Your Guide to a Heart-Healthy Diet

As a living and breathing soul in today's world, it's essential to ensure your heart is in complete harmony with your daily life. Having a healthy heart is the epitome of conducting activities, working and being productive, and your relationships. If there's any one reason to wake up and love the life you're living, it is having a healthy heart.

Diet, exercise, compassion, empathetic acts towards others, falling in love--each of these involve a heart that needs to be in good shape. It is also essential to preventing heart disease, which tends to plague numerous citizens who take for granted how they eat.

There are steps to get started on a path towards a heart-healthy diet. It's not easy to overhaul eating habits overnight. The key is to formulate a plan, write it down, place it on the refrigerator so you'll see it every day, and never give up.

The Essential Steps for Heart Health

First, we'll discuss dietary measures that are the cornerstone of any functioning wellness program. If you've already planned a grocery outing with a healthy list of items, the remainder of your goals must include the following:

• Control your portion size
• Avoid over-processed foods
• Decrease unhealthy fats
• Increase high-quality/low-fat protein sources
• Reduce the amount of overall sodium
• Plan ahead to create meals
• Give yourself an occasional treat

Next up in the essential steps process of heart health is exercise. Working with a nutritionist or dietitian from the beginning is always recommended to ensure you're receiving the proper nutrients with each meal. Every professional understands that diet alone won't provide the heart-healthy results needed to attain ultimate wellness. You need to exercise!

The best types of exercise are what you're able to do reasonably and what you enjoy. Running, hiking, walking, biking, swimming, weight-lifting, yoga, whatever type of movement increases your heart rate and gets it pumping and makes you sweat. If you're eating well, working out with cardiovascular exercise will only enhance heart health.

Why the Foods You Eat Matter

Instead of deprivation to prevent heart disease, focus more on allowance and imagination. The foods you eat drive every decision, every emotion, basically everything about your life. Having excellent heart health is central to your day-by-day activities, and keeps you on task and involved. It's vital to protect your heart with foods that matter.

Here are a few things that you should be eating more of:

• Healthy fats. This includes raw nuts, olive oil, and avocados.
• Fruits and vegetables. They should be included in every meal.
• Whole grains. High-fiber cereals, bread, or pasta made with whole grains.
• Diary. Eggs, skim milk, or unsweetened yogurt are a great start.
• Protein. Fish and poultry are some of the top high-quality proteins.

There's not one single food that magically erases years of unhealthy buildup in your heart, yet the foods mentioned above need to be a mainstay. Avoiding processed foods and focusing more on home-cooked meals with natural or organic foods will raise the bar on heart health and heart disease prevention.

Give Your Body the Gift of a Healthy Heart

By sticking with a nutritious diet and daily exercise, your heart will soar! Contact us today if you would like to learn more about maintaining excellent heart health!