You might have heard of the common saying, “health is wealth.“
And maybe, the less common one, “wealth is health.”
Despite the huge benefit of staying healthy, you often get so trapped in a bid to make more money and live the life you want.
But, you can only make more money and live the life you want when you are in good health. This is not only the mere absence of disease, but also the state of overall physical, mental, and social well-being.
Here are seven of the most important, easiest, and effective ways that you can stay healthy.
1. Eat Balanced Diet
A healthy and balanced diet requires eating the right proportion of food rich in the six classes at the right time. Eating food containing the macro and micro-nutrient is essential for disease prevention, growth, development, and optimal health.
By eating healthy, you avoid foods with high amounts of salt and sugar. Salty and sugary foods are known to affect blood pressure and heart rate.
Likewise, avoiding unhealthy and heavily processed foods helps in maintaining good health status. Processed foods refer to any food that has been changed in a way before consumption.
However, not all processed foods are bad. Foods that have been minimally altered can be part of a healthy diet.
2. Get Enough Sleep
According to the Sleep Foundation, a teenager should sleep for about 8-10 hours daily, while adults should get 7-9 hours.
Getting enough sleep allows your body to rest, reduces stress, improves your memory, and prepares you for more tasks. Sleep has also been known to help in maintaining body weight.
Avoid coffee, phone during bedtime, energy drinks, and brain stimulants that could keep you from getting enough sleep.
3. Exercise Regularly
Physical exercise is another fantastic way to stay healthy. It helps your body, mind, and provides various other benefits.
These benefits include weight control, reduce the risk of heart disease, manage blood sugar, improve mental health and mood, and strengthen bones and muscles.
It would help if you practiced physical exercise at least three to four times a week. With each session lasting for about thirty minutes.
Whenever you want to exercise, choose activities you like and feel comfortable with and not injure yourself in the process.
4. Maintain a High Level of Personal Hygiene
Good personal hygiene provides you with better health by preventing the spread of germs from any person to you.
In other words, it helps eliminate any opportunistic pathogens lying around the surface of your skin, hair, and mouth.
The simple act of brushing your teeth twice a day, washing your body, and wearing clean clothes and washing your hands regularly helps prevent illness and infection from bacteria or viruses.
5. Reduce Alcohol and Drug Intake
A high intake of alcohol and drugs is dangerous to the human body.
A study of 600,000 people found that higher alcohol consumption is associated with a higher rate of stroke, fatal aneurysms, heart failure, and death.
Reducing your alcohol and drug intake would greatly improve your health. Its avoidance would transform you into an absolute being.
6. Balance Your Professional and Personal Life
It would be best if you struck a balance between your professional and personal life. Your professional life shouldn’t affect your personal life and vice-versa.
If you find out one is affecting the other, you should reconcile and strike a balance.
It would help if you found what works best for you as the approach varies from one individual to another.
7. Manage Stress
Unmanaged stress and depression could manifest and result in physical illnesses. Learning how to manage stress helps in boosting your physical and mental health.
Find the cause of your stress and way of dealing with it.
In order to deal with your stress, meditate, take up yoga, book a massage appointment, or seek professional help towards alleviating stress.
Conclusion
Staying healthy is something we all need to strive towards because it is not what we can buy. However, good health can be attained by eating a balanced diet, getting enough sleep, exercising regularly, maintaining good hygiene, reducing alcohol and drug intake, balancing professional and personal life, and managing stress.
I initially published this article here.