You need to change your diet and make some lifestyle changes to lower your blood pressure. These changes will also protect you from heart disease and stroke.
High blood pressure or hypertension is a silent killer. Since there are no symptoms in the early stages, you come to know about it only when you go to the doctor for some other problem and he reveals that your blood pressure is high.
Do not be in a rush to take medicine to control your high blood pressure. Your lifestyle and diet are certainly the two biggest contributors for the rise in those blood press numbers above 140/90. Change them to treat your high blood pressure.
Commit yourself to lower your high blood pressure with the following changes in your daily routine and continue the new routine to keep the pressure levels once normal levels are restored.
1. Develop a Habit of Daily Exercise
In the current materialistic and highly competitive era, most of us are leading a competitively sedentary lifestyle. This reduces cardiovascular activities causing heart diseases including high blood pressure.
Regular exercise will revitalize your muscular activities, improve blood circulation and increase lung capacity. The combined effect improves your heart efficiency and lowers your blood pressure.
You do not really have to go for any major exercise routine. You can begin with a simple 30 minutes of brisk walk, 5-10 minutes of simple muscle stretches, 15 minutes of yoga and breathing exercises.
You can also engage yourself into playing outdoor games and enjoy. Any regular physical activity will improve your heart efficiency to reduce blood pressure. If you are younger than 50 years of age and your blood pressure is high then you must become active in your lifestyle. Even for the people above 50 years of age, engaging in the physical activities is important but they are limited by the range of activities and sports they can play. Yet there are sufficient avenues for everyone to exercise.
If you prefer to go to a gym, then go to the gym. The key is to begin to exercise and then continue to do it on a daily basis to make it your new lifestyle.
2. Reduce Stress and Learn to Relax
Chronic stress not only snatches your happiness away but also contributes to raise your blood pressure in the long term.
Stress can push you to overeat, eat junk food, increase caffeine and alcohol consumption leading to weight gain which ultimately impacts blood circulation causing high blood pressure and other cardiovascular diseases.
Stress also increases sleep disturbances. All these problems impact your blood circulation leading to high blood pressure.
So, you see that the chronic stress impact you in multiple ways to raise your blood pressure. It is very important to keep stress under control.
Stress can come from work, family , illnesses, financial troubles or any other source. Key is to accept the presence of stress and deal with it.
Learn to reduce stress by reducing expectations from yourself and others, by giving more time to complete a task without being anxious to finish on an arbitrarily decided predetermined time.
3. Reduce weight
Increased weight puts a lot of pressure on your cardiovascular and circulatory system, induce breathing difficulties and sleep apnea causing high blood pressure.
If you are a little overweight, have no chronic stress and lead an active lifestyle then you do not really have to worry about blood pressure.
But if you are gaining weight and leading an inactive sedentary lifestyle then this continues weight gain will put at risk of all sorts of heart diseases and other complications particularly if your weight is showing around your waistline.
Reduce your weight to lower your blood pressure and enjoy a healthy lifestyle.
4. Reduce Your Sodium Intake and Increase Potassium
Sodium increases water retention in the body leading to high blood pressure and other heart diseases.
If you are adding more salt to make the food tasty then stop doing that because this will become a habit.
Most of the processed food is preserved by Sodium compounds. Stop eating processed and preserved food and replace them with fresh food.
Increase use of potassium content fruits and vegetables. Potassium balances the bad effect of sodium. A proper sodium potassium balance in your dad will make sure that there is no water retention in the body PeaceHealth maintaining and controlling blood pressure.
Eat some potassium rich banana to lower your blood pressure. Other food items such as avocado, spinach sweet potato white beans and range of other such foods will also help
5. Eat Healthy Diet
Your diet has a significant impact on your overall health. Diet rich in cholesterol and saturated fats can increase your blood pressure and cause heart diseases.
On the other hand, overeating even the healthy diet can increase your weight with them directly impacts your blood pressure and contribute to cardiovascular diseases.
Therefore, it is important that you normally eat good food but you eat in limited quantities.
For decades, a diet called DASH (Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension) promoted by Mayo Clinic has helped control blood pressure.
It promotes eating fiber rich low fat balanced diet with 3 full meals and 2-3 snacks periods in between main meals .
6. Quit Smoking
Smoking is injurious to your health in many ways. It reduces your lung capacity and increases your blood pressure.
The immigration impact of increased blood pressure can be seen as soon as you finish smoking cigarettes.
Woodlawn. This raise in blood pressure stabilizes to remain high blood pressure.
Stop smoking to reduce blood pressure.
7. Cut back on caffeine and Alcohol
Caffeine has been found to increase blood pressure immediately after consumption, but, it somehow does not impact the regular coffee drinker. The research on the impact of coffee on blood pressure is mixed. So to be on the safer side reduce coffee consumption.
Alcohol on the other hand is good in limited amounts to control your blood pressure, but excessive use of alcohol increases hypertension. So remain in your limits
Overall if you maintain a healthy body weight, do regular exercise, eat healthy food, control sodium intake and reduce stress then you will be able to lower your blood pressure and lead a healthy life.
If your lifestyle is not a healthy lifestyle then begin to change it now.