HH319:Your Heart- How To Support Optimal Heart Function

Welcome back to another episode of health hack as I continue talking about your heart health today, and today I'm sharing with you optimal ways for you to be able to look after your heart. And looking after your heart involves a combination of lifestyle choices, dietary habits, and regular monitoring. And you don't have to do all of these at once, just pick one that you think, yeah, I could start doing that every single day and start doing that. And then you can add another one, and another one, and over time, you will be supporting your heart health. And remember, because we're an interconnected system, you will be supporting many other organs in your body as well. And in fact, if you go back to previous episodes, last week, I was talking about your kidneys the week before that I was talking about your liver, you can you'll notice that many of these tips on looking after your heart are also things that you can do to be supporting your kidneys and your liver. So here we go. The first one is eat a heart healthy diet with lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, healthy fats, lean proteins, especially including some fatty fish like salmon, as well as limiting your sugar and salt intake. Exercise regularly that supports heart health. So simply start with walking 10,000 steps a day, five days a week, or maybe it's 7000 steps, seven days a week, roughly you want to get 50,000 steps in a week, and getting about 150 minutes of movement in a week, whatever movement brings you joy. And of course, maintaining a healthy weight is important for heart health as is avoiding smoking and limiting alcohol. managing stress is critical, especially in today's world where everybody is so stressed out. And I see it in lab tests all the time, when we manage our stress that also allows our blood pressure to come down which of course is critical to your heart health and overall health. At know your numbers, what are your cholesterol numbers, your blood pressure numbers, your blood sugar levels, know what they are so that what you track you focus on and then you can work with a practitioner to help support you in lowering these levels to being within a healthy range. Getting adequate sleep is absolutely critical for heart health. And I've done previous episodes is talking specifically to that between episodes 391 to 402. I focused entirely on sleep and its importance to our overall health. And so you can go back and listen to those episodes. So often sleep is you know written off, it's overrated, it can't be overrated, it is absolutely important to your overall health. Staying hydrated, drinking plenty of water to help maintain blood volume and reduce strain on the heart is really important. And we all forget to hydrate, you should be hydrating at 50% of your body weight in ounces every single day. So if you weigh 150 pounds 50% of that is 75 pounds. So you should be drinking 75 ounces of water every single day. And that could include herbal teas that could include smoothies, however, that doesn't include your coffee. It doesn't include juices, it doesn't include alcohol. Hydration for the body is coming from water, herbal teas and smoothies and preferably at room temperature or warmer because the body can better absorb it, then you want to be avoiding excessive caffeine, limiting caffeine because it can cause spikes in heart rate and blood pressure. When we're having too much it can trigger anxiety and other issues as well as cause sleep issues. So you definitely want to be limiting that. And by integrating all of these into your daily life, starting with just one, just one that you can start to tweak and adjust to maybe it's having one less cup of coffee every day. Maybe it's making sure you're hydrating enough. Maybe it's getting to bed 15 minutes earlier every day for a week and then 15 minutes earlier again the following week. These can be small steps that you can take to create new habits that will enhance your heart health, reducing your risk of heart disease and in the process because we are all interconnected all of our organs. It will promote your overall health and well being and So enjoy figuring out the one thing that you are going to start with