Health is not just the absence of disease. It's the ability to live at your maximum level of attainable wellness and performance. It's a fluid state that's not just physical. There are psychological, social, spiritual, economic, academic, professional and even spatial realms of health, and they interact every day.
Integrating wisdom from around the globe makes finding 10 ways to live a healthy life easy. The challenge is making and sustaining change.
Get Enough Sleep
Physical well being begins with making seven hours of sleep a night a priority, a sleep habit that can help minimize the risk of cardiovascular disease, according to research at the University of West Virginia College of Medicine, published in the August 2010 issue of the journal " Sleep."
You probably know when you must rise each day, a time dictated by work or school schedules. Determine a time to get up that's early enough to allow for an unrushed start to the day, then count back seven hours to determine when you should go to bed. To prepare for restful sleep, turn off all TVs and computers one hour before your designated bedtime and stop making or returning phone calls and texts at the same time. Darken your bedroom completely before going to sleep and turn the temperature down too.
Weigh and Measure Yourself
Maintaining a healthy body mass index, or BMI, of 18.5 to 24.9 is an achievable goal that the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, recommends be maintained throughout your adult life.
To calculate this, take your morning weight, without clothes, and enter it along with your height into an online BMI calculator.
An unhealthy, elevated BMI is not the only thing to correct when you desire to live a long and healthy life. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, recommends targeting a waist circumference of more than 35 inches on women and more than 40 inches for men. Any larger size meets the CDC's definition of abdominal obesity and is associated with an increased risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and several forms of cancer.
Waist circumference is measured by placing the bottom edge of a measuring tape at the top of the hip bones and measuring around the belly with the tape held parallel to the floor. When doing this, it's important to have your feet placed hip width apart and to relax the abdomen by taking three deep breaths before taking the measurement.
Eat Your BMR-Indicated Number of Calories
Lifelong weight management begins with the calculation of your basal metabolic rate, or BMR. This is the number of calories your body requires to simply live.
To find your BMR, enter your height, weight, age and gender into an online calculator and recheck this calculation monthly. Then, to find the number of calories you can consume each day to stay at your current weight, multiply your BMR by the number that accurately reflects your activity level. Unless you are vigorously exercising each day for an hour, your activity level is considered sedentary. If this is the case, you need to multiply your BMR by 1.2, but if you walk, run or otherwise exercise for a full hour every day, then multiply your BMR by 1.3.
The CDC and American Heart Association advise those living at an unhealthy BMI of 25 or more, as well as those who meet the criteria for abdominal obesity, to correct their weight and their waists by losing one pound per week.
There are 3,500 calories of energy in a pound of body weight. Losing a pound a week is a matter of eating 500 calories fewer than the product of your BMR and 1.2 or 1.3 with recalculation of this target number every month. That assures that you will not plateau because as your weight drops, the number of calories you eat will decrease proportionately.
Nourish Yourself at Every Meal
Healthy meals begin with vegetables, the foods human beings have been gathering and eating for thousands of years. Fill half of every plate you eat with nonstarchy vegetables and add a side plate of salad to lunch and dinner. By having two or more bright colors of produce at each meal, the body is nourished with the wide variety of vitamins and minerals it requires. Having one to two servings of dark leafy greens such as arugula, kale and spinach specifically adds iron, calcium and fiber to the diet.
Next, add a portion of a protein-rich food to each meal, selecting those rich in omega-3 fatty acids, such as 1 oz. of walnuts, 3 oz. of salmon or tuna, or one omega-3 rich egg. Omega-3 reduces chronic inflammation in the body and by doing so, it decreases the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and even depression and memory loss.
Finally, add small servings of 1/3 to 1/2 cup of a whole grain and a serving of fresh fruit as accents to the meal.
Avoid All Unhealthy Foods
Eliminate all things white in making these choices including: flour, white rice, white potatoes and all sources of sugar, saturated fats and trans fats. These provide only empty calories and along with processed foods and red meat, they increase your exposure to omega-6 fatty acids, which are sources of inflammation, according to research in the 2008 edition of the "Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition." Human beings have had a healthy 1:1 ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 until the last 150 years. Since then, humans have increasingly eaten foods with omega-6 fatty acids, and the ratio is now averaging an unhealthy 1:25. Correcting this ratio -- restoring it to the balance that kept your ancestors healthy for thousands of years -- is a sensible way to decrease inflammation in the body, and that is an important way to increase health physically and psychologically.
