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Health

Better Diet, Better Exercise Plan, Better Health

The standards for good health have changed over the years. The focus seems to be on lower weight and lower body fat percentages than several decades ago. That’s because experts on being healthy have determined that lower body fat and lower weight are important factors in avoiding things like cancer and heart disease.

We can also now better measure the levels of cholesterol, blood sugar, and other important health indicators than ever before, and since these all contribute to overall health and the risks of things like diabetes and heart disease, it’s important to keep an eye on these levels.

Diet and exercise have always been stressed as the major factors in staying healthy, though, and that still hasn’t changed. What you eat and how much you move determine how healthy you’ll be overall, more than anything else, including heredity. While sometimes heredity and other factors can cause diseases even in seemingly healthy people, as far as heart disease, cancers and diabetes, most of them are believed to be cause by plain old poor health. And poor health is usually a result of a poor diet and not enough exercise.

Does this mean that most diseases are preventable? According to the experts, they are. Type II diabetes, for instance, otherwise known as adult onset diabetes, is a highly preventable disease in most cases. Unlike Type I diabetes—juvenile diabetes—in which the pancreas simply malfunctions and stops using insulin, type II is generally the result of years of poor diet that have caused insulin resistance in which either the pancreas slows down or stops insulin production, or it overproduces insulin and becomes ineffective that way.

Finding health information about diabetes is easy these days, and you’ll find in that information that following a healthy diet reduces your risk of diabetes dramatically, even if runs in your family. While there really are no bad foods, you should for the most part avoid things like sugar and starches and aim for things on a healthy foods list like whole grains, fruits, vegetables and lean source of protein. Someone following a diet like that is unlikely to ever suffer with diabetes.

To protect your health, you should also get plenty of exercise. Both cardio exercises that work the heart and lungs (as well as burn fat) and strength training to make you stronger and raise your metabolism are part of an overall healthy exercise program.

Health is primarily improved through diet and exercise, but other things can play a part too, such as how much sleep you get. Sever or eight hours a night at a minimum is considered a healthy amount of sleep, but you may function better with even more. And your stress levels also play an important part in your health, because stress is one of the contributing factors in things like heart disease and heart attacks.

Fortunately, getting enough sleep, eating a healthy diet, and getting the right kind of exercise in the right amounts improve your health and also reduce stress.