Tips to Help Lower Your Blood Pressure
Did you know? About 75 million American adults (29%) have high blood pressure—that’s 1 in every 3 adults. High blood pressure, or hypertension, is a blood pressure reading above 140/90 mmHg (millimeters of mercury). Having high blood pressure puts you at risk for heart disease and stroke, which are the first and the third leading causes of death in the United States. Fortunately, high blood pressure is treatable and preventable.
Here are 5 tipsto help lower your blood pressure.
1.) Regular Checkups: High blood pressure generally develops over many years. You can have high blood pressure for years without any symptoms. Even without symptoms, damage to blood vessels and your heart continues. The only way to know is to check your blood pressure regularly. Once you know you have high blood pressure, you can work with your doctor to control it.
2.) Watch your waistline: Maintaining a healthy weight for your body type helps keep your blood pressure in check. If you carry excess weight, losing it is especially around your waist area is important for lowering blood pressure. Talk to your doctor or a registered dietitian about a target weight and a safe weight loss plan.
3.) Exercise regularly: Regular physical activity makes your heart stronger. A stronger heart can pump more blood with less efforts. If your heart can work less, to pump, the force on your arteries decreases, lowering your blood pressure.
Simple aerobic activity, such as walking, jogging, swimming or doing chores around the house, such as mowing the lawn, raking leaves and gardening can lower blood pressure. ACSM recommends 30 minutes minimum of moderate physical activity at least five days a week.
4.) Reduce sodium: The American Heart Association recommends, no more than 2300 mg a day and an ideal limit of no more than 1500 mg per day for most adults for especially those with high blood pressure. Just to give you an idea 1 teaspoon salt contains 2300 mg of sodium. Even cutting back by 1000 mg a day can improve your blood pressure and heart health.
The majority of salt in the American diet comes from restaurant food and highly processed foods such as instant food products, frozen meals, frozen pizza, canned foods so reducing or cutting these foods out of your diet can significantly make a difference in your blood pressure.
5.) Stress management: Stress can increase blood pressure so you’ll want to pay particular attention to lowering your stress if you’re at risk for high blood pressure due to being overweight. Not only do eating right and exercising help with stress management, but activities like meditation, deep breathing, yoga, listening to a soothing music, taking long walks can also help.
If you’re living a healthy lifestyle, you will definitely make the right choices to control your blood pressure.
Right Nutrition Works is dedicated to helping people create healthier lifestyle by offering evidence based personalized nutrition counseling and teach people how to make healthy food choices.
Prajakta Apte RDN at Right Nutrition Works treats each one of her clients exclusively, providing nutrition and health roadmaps based on their needs and goals, not just broad recommendations.
She helps people with diabetes, weight loss, high blood pressure, food intolerances and various GI disorders such as abdominal bloating, chronic constipation, IBS and ulcerative colitis.
By Prajakta Apte, RDN
rightnutritionworks@gmail.com