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 healthy foods and reducing the conumption of salt, sugars and saturated and industrially produced trans fats, are essential for healthy diet.
A healthy diet includes a combination of different foods which includes:
- Staples like cereals including wheat, barley, rye, maize or rice or starchy tubers or roots such as potato, yam, taro or cassava.
- Legumes including lentils and beans.
- Fruit and vegetables.
- Foods from animal sources including meat, fish, eggs and milk etc.
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 since infant life, where breastfeeding promotes healthy growth, and may have long-term health benefits, including reducing the risk of becoming over weight and developing critical diseases in future.
Feeding babies exclusively with breast milk from birth to 6 months of life is very important for a healthy diet. It is also important to add safe and nutritious baby foods after 6 months of age of infants, along with continuing the breastfeed until your child becomes two years old and above.
Eat plenty of vegetables and fruit:
They are very important sources of vitamins, minerals, dietary fibre, plant protein and antioxidants.
People with eating diet rich in vegetables and fruit have a significantly lower risk of obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some types of cancer.
Eat less fat:
Fats and oils and rich sources of energy. But, eating too much fat, particularly the LDL Bad fat rich food such as saturated and industrially-produced trans-fat food, can increase the risk of heart disease and stroke. Using halthy unsaturated vegetable oils including olive, soy, sunflower or corn oil other than the animal fats or oils high in saturated fats inclluding butter, ghee, lard, coconut and palm oil will help to get Healthy HDL fats.
To avoid unhealthy weight gain, consumption of fat rich food 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 will helps further to reduce the intake of high sugars food.
Reduce salt intake:
Keeping your salt consumption lower than 5g per day will help to prevent the hypertension and reduces the risk of critical heart disease and stroke in adults.
Limiting the amount of salt and also reduce the use of high-salt food sources including soy sauce and fish sauce etc., in your cooking will 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 with age 18 to 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 with age 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 people with restgricted body mobility should do the regular physical activity to enhance their body balance and prevent from falls, by 3 or more days per week.
- Muscle-strengthening activities should be done with involving major body muscles, 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 gadgets are considered helpful to improve the lifestyle, but its impact on peoples health is still the question mark upon higher use of such Digital Gadgets. There is a high scope for use of digital gadgets for productive use only with improving health by following regular Digital Detox.
The primary purpose of a digital detox helps you to keep away the digital gadgets such as TV, Mobiles, Laptops etc.. Screens not only impacts on your eyes, but also digital gadgets takes away your productive time, and also promotes the unhealthy sedentary lifestyle, which may promotes higher weight gains.
More people with sedentary lifestyle unknowingly saturates more fat in their body, which may leads to blood pressure issues, restricted body movement and bad body posture problem, longer seating at one place, creates chocked in body 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 and also taking proven measures to quit, are the best ways for 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 and wants to quit. Hence, counselling and medication can doubles the chance that someone who wants to quit tobacco.
If you are a tobacco and alcohol user and wanting to quit, then it is important to understand the importance of it for your own health and even for your family. Also if others can quit than, you can also positively quit this unhalthy life threatning habits.
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.