It’s important to have check-ups with your health care professional to help identify serious conditions before they get out of control. However, when you have wellness goals, you can often prevent them from ever happening. Wellness goals can help you feel your best, besides adding to your prevention measures for conditions that can occur down the road. So what are some of these important changes that you can add to your list to help you live a healthier life and keep health conditions at bay? It all starts with lifestyle changes.
Start your list with a top priority, healthy eating.
There’s a lot more information and interest today on how dietary habits can not only affect health, but also bring about healing. Dr. William Li the Director of the angiogenesis Foundation is doing research into how changing diet might actually be a cure or prevention for serious conditions, such as cancer and heart disease. It’s all about the nutrition that’s found in food and how it affects the body. You don’t have to be a world renown scientist to understand that eating junk food filled with empty calories will add pounds as it destroys your health.
It’s more than just about weight loss, although obesity is now the leading cause of preventable deaths.
Humans were meant to move, but humans were also meant to choose foods from plants and animals that grew naturally, not food grown or supplemented in the lab. Every color of fruit or vegetable has different phytonutrients that provide healing properties or benefits to support good health. You simply can’t bottle that. Anthocyanin—the flavonoids that give purple, blue, orange and red fruits and vegetables their color—are important for treating many serious diseases, including cancer and heart disease. Rather than separating out the anthocyanins, eating the whole fruit or vegetable is best, since the other nutrients in those same foods, boost the action of the anthocyanins and worked in synergy to make it more potent. Eat healthier and prevent problems.
Exercise should be an important part of your wellness program.
Move it or lose it isn’t just a saying to get people to move out of your way, it’s a fact. If you don’t get exercise, you lose muscle tissue, which also causes the loss of calcium from the bones—osteoporosis. Building your strength, endurance and flexibility not only helps you burn calories and boosts your metabolism, it also keeps you stronger and fit longer, so your senior years really are golden and enjoyed. You’ll boost your energy the more you exercise.
- Drink plenty of water. One of your goals should be to stay hydrated and NOT with sugary drinks like colas. Drink at least 8-eight ounce glasses of water each day. The older you get, the easier you become dehydrated and dehydration can cause serious consequences for your health.
- Get adequate sleep. Studies show that getting adequate sleep is heart healthy. It also helps keep your satiety and hunger hormone in balance. Too little sleep will increase the production of ghrelin—the hunger hormone and stifle the production of leptin, the hormone that makes you feel full.
- Get social and smile. Studies show that the better your social life and the more you smile, the healthier you’ll be and the longer you’ll live.
- Create a few wellness goals and as they become a lifestyle change habit, add to your list. At I Am Breakthrough Wellness, we make eating healthier easy.