and exercise routine haven’t changed? Additionally, high-stress levels have been linked to various illnesses, such as stroke and heart disease.
Managing your stress by learning coping mechanisms can help you live longer and healthier, so consider breathing exercises, yoga, and practicing gratitude to help you get through the more difficult times.
Final Thoughts
Staying healthy isn’t easy, but building healthy habits can be. The more you focus on your overall health, the better your immune system will function, allowing you to fight off illnesses like the common cold. Meanwhile, staying healthy throughout your life can prevent serious diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.