While a doctor can’t mend a broken heart—they certainly can help keep it healthy. For the past 50 years heart disease and complications due to heart disease has been one of the most lethal illnesses in America.
What Causes Heart Disease?
Heart disease is a catch all term for a variety of cardiovascular diseases. Most of the time, heart disease refers to diseased blood vessels, damaged structures, or blood clots. It can refer to anything between arrythmia (when your heart beats too slow or too fast) to cardiac arrest.
These can make it difficult to nail down one “cause” of heart disease, but the doctors often point out that high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and smoking are frequently to blame for cardiovascular disease—which is why heart disease is often considered a consequence of an unhealthy lifestyle.
Changing your lifestyle by eating healthier, exercising, and cutting unhealthy practices (such as smoking) are the chief ways to greatly diminish your risk of heart disease.
Signs of Heart Disease
Within cardiovascular health there are “intense signs” and “quiet signs” of heart failure. Intense signs refer to the obvious: chest pain, stabbing pain in the arm/neck/jaw, shortness of breath, sweating, dizziness; but often the quiet signs show up much sooner. These signs involve shortness of breath when laying down, increased resting heart rate, swelling of the legs, ankles, and feet, and persistent wheezing/coughing.
If you notice these signs, contact your doctor and be ready to make lifestyle changes.
Tips for Starting a Healthy Lifestyle
Routine is king when it comes to healthy living. Experts suggest it takes 27 days to create a habit, by making exercise and healthy eating a habit, you will passively maintain your own health, greatly diminishing your risk for heart disease. Some routines doctors recommend:
-Escalating Cardio Exercise
-This can be swimming, biking, running, or aerobics
-Start small and work your way up, for example if you want to start biking, begin with flat areas before heading for the hills.
-Set time-based goals that slot easily into your schedule, it’ll make budgeting time so much easier since “10 miles” isn’t exactly something you can put in your google calendar.
-Start tracking your Nutrition
-Cook meals at home and keep track of macronutrients such as: carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. Balance these with your doctor’s recommendations!
-Make a weekly menu or meal prep so that healthy at-home options are as available to you as fast food.
-Manage your stress
-Managing stress sounds like an oxymoron, but by sleeping regularly and maintaining a healthy work-life balance, I believe in your ability to get it done.
-Use your Annual Wellness Check-Ups
-Most health care providers have wellness visits built into their insurance plans. This gives policy holders the ability to easily check for and manage common diseases and to proactively stay safe from illness.
-Aflac also offers wellness check-ups, click here to learn more.
Ultimately, heart disease is an issue that, left unchecked, can and will destroy your life. Many complications stemming from heart disease are either fatal or extremely debilitating that lead to hospitalization and other severe repercussions. By maintaining an unhealthy lifestyle, you put yourself at risk of strokes, clots, heart attacks, and other extremely disruptive events that are often non-reversible.
But, if you act now, you can stem the tide. Educate yourself and your loved ones. Make a plan to eat right, live healthy, and exercise. Save yourself the literal heartache, you won’t be sorry.
Well… that got dark! Happy Valentine’s…
This is a serious issue that affects thousands of homes in America. This disrupts families, it ends lives prematurely, it is a real problem—but a preventable one. We have all lived through problems we have no power over, this is one you can control. So, start now, before it is too late.