Drink Wisely, Drink Water
Water is the only thing any mammal drinks after infancy, except humans.
Breast milk is the proper food for infants, and cow's milk is an excellent source of nutrition for baby cows. But for human beings who want to attain and maintain a healthy body for life, nothing beats water as the beverage of choice.
Drinking one to two glasses of water before a meal is an excellent way to stimulate the sense of being satisfied, and it causes most people to eat less. Water, as the meal time beverage, does not increase caloric content at all, and it does not interfere with the absorption of iron the way that milk does.
Juice, sports drinks and soda are all equally damaging in human nutrition, providing far too much sugar, which can lead to obesity and diabetes. They have no place in the diet and should be replaced with water. Juice was first designed to supply soldiers with access to vitamins during war, when fruit was not available, and it is not the equivalent of fruit. Juice lacks fiber and has just as much sugar as soda.
To ease the transition to pure water, add a lemon, lime or orange slice to each glass.
Brush, Floss, Rinse, Repeat
Dental health is vital to overall physical and emotional health. When food, especially starches, remain on the teeth and between the teeth, decay begins. Bacteria use the sugar to breed, causing them to multiply below the gums, an infection known by the inflammation it causes; gingivitis. Because gingivitis occurs over a large surface area, it leads to a whole body response called chronic inflammation, a condition that can affect every body cell, including those of the brain.
Emotionally and socially, a healthy white smile without missing teeth is important and can also make a difference in professional advancement. For this reason consider investing in smile restoration through implants if you have any missing teeth and see the dentist frequently to prevent tooth loss.
Brush for three minutes two times daily and floss between every tooth before going to bed each night in accord with the recommendation of the American Dental Association.
Devote an Hour to Walking
Walking 60 to 90 minutes each day, enough to cover a five-mile round trip, will burn approximately 500 calories. This will result in a one-pound weight loss each week. In addition, walking strengthens the large muscles of the abdomen and legs, resulting in greater bone and joint health. Because of this overall strengthening, walkers experience less compression of the lower back and avoid this common source of chronic inflammation.
Walking outdoors in the mid-morning sun holds another gift -- the ability to absorb vitamin D. The body needs this essential nutrient to transport calcium into the bones. This is necessary to prevent osteoporosis, a weakening of the bones, but it also lowers the chance of breast and colon cancer.
Walking outdoors has an added psychological benefit. While exercise raises the level of the neurotransmitters that help you register pleasure and fight off depression, sunlight exposure prevents seasonal affective disorder.
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Create Healthy Environments
One of the great things about being an adult is the freedom it brings to create your environment, whether at home or at work.
A healthy environment is clean, and it is also free of safety hazards, rodents, insects, air contamination and excessive humidity, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
In particular, air quality is critically important to health. Smoke, either from personal use or secondary sources, contaminates the home and works against the goal of fostering good health. Other home contaminants that are detrimental to health include ammonia from pet urine, cleaning fluids when they are used without proper ventilation, and the bacteria and viruses carried into the home when shoes are not removed at the door. Creating a healthy environment should start with eliminating all of these contaminants and opening windows whenever possible, both at home, at work and in your car.
Build Healthy Relationships
The quality of your health is affected by the health of your relationships, but your ability to develop healthy relationships is only half the equation. It is equally vital that you can quickly discern when an intimate or close relationship would be unhealthy, either because the other person is not reciprocating your level of attachment or because he is behaving in an unhealthy manner. When an existing relationship becomes unhealthy, the skills needed include the ability to quickly recognize this reality and to dissolve the relationship in a mutually healthy manner.
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References
- Journal.com: "Seven Hours of Sleep is What You Need"; August 10, 2010
- National Institutes of Health: Aim for a Healthy Weight
- "Asia Pacific Journal of Clinical Nutrition"; "The omega-6, omega-3 Fatty Acids Ratio, Genetic Variation and Cardiovascular Disease"; Dr. Artesia Simopoulos; 2008
- American Dental Association: Cleaning Your Teeth and Gums
- Housing and Urban Development: Making Homes Healthier for families
- Mentor Path: Dr. David Krueger
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