20 Tips For A Healthier Life

A healthy lifestyle has both short and long term health benefits. Long term, eating a balanced diet, taking regular exercise and maintaining a healthy weight can add years to your life and reduce the risk of certain diseases including cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis and obesity.

Below are my 23 tips to a healthier lifestyle;

1. Eat nuts frequently: Nut consumption is associated with lower rates of certain kinds of heart disease. 
2. Get your selenium: This wonderful mineral is a powerful anti-oxidant and anti-cancer agent. Proper levels of selenium have been linked to lower levels of cancer and to a healthier immune system. Three Brazil nuts provide over 200mcg of selenium.
3. Get your fibre: Higher levels of fibre in the diet have been associated with better blood sugar control and may have protective effects on some cancers as well. Soluble fibre can be found in fruits, oats, barley and legumes. Insoluble fibre can be found in bran, whole grain breads and vegetables.
4. Stop and breath: Deep breathing is incompatible with anxiety. Most of us breathe far too shallowly most of the time, especially during times of stress. Expand your diaphragm (from the belly) and then slowly expand your chest, filling it with air. Let it out slowly and fully in the reverse order. Train yourself to take a few breaths like this at least several times in each day.
5. Develop a relationship with an animal companion: A relationship with an animal lowers blood pressure and raises important brain chemicals needed for a sense of well-being. Dog owners live longer and have fewer heart attacks.
6. Take a walk before dinner: It raises your metabolic rate as well as those important “feel-good” brain chemicals. Just ten minutes a day of walking was found to significantly lower the risk of heart attack.
7. Eat earlier in the evening: Avoid going to bed on a full stomach which can make it difficult to burn fat during the night. Eating late at night can also lead to sleep disturbances.
8. Start the day with protein: Protein in the morning is associated with greater energy, higher levels of mental alertness and less mid-morning cravings.
9. Wash your fruit and vegetables: Minimise pesticide and toxin exposure with a good vegetable wash using pure water. It’s an inexpensive way to make these great foods even healthier.
10. Stretch after exercise: Stretching cold muscles is like pulling apart a frozen rubber band, the muscles are hard and brittle when they are cold and can be much more readily injured if you force a stretch. If you prefer to stretch before doing your exercise routine or before going for a run, at least do a few minutes of light warm-up. Muscles respond much better to stretching when they are warm.
11. Eat your greens every day: Wheat-grass, kale, barley, and green magma are a wonderful way to add valuable enzymes and nutrients to your diet.
12. Spice up your life: Ordinary spices and herbs are an amazing natural pharmacy of nutrients, antioxidants and other healthy compounds. Plain ordinary cinnamon has been found to have a positive effect on blood sugar levels. Garlic can enhance circulation, turmeric has long been known to have profound anti-inflammatory properties as well as being a tonic for the liver. Rosemary, thyme, parsley and other fresh herbs and spices have many other health benefits. 
13. Respect your body’s need for rest and sleep: Choose a cut-of time for emails, phone calls and business talk in your home and allow the last hours of the day to be filled with relaxation, peace and rest.
14. Go to bed earlier: Sleep experts have found that it’s far easier to get extra needed sleep by going to bed earlier than it is by sleeping later.
15. Keep your word: You can increase your sense of power in the universe in all things that you undertake by making what you do and what you say be the same thing. Practice this in some small way daily and miracles can happen.
16. Daydream: Down time is not wasted time. Far from being unproductive, some unstructured time alone with yourself allows you to replenish, rejuvenate and renew the best parts of yourself.
17. Vary your workouts: Every two months or so change your exercise routine. A change in routine prevents boredom and presents fresh challenges for your muscles and cardiovascular system.
18. Eat the reverse pyramid: Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a princess, and dinner like a pauper. This is much more in keeping with your body’s natural rhythms and needs and is also far less likely to lead to unwanted weight gain.
19. Lift weights at least twice a week: Weight training shapes and tones your body, and helps you preserve valuable muscle which is where fat is ultimately “burned”. Muscle is your best ally in keeping your metabolic rate high and keeping unwanted fat at bay.
20. Try to stress less: Stress can give you headaches, high blood pressure, heart problems, arthritis, depression, anxiety and can lead to weight gain as it rises the levels of cortisol, a stress hormone. 

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog.

Take control of your life, rock on!

Until next month, Evie xx

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