If you’re reading this and you’re overweight, I want you to answer the following.
Did you gain all that weight quickly?
Did you have to do something drastic to gain it, like eat 10,000 calories a day?
I’m going to take a chance here and say the answer to both questions is “no.”
You gained the weight over time, by making a series of decisions regularly. Decisions like eating foods that contribute to weight gain, or not moving as much as you should.
The point I’m making is that change doesn’t happen immediately, it happens over time as a result of the decisions we make.
So if you now want to lose weight and focus on improving your heart health, the answer isn’t to take drastic measures. You don’t need to lose huge chunks of time to do it. You don’t need to rely on motivation. And you certainly don’t need to live unhappily because of the changes.
The key to losing weight, getting fit, and increasing your cardiovascular health is as simple as making the right decisions each day, and letting time take care of the rest.
Daily actions to increase heart health
Let’s take a closer look at what those decisions are:
What you eat
This is the big one, and where most of your focus needs to be. As important as other lifestyle factors are, the truth is it’s not possible to out-train a bad diet. Even with nothing else, a healthy diet will still help you to be metabolically healthy, improve your mental clarity, keep your arteries clean, and generally help you to feel good. On the other hand, if you do everything else right but have a poor diet, it’ll be like swimming upstream.
For many people, the first step in working out how to eat a healthy diet means visiting the food pyramid. Unfortunately, the food pyramid has failed us and turning to it for advice can make your problem even worse.
We also can’t rely on influencers to tell us what’s healthy, which includes celebrity chefs endorsing “heart-healthy” cereals. While it may be true that their endorsed products help to lower cholesterol, that doesn’t mean they aren’t causing other problems.
When you start thinking about rules for eating, it’s easy to feel stressed and overwhelmed. But in reality, following simple rules for heart-healthy eating is all it takes.
First of all, eliminate as much processed food from your diet as possible. Straight away you’ll remove a lot of sugar and unhealthy vegetable oils, both of which will drastically improve your health.
My general principle is to eat either things that grow in the ground, or which eat the things that grow in the ground. That means animal products, fruits, vegetables, seeds, as well as potatoes and sweet potatoes. It excludes Oreos and Fritos.
That leads onto the next recommendation: avoid foods that come in a box or bag. This is a general guideline – your vegetables or meat may be purchased in a bag, and that’s okay. This is more about a principle of avoiding foods that come from a factory or have a list of ingredients stamped on the packaging.
Lastly, prepare your meals at home as much as possible. This way, you’ll be in full control over the ingredients as well as the calories. You’ll know that there aren’t hidden ingredients, like the food being cooked in vegetable oils.
How you move
If preventing heart disease is important to you, then exercise needs to be a priority. This is an area that causes a lot of confusion though, with many people thinking they need to spend countless hours performing cardio. It’s not true, and as with food, following some simple guidelines will give you amazing results.
The very best thing you can do is incorporate what I call “constant movement.” This means to use your body wherever possible:
- Instead of taking the elevator, walk up the stairs
- Use a standing desk instead of sitting all day
- Walk instead of driving, where possible
This will burn some extra calories but most importantly it will help to strengthen your muscles and increase bone density.
Resistance training is also very important. If you want to stay at home, you can incorporate bodyweight exercises into your day, like push-ups, squats, pull-ups, and sit-ups. You can also follow a basic dumbbell routine or join a gym if you want to challenge yourself further.
Finally, cardiovascular training is beneficial too. You don’t need to jog for hours though. My personal favorite is high intensity interval training (HIIT) a few times a week, as it’s highly effective and doesn’t take much time. Alternatively, take long and leisurely walks that get your heart rate into zone 2.
Stress
With diet and exercise addressed, it’s time to look at lifestyle factors. Stress is widely known as increasing the risk of developing heart disease, although some of the reasons are often overlooked.
The most recognized impact of stress is that it triggers our fight or flight response, releasing hormones and raising blood pressure. None of this is problematic in the short term, but it can become a threat to our health if it’s frequent – as it so often is in modern society.
Stress also has a secondary role in increasing the risk of heart disease: the coping mechanisms we turn to. “Comfort eating” is one example, but binge drinking, smoking, overworking, and spending hours on the couch are also all popular behaviors for coping with stress. And, as we all know, they all can increase the risk of heart disease too.
The best way to combat this is to reduce your exposure to stress where possible, and find healthier coping mechanisms to avoid feeling overwhelmed. But no, you don’t need a stress test to find out if you’re at risk of heart disease.
To sum up
This article isn’t an exhaustive list of things you can to prevent heart disease – smoking and heavy drinking haven’t been mentioned, for example.
Instead, this is a look at the “big wins” you can focus on. They’re the areas that have the biggest impact on your health, and avoid you majoring in the minor leagues, as the saying goes.
Most of all, I want you to see that becoming healthy doesn’t have to take over your life. It’s a simple matter of taking the right steps, which will enhance your life.
You don’t need special equipment or expensive clothes. You can literally start this very instant.
To get the very best insight into your health, I recommend taking my free metabolic health quiz. It will tell you how metabolically healthy you are right now, so you can take the most beneficial action.