Fall in Love with your Heart

Love is in the air as the Valentine ’s Day is almost here and while we are always busy celebrating wiyh our loved ones we often forget to take care of our own heart.  Month of February is declared as the Heart Health month and it implicates the need to fall in love with our own heart as 31% of all deaths in the world are due to cardiovascular diseases and it is the number one killer of women.  But the good news is 80% of heart diseases are preventable.  What is your risk? What are the causes? How can you prevent?

Are you at risk?

·         Smoking

·         High Blood pressure

·         High blood cholesterol ( High LDL and Low HDL)

·         Overweight/Obese

·         Physical inactivity

·         Diabetes

·         Middle aged men and women (after menopause)

·         Family history

Research studies show that 95% of those who die from heart disease have at least one of the above risk factors.  If you think you have any of these risks factors, sooner the better you start making your “Heart profile”. 

How do you prevent?

Health screening

If you haven’t visited a doctor in recently, it’s time to get an appointment for annual physicals that lets you know your numbers on risk factors. This is your first step towards preventing heart diseases.

Set your goal

·         To reduce the risk factors

·         To reduce the weight

Heart healthy food

·         Read the food labels to watch for calories, sugar

·         Stick to whole grain foods

·         Choose the diet that’s low in saturated fat, sodium, trans fat and cholesterol

·         Balance your calories that you eat with the calories that you expend with the physical activity

·         Reduce the amount of caffeine as it can raise the blood pressure

·         Regularly take Vitamin D supplement that helps to prevent heart diseases

Get set move

·         Get regular physical activity at least 30 mins a day for 5 days a week

·         Set smaller goals to keep going

Reduce stress

·         Get good sleep in the night from 10pm-5am

·         Perform breathing exercises especially the deep breathing techniques help to reduce the stress instantly

·         Practice meditation daily with your favorite soothing music

Finally, if you are going out for a dinner on Valentine ’s Day with your loved ones, here is a healthy tip to choose a heart healthy restaurant. This link http://www.healthydiningfinder.com/ helps you to find heart healthy restaurants in and around your city with the healthy menu.  Please do a research for your own heart before you share your heart on this Valentine’s day.

Happy Valentine’s Day dear friends!

Food labels decoded

While we are shopping for groceries it is always good to read the food labels. But often for many of us, it is like anintricate puzzle just to see the numbers and percentages on the boxes and bottles.  Here is a video that helps you to decode food labels. A fun video to watch to understand your food labels better that I found on youtube. Enjoy but learn to read the labels for your next grocery shopping!

                                                       Reinforce your resolution

It is already a half month since the beginning of the year 2016 and every one of us is busy working on resolutions amidst of our career, parenting, responsibilities, home loan and a lot more. There are folks who already realized how important is health and healthy living while the others still enjoying eating generous meals and inactive life style. According to Statistic brain, a research institute losing weight is among the top new year’s resolution every year. Losing weight is the biggest challenge and goal people expect to accomplish within a short duration. But a lot of them stumble to keep up with the challenge with poor planning or lack of motivation. One of the most powerful techniques to stick on to the healthy living resolution is breaking such a large goal into smaller targets than just focusing on the weight scale. Here are some of the tips to keep up the healthy routine.
Eating right and healthy
A sudden transition from heavy, unhealthy meal to a healthy and limited meal could be overwhelming and many of us have the impression of healthy eating as counting the calories. Of course, counting the calories matter, but we need to make sure how healthy are those calories.

 • Make it a habit to look at the food labels for the ingredients, calories, sugar, proteins, fibers and other nutrients before adding them into the shopping cart
 • Avoid going to the snack aisle while shopping which largely helps you to keep away from junk food
• Hide the junks and keep fruits where you can see them
• Know your daily requirement of calories according to your weight
• Keeping a smaller plate for each meal helps to serve yourself smaller portion
• Homemade meals are always a better choice over eating outside
• Plan to include at least one serving of a healthy recipe during each meal for example Salad or soup
• Always pay attention to your appetite as most of the times we tend to eat even without being hungry

  Exercise
Maintaining a healthy body and mind is a combination of diet, exercise and life style without any compromise with any one of them. Winter can be lethargic to get off the couch especially after a long holiday to engage in any kind exercise. Motivation is the key to accelerate towards an active life style. Here are some tips

• Determine your favorite type of exercise (Running, walking, aerobics, dance, yoga, etc)
• Signing a contract with pledge to exercise daily (such as 30 mins daily for 3 months) is a proven method to keep up with the resolution
• Set yourself a realistic goal to workout such as to run a 5k and start feeling like an athlete
• Look for running events locally and sign up for a 5k or a cycling event or yoga events
• Schedule a time to work out every day and make it a part of your routine
• Get fitness apps in your smart phone to track your daily work out
• Find likeminded people to get motivated and form a group for support
• Change your perspective of exercise as to be healthy, than to lose weight
• Try different type of exercises if you lose interest in just one type of exercise such as strength training at least twice in a week in between your regular workouts
• Getting the help from a personal trainer can bolster the performance in a right way as exercise is a prescription!

  Good luck to the endeavors of healthy living and make sure you don’t have to start with the same resolution again in 2017. Happy 2016!