Simple Steps to Nutrition and Fitness With a Chronic Illness
Article by: Farlyn Lucas
It’s no secret the rates of chronic illnesses like heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and cancer, are rising. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 60% of adults in the U.S. have at least one chronic disease and 40% have two or more. Caring for these conditions is a large part of an annual $3.5 trillion healthcare budget.
Thankfully, there are steps you can take that have a significant impact on your health and wellness even into your 90’s. For example, did you know that the food you eat helps determine how fast a wound heals? In other words, “health” is not just about weight loss. It is more about helping your body to function optimally, which often means you’ll naturally reach a healthy weight.
Steps to Healthy Nutrition
Nutrition may be one of the more important steps to attaining and maintaining health. Your body – and specifically the cells in every organ, muscle and bone – uses the food you eat to power your life. Your body doesn’t just run on calories. Instead it functions on nutrition – vitamins, minerals and macro nutrients. Processed foods may have calories, but they don’t have the nutrients your body needs to be healthy. Consider starting with these steps toward a healthy lifestyle:
1. Drink Water
The human body is up to 60% water. To stay hydrated it’s important you replace fluid with water. Although soda, tea, alcohol and coffee are fluid, they do not nourish your cells the way water does. Added to this, soda is packed with sugar or artificial sweetener that alters your blood sugar and increases your risk of diabetes. One large European study showed that with or without sugar, soda raises the risk of early death.
2. Eat Whole Food
Focus your grocery shopping on the outside walls of the store where you’ll find produce, dairy and meat. It may take a couple extra minutes to make your own food rather than rely on processed and canned foods, but the rewards are well worth it. With the help of crock pots, pressure cookers and a little planning, meal preparation does not have to be lengthy.
Evidence from two recent studies showed those eating ultra-processed foods had a higher risk of heart disease, stroke and early death. Ultra-processed foods are made “from industrial ingredients and contain little or no intact foods.”
3. Sleep
In the past decade researchers have found people who consistently don’t sleep enough have a higher risk of poor health, brain impairment that affects thinking, and early death. Seek to get between seven and eight hours of quality sleep each night.
Making Exercise Work for You
Many people say they don’t have time to hit the gym each day, but it’s important to remember your goal is to simply move at a moderate pace for at least 30 minutes each day. The flip side of the exercise coin is non exercise movement, which is just as important. This is movement throughout the day that doesn’t raise your heart rate or breathing. Researchers coined the term “sitting disease” to describe the impact lack of movement has on your risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, other chronic health conditions and early death.
In fact, you can’t exercise sitting all day. No amount of exercise one time a day will reduce your risk of ill health when you sit behind a desk without moving all day at work, sit in the car to commute, sit at dinner and then again after dinner.
Yet, exercise and movement can be fun. Consider beginning with walking if you’ve been a couch potato for years. As you become accustomed to the added activity you can move on to other types of gentle but fun exercise such as biking, swimming, rowing or tennis. There’s an activity for you if you enjoy being alone, want to do something with others or enjoy team sports. Don’t forget to take the time to get up every 30 to 45 minutes each day to stretch, walk a bit or do some office exercises.
Bringing It All Together
There are just a couple of rules to making lifestyle changes that improve your health. First, take stock of your current habits and mark the ones that are healthy and those that are unhealthy. Once you know where you’re starting from, you can prioritize the changes you want to make. For example, if you drink soda each day you may want to cut back by one soda and replace it with water for one or two weeks and then repeat.
The objective is to make your changes slowly and make them stick. If you pick 10 things you want to change and then try to change them all you’ll inevitably decide it’s too difficult and quit. But, one step at a time you’ll start to enjoy better health and more energy – and that is highly motivating!
