Love your heart
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Love your heart
Be kind to yourself
The best and most important thing you can do, is to ensure you look after yourself and treat yourself kindly.
Working to reduce your stress levels can help to lower your blood pressure and help you avoid developing unhealthy habits that you may turn to in order to cope. It’s also important to make sure you’re well rested, as getting enough sleep is important for both our general wellbeing and the health of our heart and blood vessels. Most adults should aim for seven to nine hours of sleep each night.
February marks Heart Month 2024, and provides us with a fantastic opportunity to focus on good heart health. Our heart beats 100,000 times a day, but we tend not to worry about the maintenance of our heart unless there is a problem.
The heart is a muscle and, like any other muscle, needs physical activity or exercise to help it work properly. When you’re active, your lungs do a better job of getting oxygen into your blood so it can be pumped to all the tissues and cells of your body.
Being active can reduce your risk of developing some heart and circulatory diseases by as much as 35%. Regular physical activity:
- Helps control your blood pressure and keep it within healthy levels
- Raises your levels of good cholesterol and reduces the bad cholesterol
- Can help to control your blood glucose levels, reducing your risk of type 2 diabetes and controlling your diabetes if you already have it
- Increases the number of calories you burn and helps you maintain a healthy weight.
Not only does regular activity protect your heart, it can also help your general wellbeing by boosting your mood, improving your concentration and memory, and helping you sleep better.
Below we have shared some basic heart health tips that will help you to positively impact the healthiness of your heart:
Eat Well
A healthy and balanced diet is vital for both gut and heart health. You should aim to eat less sugar or salt, avoid ultra-processed food, and instead eat more wholegrains, fruit and vegetables.
Eating well will also have a positive impact on your weight. We appreciate that weight management can be easy to talk about but yet, hard to do. It may help if you focus on making small, achievable, long-term changes, such as reducing your portion sizes. This can help bring your weight and waist circumference into a healthy range and, importantly, keep it there.
You should also avoid developing high cholesterol with a healthy balanced diet and please make sure you take your medications if you are prescribed them.
Know yourself
It is important that you know your medical history and your family history. When you need medical advice, your doctor may need to know if you have a family history of cardiovascular disease, or if you’ve had diabetes or high blood pressure during a pregnancy to assess your risks appropriately.
Knowing your numbers is also vital. If you live in England and are between 40 and 74 years old, you may be invited to your free NHS Health Check – do go along as you will have your cardiovascular risk levels calculated and explained.
Knowing yourself, so you can pick up on when your body isn't quite right is also essential. A heart attack is a medical emergency that can happen at any time to anyone, regardless of gender. It’s crucial that everyone knows the symptoms of a heart attack, as getting treatment quickly can save your life. Symptoms can vary between people, and can include pain or heaviness in your chest, discomfort spreading into your arms, neck, jaw, back or stomach, and feeling sick, sweaty light-headed or short of breath.
Move more
Aim for over 2 hours of moderately intense activity a week. You don’t have to go hell for leather and hit the gym – a brisk walk can help keep you fit without spending a lot of money. Meet up with friends and move more together, motivation from a peer is a great way to get you up and out.
Stop smoking
If you’re a smoker, quitting for good is one of the best things you can do to help your heart. You may be able to get support from your GP or NHS stop smoking services.