By Bytemarks from Flickr.com
If you’re one of those people that burn the candle at both ends and insult your body with poor food choices, you could be setting yourself up for a fall later in life. Everyone has a built in genetic code that protects the person from specific illness or diseases. While you might believe you’re invincible, it just might be your genetic make-up protecting you.
However, everything has to end sometime and those who think they can abuse their body and never pay a price eventually find that the abuse takes its toll in later years. Poor diet, heavy drinking, drug use and a party mentality soon become the enemy in the later years.
If you had the lifestyle, want to change your habits and protect your health, it’s never too late to make the changes. While free radicals can destroy many of the cells in your body, and the destruction of the cells is what causes aging and disease, the use of antioxidants can help reverse some of the changes and prevent further damage.
Your health is too important not to give diet and exercise a shot at improving it. Many people that lived a sedentary lifestyle now facing a critical illness find that changing their diet and exercise habits is one way to improve the body’s ability to fight back against even the strongest, most devastating diseases.
You’ll find ample stories about people fighting cancer that used complementary healing techniques to aid their fight against the cancer and maintained their stamina even though they were taking powerful chemotherapy. The use diet and exercise to not only maintain health but also return a body back to health can be powerful.
Other important things to remember for your health is an annual check-up. While you might not feel bad, insidious conditions such as high blood pressure and cancer have very few symptoms in the early stages. Often people with high blood pressure find out they have the problem only because they went to the doctor’s office for some other medical issue. Of course, everyone knows that cancer is a killer but high blood pressure, one of the easiest conditions to treat, can cause coronary disease, stroke and other life threatening conditions. A simple annual check-up can identify the condition before it takes its toll on your health.
If you are constantly under stress, you’ll find your health compromised by the damage done from the stress. The body secretes hormones for fight or flight when under stress. Unfortunately, we don’t do either when faced by today’s stressors. While scooting away as fast as possible was important when faced with a saber-tooth tiger, charging buffalo or other predator, it’s not beneficial in today’s world when the stressor is the boss or another coworker. You can neither fight nor run away from them.
Learning ways to lower your stress levels such as meditation and yoga can make great improvements in your health. By taking a few minutes out when either in a stressful situation or simply in the middle of the day, to relax your body and mind, you’ll find that you’re less prone to infection and often gain less weight or even lose some if accompanied by a healthful diet. You can also lower your blood pressure and keep your stress levels from harming you once you learn to reduce the levels through taking a moment to yourself for your health.