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Good health refers to your overall mental, physical, and emotional wellness. While your health is affected by many factors in and out of your control, you can improve many aspects of your well-being through simple lifestyle changes.
In this blog, we examine what a healthy lifestyle looks like as well as good and bad choices for your overall well-being. If you’re in the Henderson, Nevada area, Dr. Evan Allen and his team at Allen Wellness & Medical Center offer comprehensive preventative care to keep you in great physical, mental, and emotional health.
Defining a healthy lifestyle
A healthy lifestyle refers to living in a fashion that maximizes your physical, mental, and emotional health. This could include making changes to personal habits, diet, physical activity, and a number of other things in your life.
Achieving this lifestyle, however, is not something that happens overnight. If you’ve had years to develop bad habits, it takes time to build new habits and make them a part of your daily routine.
How your choices can affect your health
To understand how to improve your lifestyle, it’s important to know what can make your health better or worse. Several factors contribute to health, including:
Diet
What you eat plays a big role in your overall health, how much energy you have, and your risk for various diseases. A bad diet can lead to diabetes, stroke, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and other chronic conditions.
To avoid these risks, we recommend healthy dietary choices like reducing your intake of high-cholesterol foods, refined sugars, and processed foods and eating more fruits, nuts, lean meats, and vegetables.
Activity levels
A sedentary life can lead to problems with weight, fatigue, and metabolism. In addition to increasing your risk of chronic conditions, it can also impact your mental health. 150 minutes weekly of moderate exercises like walking, swimming, or biking can help your body stay healthy.
Weight
Being overweight increases the risks of conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and hypertension. The extra weight also puts more stress on your joints, ligaments, muscles, and bones, increasing the chances of other conditions like arthritis.
Luckily, we are here to help with individualized medical weight loss support. Just a small 5% weight loss can lead to vastly improved health and reduced risk of obesity-related diseases.
Substance use
Drinking, smoking, and illegal drug use are all things that pose dangers to your body for a variety of reasons. They can create dependency issues that affect your mental health and lead to many conditions like cancer, cirrhosis of the liver, and more. If your substance use is a problem, our team can help you quit.
Amount of sleep
Getting the proper amount of rest is necessary for your body to recharge. Going to bed at consistent times and aiming for seven to nine hours of uninterrupted rest helps you stay healthy.
Stress levels
Chronic stress affects your emotional and physical health in many ways and can increase your risk of preventable conditions. Try to manage your stress by giving yourself time to relax and trying activities like mindfulness and meditation. Staying connected with loved ones can also help reduce your stress long-term.
The path to getting healthy is different for everyone, but whatever you need to get there, we’re here to help. When you’re ready to find the healthier lifestyle that fits you, make an appointment with Dr. Allen and Allen Wellness & Medical Center today to get started.