Healthy lifestyle is not just one components as it contains many things and wilful actions to promote your health and make you healthy and active for a longer time, also prevents you from the major critical disease of modern days.
Lets know the elements of healthy lifestyle:
Healthy Diet:
A healthy diet is essential element of healthy lifestyle with benefiting of good health and nutrition. It protects you against many chronic noncommunicable diseases, such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Eating a variety of foods and consuming less salt, sugars and saturated and industrially-produced trans-fats, are essential for healthy diet.
A healthy diet comprises a combination of different foods. These include:
Staples like cereals (wheat, barley, rye, maize or rice) or starchy tubers or roots (potato, yam, taro or cassava).
Legumes (lentils and beans).
Fruit and vegetables.
Foods from animal sources (meat, fish, eggs and milk).
Following is a very useful information, based on expert recommendations, to follow a healthy diet and gain its benefits.
Breastfeed babies and young children:
A healthy diet starts early in life – breastfeeding fosters healthy growth, and may have longer-term health benefits, like reducing the risk of becoming overweight or obese and developing critical diseases later in life.
Feeding babies exclusively with breast milk from birth to 6 months of life is important for a healthy diet. It is also important to introduce a variety of safe and nutritious complementary foods at 6 months of age, while continuing to breastfeed until your child is two years old and above.
Eat plenty of vegetables and fruit:
They are important sources of vitamins, minerals, dietary fibre, plant protein and antioxidants.
People with diets rich in vegetables and fruit have a significantly lower risk of obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and few types of cancer.
Eat less fat:
Fats and oils and concentrated sources of energy. Eating too much, particularly the LDL Bad fat, like saturated and industrially-produced trans-fat, can increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Using unsaturated vegetable oils (olive, soy, sunflower or corn oil) rather than animal fats or oils high in saturated fats (butter, ghee, lard, coconut and palm oil) will help to get Healthy HDL fats.
To avoid unhealthy weight gain, consumption of total fat should not exceed 30% of a person’s overall energy intake.
Limit intake of sugars:
For a healthy diet, sugars should be less than 10% of your total energy diet intake. Reducing even further to under 5% has additional health benefits. Choosing fresh fruits instead of sweet snacks such as cookies, cakes and chocolate helps to reduce the excess consumption of sugars.
Limiting intake of soft drinks, soda and other drinks high in sugars, instead fresh fruit juices, low sugar cordials and syrups, flavoured milks and yogurt drinks helps to reduce intake of high sugars food.
Reduce salt intake:
Keeping your salt consumption to less than 5g per day helps to prevent hypertension and reduces the risk of critical heart disease and stroke to adult.
Limiting the amount of salt and reduces use of addition of high-sodium rich food including soy sauce and fish sauce etc., while cooking foods helps to reduce higher salt intake.
Physical activity:
Being physically Active is an another important part of healthy lifestyle followed by healthy diet, as being active daily helps to people, no matter their age, to live a long time healthier lives.
Doing some physical activity daily is always better than doing none. By being more physically active schedule throughout the day in relatively simple ways, people can quite easily achieve the recommended activity levels.
Below are the levels of physical activity for people of different ages.
Children and adolescents aged 5-17 years
Go with at least 60 minutes of moderate to high-intensity physical activity on daily basis.
Physical activity for more than 60 minutes daily provides additional health benefits.
Should include activities that strengthen muscle and bone, at least 3 times per week.
Adults aged 18–64 years
Should do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity throughout the week, or do at least 75 minutes of high-intensity physical activity, or an equivalent combination of both.
For additional health benefits, adults should increase their moderate-intensity physical activity upto 300 minutes per week.
Muscle-strengthening activities should be done involving major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week.
Adults aged 65 years and above
Should do at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity throughout the week, or at least 75 minutes of high-intensity physical activity, or an equivalent combination of both.
For additional health benefits, they should increase moderate-intensity physical activity to 300 minutes per week, or equivalent.
Those with poor body mobility should perform the physical activity to enhance body balance and prevent falls, by 3 or more days per week.
Muscle-strengthening activities should be done involving major muscle groups, 2 or more days a week.
Digital Detox
Digital technologies are today an integral part of our daily life, and the world’s major population is today using digital gadgets and social media extensively. Innovation, particularly in the digital world, is happening at the higher scale but sometimes with wrong use it can creates an issue to masses. Even so, its current application to improve the life of people is ok, but its impact on peoples health provides the question mark on extensive use of Digital Gadgets. There is a high scope for use of digital gadgets for productive use with improving health instead of damaging it on mass level with Digital Detox.
The primary purpose of a digital detox is to allow you to keep yourself away from digital gadgets such as TV, Mobiles, Laptops etc. Screens not only impacts on your eyes, As Digital gadgets takes away not only your productive time, but they also promotes the unhealthy sedentary lifestyle, which promotes higher weight gains, more body fat also leads to blood pressure issues, restricted body movement and bad posture issues, longer seating at one place, creates chocked veins which leads to critical diseases such as heart attack. Also the excessive use of social media trigger high dopamine release in your brain which creates anxiety and mental fatigue and loss of focus.
Key Benefits of Digital Detox
Following no screen day, and stay away from digital device with a very small time uses practices will helps you to do a digital detox followed by many health benefits including below.
Sharper Focus: Interrupting excess dopamine release improves your ability to focus on important tasks.
Better Sleep: Reducing blue light exposure helps to regulate melatonin and promotes better sleep and functional health and energy for next day.
Nervous System Regulation: Lowering digital stimulation allows your body to exit the short dopamine release which often attract you towards the gadgets for more time.
Improved Real-World Connection: Moving away from social media promotes a real deeper emotional awareness and meaningful person to person interactions and promotes better relationships.
Habits to Avoid: Say No tobacco and Alcohol
Avoiding tobacco and Alcohol or taking proven measures to quit, are the surest ways for mass of people to avoid many critical diseases and walk on the road to good health.
In fact, there are immediate and long-term health benefits of quitting for all tobacco and alcohol users, including lower blood pressure.
Here are some key points on avoiding the harms of tobacco and alcohol use:
Most tobacco and alcohol users who are aware of the dangers of tobacco want to quit. Counselling and medication more than doubles the chance that someone who uses tobacco and tries to quit will succeed.
If you are a tobacco and alcohol user wanting to quit, it is important to understand the importance of doing so for your own health and your family.
Then, you must be confident that you can quit as many people have done it so.
If needed, seek support from health professionals to quit the alcohol and tobacco. There are many things people can do, from calling a quit line and accessing online material and to attending a rehab session at nearest clinic.
Healthy lifestyle is not a single thing, as it consists dedicated efforts and switching your habits to healthier one with the help of experts can gain you not only health but also a piece of mind with keeping away critical diseases from you.
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