How to start living a healthy lifestyle: What are the benefits?
When you aren’t at your healthiest, you probably can tell that you are feeling “off”. If you unfortunately become sick, you may talk about feelings or senses that are not related to your condition, resulting in medical errors. But the important thing is that if you aren’t living a healthy life, you are lacking many things that lead to your feeling less energized. There can be changes in your digestive system, and your body will get to a point where you can get a cold pretty easily. Even if we put the physical aspects to the side, you may feel mental problems like being anxious, depressed or unable to concentrate due to an unhealthy lifestyle.
The bright side is that you can probably solve most of these problems, feel better, and avoid possible medical errors. We’re talking about medical errors because when you are not living a healthy lifestyle, you’re more prone to conditions that don’t show up much themselves but start to show up along with other conditions because you are weaker. This can result in misdiagnosis that delays treatment for the underlying condition, while probably making it worse.
To live a healthy life, you must change your lifestyle. That said, you won’t need to overhaul your entire life in one night; you can take smaller steps toward this idea of a healthy lifestyle. Besides, once you make the bigger changes, those successes will motivate you and make the rest of the steps easier.
What is a healthy lifestyle?
If we want to take a philosophical look at what makes a healthy lifestyle, we would get very different answers from different people. But a simple definition is that living a healthy lifestyle simply means doing what makes you and your body happy.
For some people, it may mean eating fast food once a week while taking a five-mile walk every week and spending quality time with their loved ones, while for some other people it may mean eating fast food once a month but running 3 days a week. Both our examples are good and neither is unhealthy. The important thing is figuring out what works best for you.
Here are some of the benefits you can get from living a healthy lifestyle:
Avoid certain diseases
Some diseases have a genetic risk factor, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t avoid them. Following a set of healthy rules and creating healthy habits for yourself can help you reduce the risk of various diseases that run in your family.
You don’t believe us? According to a study from the ACPjournals, adults who follow the recommended American diet – you know, the one that is rich in fruits and vegetables – for 8 weeks have a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.
According to another study from the year 2020 by the respected journal BMJ, every 66-gram increase in daily fruit and vegetable intake was associated with a 25 percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes. This data is available online so you can go and read the original title.
Additionally, swapping refined grains with whole grains may lower the risk of many different diseases such as type 2 diabetes by up to 29%.
Finally, exercising for about 10 to 15 minutes a day can increase your chances of avoiding different chronic diseases.
Spend less money
An annual visit to your primary care physician is a must, but what if something goes wrong while you’re not taking care of yourself? Then you’ll need to pay extra money to visit specialists, go through different examinations and tests, and pay for the treatments. If your healthcare process is associated with a medical error, that may double the whole bill. If we want to get to the point, living healthily can let you avoid having to pay a lot of money for preventable health problems.
Conclusion
Ultimately, with the rise in different medical errors and with the cause of some of them being the patient’s unhealthy lifestyle, our goal is to make you aware of the importance of looking after your health. That’s what matters more than anything, with no exceptions. Living a healthy lifestyle can help you avoid both mental and physical health conditions.
Just remember, your lifestyle choice must make you happy, as well as healthy.
Resources:
https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness-nutrition/healthy-lifestyle-benefits#how-to-start
