Tips to Help you Prevent Illnesses in your Family

Prevention is the best form of cure, so it makes sense to adopt the best lifestyle practices for your family and encourage healthy living. Remember, the patterns and habits you encourage for your young family are the ones they will recall and adopt in later life when they have left home.  

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Healthy Eating 

Search healthy eating on the internet, and your will come up with wide-ranging advice, but maintaining a healthy diet is often a very basic practice. The food we eat is the fuel the body uses for almost every process in the body. If you put low-quality fuel in your car, it won’t operate to its full capacity; the same is true of the body; you need to give the best fuel to your family. 

Experts suggest that healthy eating is simple. Use basic ingredients for meals and avoid processed foods. Processed foods such as chips, white bread, doughnuts, cookies, and a wide range of ready meals all increase the risks of high cholesterol and blood pressure. These foods also affect a person’s mood, concentration, and personality. Remember, we are what we eat.  

Cholesterol Checkups 

Cholesterol gets a bad name – perhaps because it is the cause of many fatal diseases like heart disease and strokes – but the body needs cholesterol to create cell walls, tissue, hormones, and vitamin D. Cholesterol is produced in the liver and enters the bloodstream where it travels to the areas of the body where it’s needed. However, fatty foods can create high levels of it in arteries.  

This is where cholesterol gets its bad name from, but in reality, the development of high cholesterol is down to a person’s diet. Eating too much-processed food will create more cholesterol than is needed which then builds up in the arteries and leads to avoidable diseases. If you have concerns or you want to change your diet, visit a doctor for a cholesterol checkup.    

Blood Pressure Checks 

High blood pressure causes the heart to work harder and increases the likelihood of disease. Most people don’t know if they have high blood pressure or not, so it’s important to get checked regularly by the doctor. Having high blood pressure can increase your chances of heart disease, heart attacks, heart failure, and kidney disease. It also affects sight, hearing, and energy levels.  

Younger family members shouldn’t need to worry about high blood pressure, but that doesn’t mean you should avoid checkups and healthy eating. Of course, high blood pressure develops over time, and since prevention is the best form of cure, it makes sense to create healthy lifestyle patterns from an early age. Older family members need testing to avoid urgent care.  

Active Life 

When it comes to staying fit and healthy, many people think of a gym membership or joining a sports club. This level of dedication and expense isn’t needed to enjoy a healthy and active life. While some people benefit from the structure and motivation a gym membership provides, it makes more sense to create a natural pattern of exercise in your life to support family health. 

Staying healthy and active is more about how often, how hard, and how long you exercise. In short, it’s about the frequency of your active life rather than ticks on the calendar. An active life is also an enjoyable one. Why not encourage your family to hike in the hills on the weekend or take them wild swimming? Maybe you could have an assortment of activities for optimal health.    

Weight Control 

Body weight is important, but it’s equally important to remember that you don’t have to be skinny to be healthy. Unless your natural body weight puts you on the slight end of the BMI, becoming skinny is probably not the best thing for your health and well-being. It’s important to find a baseline for your weight which is where BMI measurements are handy; They are easy to take. 

Calculate your BMI using a metric system. This simple calculation divides your weight by your current height to give you a BMI value. For example, a weight of 68kg is divided by a height of 165cm, giving a BMI of 24.98. This is a healthy weight. Using a BMI table, you can easily see whether you or a family member is above or below a healthy weight and make lifestyle changes. 

Conclusion 

If you are on board with the theory – prevention is better than cure – it’s time to put it into practice and create a better quality of life for your family. When you start getting into a pattern of healthy living, you start to notice the results. Healthy living is then easier and more integrated with life.    

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