Preventing High Blood Pressure
Posted by Owen Jones in Uncategorized, tags: aging, blood pressure, cooking, diet, disease, elderly, family, fitness, health, heart disease, mens issues.womens issues, other, recipes, self help, UncategorizedIf you are concerned about your blood pressure getting overly high, you will probably go to your GP to seek advice. Your medical doctor will invariably like you to attempt some lifestyle alterations or / and take medication if this does not have an effect. Making lifestyle alterations is the first tactic, yet it does not always do the trick. It usually does, but just not always.
However, it is important to try to reduce your blood pressure, also called hypertension, before you go on medication. Lots of people are of the belief that once your body relies on medication to moderate its hypertension, you will never be able to wean yourself off the tablets. This is what my GP told me. Therefore, if it goes against your personal beliefs to take tablets, now is the time to do something about it.
The first thing to do is give up smoking and if you regularly drink too much alcohol, to cut back on that too, as both actions will have the impact of elevating your blood pressure. Taking these measures will also have knock-on effects for the rest of your body. You will be fitter in general by not smoking at all and not drinking very much.
The next thing to do is to raise your level of daily activity. Do you take any exercise at all? If not, you will be surprised at how much two thirty-minute sessions of light exercise will help. Walk for thirty minutes in the morning and evening or replace one walk for thirty minutes gardening or swimming.
Diet is another manner of beating off the hypertension tablets. Salt, or sodium as it is frequently referred to, is a major cause of hypertension, usually because it encourages water retention. So, cutting back on salt or following a sodium depleted diet can have a major effect on your blood pressure.
Try substituting something else for salt: more pepper, a mixture of some other herbs or simply leave it out altogether. After a couple of weeks you will not notice, except that everybody else’s cooking will taste really heavily over-salted! I did this quite successfully.
Add more fresh fruit and vegetables to your diet, because that will also decrease your hypertension. Eating less fat and red meat will also help. Stress is a main factor in hypertension, endeavor to relax a bit more and possibly take up meditation or yoga.
If you are on medication, it is possible that the drugs are raising your blood pressure. If you think that this might be the case, take your drugs to the doctor and seek his opinion. You may be able to substitute some of them. Some of the drugs that can have an adverse impact are: oral contraceptives, steroids, anti-depressants and cold / flu treatments.
You will notice that lots of these methods for reducing your (possible) hypertension are related, so if you are an over-weight, inactive smoker who enjoys a drink, you can do a great deal by remedying that and your pressure will fall and you will become healthier in other ways as well.
Owen Jones, the author of this piece writes on several of subjects, but is currently involved with work on the cause of high blood pressure. If you want to know more or check out some great offers, please go to our site at High Blood Pressure Recipes.
Entries (RSS)