Tips for Keeping Your Heart Healthy

Submitted by Kevin Kielty

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. The most important way that you can prevent a heart attack is to change your lifestyle. The three most important areas to change are to improve your nutrition, increase your exercise and stop smoking. Improvements in these three areas can reduce your chances of a heart attack and increase your chance is a long and healthy life

Your goal should be to burn as many calories as you take in each day. Start by learning how many calories you are currently taking in by keeping a notebook. Log everything you eat and then calculate the calories at the end of each day. Then, you will need to find out what your calorie intake should be for your height and age.

Improve your nutrition

Improving your diet is not just about cutting back on calories, but it's about choosing the best foods. Foods that can either be nutrient rich or nutrient poor. Nutrient rich foods include fruits and vegetables and whole grains foods. Fruits and vegetables have lots of vitamins and minerals as well as fiber and whole grain foods have a high amount of fiber. Nutrient poor foods are those that are high in calories, but low in nutrients. These include non-diet sodas, candy and other sweets. For a heart healthy diet, you should also limit the amount of high cholesterol foods each day, try to stay under 300 mg per day. Limit the amount of snack foods you have, and also try to cut back on your daily salt intake.

Increase exercise

25% of Americans lead sedentary lifestyles, causing them to be overweight. Increasing exercise is an important factor to preventing heart disease and it can also lower blood pressure and cholesterol. Most people should be exercising 30 minutes, 5 days per week. That time can even be broken down into 10 minute exercise periods throughout the day.

Start out with a stretching routine, and then a warm-up before you begin your exercise regime. This can prevent muscle injury and strain. Nothing will derail a new exercise program like sore muscles or an injury. After the warm up, they you will move into the calorie burning portion of your exercise. This should be a moderate level of exertion. You should not be going so hard that you cannot still talk during the exercise. After the calorie burning portion, then you will move into a “cool down” period while your heart rate returns to normal.

Stop smoking

Smoking kills about 440,000 people in the US every year. The more cigarettes, a person smokes, the greater their chances for getting heart disease. Women who smoke and take birth control pills, greatly increase their chances of a heart attack. Smoking increases your chance for heart disease, because it decreases the amount of oxygen that gets to the heart, and increases blood clotting and blood pressure.

If you want to keep your heart healthy, there are our several important steps you can take. The first is to choose healthy, nutrient rich foods in your diet. The second is to increase your physical activity and the third is to stop smoking. If you incorporate all of these changes into y