The basics of a healthy lifestyle

The basics of a healthy lifestyle are in essence quite simple, but in the treadmill of daily life they are easily forgotten. The three areas that need to be addressed in order to improve your life the healthy way are:

• Diet & Nutrition
• Exercise
• Relaxation

Diet & Nutrition

You are what you eat is often said. And it is as true now as it has always been. Modern science has shown us that your body renews itself about every 7 years. This means that you are not the same person you were 7 years ago. Every molecule in your body has been replaced with another that you have somehow ingested in the last 7 years. Being through food, drink or breathing.
That’s why it is so important to monitor what you put in your mouth. If you eat a lot of junk food, drink a lot of alcohol and smoke for example you are filling your body with toxins and your body after a while will be build from toxins, paving the way for all the modern diseases to kick in, like cancer, cardiovascular disease, high cholesterol etc. The good news is that if you fill your body with healthy things, your body will have the materials to keep itself in a good state and fight disease.

What is a healthy diet?
A healthy diet needs the following basic ingredients:

• A lot of different fruits and vegetables. They provide the body with a lot of different nutrients. Eat at least 2 pieces of fruit and about 200 grams of vegetables daily. More is better.
• Plenty of fiber. Fiber is the part of the food you cannot digest and help to keep the intestine clean. Whole grains and vegetables are full of fibers.
• Drink plenty of water. Water helps the body to transport nutrients into the body and waste products and toxins out of the body. Drink at least 8 glasses of water daily.
• Avoid junk food, soft drinks and highly refined foods. Junk food and soft drinks are full of sugars and fat and low in nutritional value, so they don’t do much for the body apart from providing energy. Highly refined foods have been processed to the point that many nutrients have been stripped away. So the closer it is to recognizable food, the better.

Exercise

The body was made for moving. Not for sitting down, like we do now most of the time in our modern life. Not exercising has several effects on the body. First of all muscles atrophy if they are not used. If you don’t use it, you loose it, is true here. Plenty of scientific research has shown that exercising your muscles not only makes you look better, but keeps you more healthy and keeps you younger. Also the amount of muscle tissue determines how many calories your body can burn. So by exercising your muscles, you also burn off fat.
Furthermore when you don’t exercise your cardiovascular system, you loose your stamina. Making your heart and lungs work harder, makes them work better, strengthening your heart muscle and increasing your lung capacity. Also doing exercise helps your body to keep the cardiovascular system cleaner.
Exercise also helps the body cope better with the effects of stress. Exercise has the same effect on the body as stress, but at the same time exercise negates the effects of stress as well. So by exercising your body learns to cope with stress even when you are not exercising.
Overall exercise makes your body stronger in every way. It is recommended to have some exercise at least half an hour each day. This can be jogging or weight training, but also biking or walking or some other activity. The most important thing is to be active.

Relaxation

Relaxation is very important to cope with the stress of modern life. The stress reaction of the body was very important for survival when humans were evolving. It made us alert to dangers and gave us the impulse to flee from predators en gave us the focus to catch our prey. And when the danger passed or the prey was caught, the stress would disappear. In our modern lifestyle stress is caused by other things, like work, relationships and the worries of modern life, and last much longer. Long term stress has a detrimental effect on the body. Stress makes the body function worse, causes it to store fat and makes you more susceptible to diseases.
So it is important to learn to relax. There are many ways to find relaxation. One is to exercise. Exercise helps to eliminate stress from the body. Other ways are some form of meditation, tai chi or yoga. They all help to alleviate stress and make your body cope with stress better.

Popularity: 42% [?]

---

Related Posts:

Exercise reduces chance of impotence
Traditional Chinese diet is good for losing weight
Eating with the family makes healthier eaters
Too much salt is unhealthy - the function of salt
Which diet is right for you?
8 Life rules to avoid cancer
Mediterranean diet good for cholesterol