3 minute read
Key takeaways
- Healthy habits, such as regular exercise and a nutritional diet, can help improve factors such as blood pressure, cholesterol, heart rate, and your heart’s general health.
- Keeping track of your heart’s readings can help identify any signs of concern with your heart’s activity.
Having a heart condition can be life-changing. Currently, in the UK, there are 7.6 million people who live with heart and circulatory diseases. Ensuring you live a healthy lifestyle and looking after your heart is key to lowering your risk of developing a heart concern, such as cardiovascular disease or a heart attack.
But the key question is, where do you start? Keeping your heart healthy is something you can work on every day. In this article, I detail some key changes you can make to your day-to-day lifestyle to improve your heart health and how you can monitor key readings to ensure it is working the way it should.
Managing your lifestyle
How you live your life and the habits you follow can greatly influence your general heart health.
Unhealthy habits such as smoking, drinking alcohol excessively, not managing high levels of stress, and eating high levels of salt and saturated fats can eventually lead to serious heart complications over time.
Making sure you follow healthy habits can improve your heart health and general well-being. These can include:
- Managing your weight (especially around your waist) – carrying extra weight can increase your risk of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and type 2 diabetes. These factors can put you at higher risk of conditions such as heart disease. Keeping a healthy BMI and weight-to-height ratio is key to reducing the risk to your heart’s health.
- Exercising regularly – keeping a consistent fitness routine helps keep your heart strong and improve your circulation.
- Eating healthily – eating a diet high in portions of vegetables, fruits, and fish can help improve your blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Keeping your diet low in salt can also help improve your blood pressure.
- Quit smoking – smoking can lead to the furring of the arteries (atherosclerosis), which is a leading cause of coronary thrombosis in people under the age of 50.
- Drink no more than the recommended amount of alcohol each week.
- Implementing mindfulness and relaxation techniques to manage stress.
Looking after your heart is the key to improving your overall health. At the clinic, we can work with you to help make key lifestyle changes to help alleviate your symptoms and improve your overall quality of life. Learn more about how we can help on your health journey here.
Healthy heart readings
When monitoring your heart health, it’s essential to keep track of your heart’s numbers to ensure you are within a healthy range or spot any abnormal signs.
Blood pressure
Your blood pressure is given in two readings: systolic and diastolic. Systolic is the pressure when your heart is pumping blood out, and diastolic is the pressure when your heart is pumping blood in.
Ideal blood pressure readings should be between 90-120 for systolic and 60/80 for diastolic. Anything above 120/80 mm Hg or below 90/60 mm Hg is a sign that something might be wrong with the heart. Discuss your readings with a medical professional if you are concerned about your blood pressure, and they can evaluate your heart’s health.
Heart rate
A healthy heart rate for most adults should be between 60 and 100 bpm (beats per minute). However, your heart rate can go up and down depending on your actions and other factors such as age and general health. Smoking, drinking alcohol regularly, and other lifestyle habits can also impact your heart rate.
To find out what your resting heart rate is, sit still for 5-10 minutes and count the number of times your heart beats per minute within that time.
If your heart rate is continuously over 100 bpm or lower than 40 bpm, you should seek advice from your doctor and get your heart checked out. This may be a regular heart rate for you or a sign of cardiovascular issues, such as arrhythmia or heart failure.
Cholesterol
For a heart to be healthy, there must be a balance of ‘good’ HDL and ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol. HDL helps remove harmful cholesterol from the bloodstream, whereas LDL cholesterol builds up in the arteries.
On average, a healthy cholesterol reading in an adult is:
- Total cholesterol – 5mmol/L or below
- HDL cholesterol – 1mmol/L or above
- LDL cholesterol – 4mmol/L or below
Keeping track of these readings can be tricky on your own, and it is hard to decipher if they show issues with your heart or if they are a ‘normal’ reading for you individually. The team and I can help walk you through your readings and help explain what may be going on with your heart’s activity.
Helping keep your heart healthy
If you are concerned about your heart or have noticed any abnormal readings, as an expert cardiologist, I can thoroughly assess your heart’s health and get to the bottom of what might be troubling you.
The clinic offers a wide range of diagnostic tests to help truly understand your heart health. Once I have the results, we can help discuss the treatment options available and lifestyle changes that may help manage your condition.
Book an appointment to get started on your health journey today.
