Keeping your heart healthy is essential if you want prevent or lower your risk of heart disease. With small adjustments to your daily life, you can ensure that your heart and the rest of your body stays healthy. Here are 5 tips to keep your heart healthy:
- Avoid smoking and tobacco. Cigarettes and tobacco are some of the worst things for your body. In fact, smoking is one of the ways you can get heart disease. Tobacco contains certain chemicals that can cause your arteries to get smaller with all the plague building up inside them. This condition is called atherosclerosis and can cause other problems like heart attacks.
- Exercise. It’s recommended that you exercise for about half an hour for a majority of the days in the week. Maintaining a regular exercising schedule can do wonders for your risk of heart disease. When you exercise, you should work to get your heart pumping. It doesn’t have to be hard exercise, it just has to be something like walking the dog, doing some chores, or going on a bike ride to get yourself off the couch and moving around.
- Eat healthy. Diet is essential to maintaining a healthy heart. Lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat foods are a great place to start for food that keeps your risk of heart disease low.
- Keep your weight at a healthy level. Excess weight can heighten your risk of heart disease. Not only does it make your heart work harder, but being overweight can also cause other problems like diabetes, high cholesterol or high blood pressure.
- Get enough rest. Not getting enough sleep doesn’t just make you tired. If you consistently aren’t getting at least 8 hours of sleep per night, your heart health could be at risk. One good way to tell that you’re well rested is it if you can wake up without an alarm and not feel tired. If you’re constantly wishing you could go back to bed after your alarm goes off, you need to start going to bed earlier and getting more rest.
Dr. Ciuffo and the Minimally Invasive and Bloodless Heart Surgery Program
Dr. Ciuffo is dedicated to ensuring your heart is healthy. If you are in need of heart surgery, he will do everything he can to ensure that the surgery is successful and that you have a low recovery time. If you have any questions about your heart or how to keep it healthy, feel free to contact us at (330) 588-4676 or visit our contact page online.
