An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
It's easier to stop something from happening in the first place than to repair the damage after it has happened.
Last week we talked about preventative health. We encouraged you to regularly visit your doctor and obtain any kind of screening he or she recommends. After you’ve done that (or if you already have) educate yourself on your results. Are you normal or average for someone your age and gender, or is there an area you could hone in on to try to improve? For example, say your health screening was a simple blood pressure reading and your results showed that you are stage 1 hypertensive (new blood pressure guidelines). Some steps you could take to address your high blood pressure include study and follow a healthy eating pattern, lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, manage stress, limit alcohol, and quit smoking (more tips from heart.org here).
One thing we didn’t discuss was knowing your family history or your genetic risk. Some things in life are modifiable. Your genes are not. BUT, knowing you are at an increased risk of a disease or condition can help you take preventative steps before hand. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you won’t still get whatever it is you are predisposed to, but you might prolong the diagnosis or lessen the burden of the symptoms because of healthy lifestyle modifications you made in advance. If you don’t already know your family history, take some time this week to find out what diseases and conditions you are predisposed to, and then educate yourself on best practices or methods for treating that disease or condition.
Finally, know yourself. Begin to tune in to what your body is saying. Listen to your hunger cues and your body’s response to different foods and activities. We call this mindfulness. A study was recently conducted at Binghamton University in New York that shows a relationship between our food and our mood. I’ve put a link to the article here if you are interested.
Maybe I'm wrong in assuming we all want to live as long as we can and experience as much as we can without being limited by our health. Maybe that's just me. I hope you can find a way to make one small change today for better health tomorrow.
Until next time, keep striving to make the healthy choice the easy choice.