Hypertension (High blood pressure) is a common health condition. Millions of people suffer from this problem across the world. High blood pressure usually doesn’t cause symptoms until it becomes severe. If it left uncontrolled, it can lead to serious health condition like stroke or heart attack. Therefore, keeping high blood pressure under control is necessary to avoid them.
How to Control Hypertension
Dietary and lifestyle changes help manage hypertension naturally. When you are diagnosed with hypertension, your doctor prescribes medications and also suggests dietary and lifestyle modifications. Here we are including dietary and lifestyle changes in this article that help you to control and prevent hypertension and its further health risk.
- Lose extra body weight
Reducing your body weight and maintaining an ideal weight is one effective way to manage hypertension. With increasing body weight, the chances of hypertension increase. Obesity/overweight causes disrupting breathing while sleeping that raises blood pressure
Weight loss is the most important thing for hypertension control and prevention. If you are overweight, try to lose some weight.
- Reduce salt intake
Consuming too much salt is not good for your BP as it contains sodium which increases blood pressure. You should reduce your salt in food for your heart health. Packaged foods often pack a lot of sodium, though you should choose reduced-sodium options.
- Healthy diet
Eating a healthy diet that includes whole grains, fruits, vegetables and low-fat food items and is low in saturated fat and cholesterol can reduce high blood pressure. Dash diet and the Mediterranean diet can help control blood pressure. Potassium in the diet can minimize the effects of salt (sodium) on blood pressure. Foods like fruits and vegetables are better providers of potassium than supplements.
- Regular exercise
Regular exercise can help to control hypertension. It’s important to keep yourself more physically active and participate in at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise daily. It is also helpful to manage your elevated blood pressure and reduce the risk of developing hypertension.
- Limit alcohol consumption
Drinking too much alcohol fatally damages your health and increases your blood pressure in several ways, so try to limit the consumption of alcohol and prevent heart diseases. Take alcohol in limit, otherwise it may reduce the effectiveness of your BP medications.
- Stop smoking
Smoking elevates your blood pressure. Giving up smoking helps to let down your blood pressure. And also decrease the risk of heart disease and enhance overall well-being, which possibly leads to a longer life. Smoking also creates problems with the effectiveness of blood pressure medication.
- Reduce stress
Stress is a major factor in the rise of blood pressure. To determine whether stress management practices help lower blood pressure, more study on their effects is required. Nevertheless, it can’t harm to identify the sources of stress, such as work, family, finances, or disease, and focus on reducing them.
Keep your doctor informed so they can ensure you don’t have any underlying medical conditions or, if you do, can manage them. You can make the above lifestyle adjustments if you are diagnosed with hypertension. It becomes easier to manage your hypertension and overall health.
Source: 7 Effective Ways to Manage Hypertension