Living with Heart Disease

Couple with an apple Heart disease kills more Americans than cancer each year. Adopting a healthy lifestyle can help you control and often reduce risk factors that lead to heart disease.

Small changes including reducing salt intake, increasing physical activity, eating more vegetables and less meat, taking time every day to de-stress and getting a good night's sleep, can significantly reduce cholesterol and high blood pressure. Research shows that plant-based diets help decrease strokes, heart attacks and many forms of cancer as well as increased life expectancy and fertility. To successfully make lifestyle changes, start with a plan that has realistic and specific goals, and rewards for accomplishments.

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These days, people are on so many pills that they want to come off. So, how do you get off of pills when you have high blood pressure or high cholesterol?

The answer comes in lifestyle. Nature's most potent anti-hypertensive, that is the thing that fights high blood pressure, is exercise. It's free, but it requires 30 minutes of breathless intense activity before there's an effect. It has to happen regularly and be part of a lifestyle.

And then of course, eating a much lower fat, plant-based, whole unprocessed food diet is one of the best ways to get cholesterol to plummet very quickly.

Together, diet and exercise do wonders to improve cholesterol and blood pressure.

Remember, the medical word for high blood pressure is hypertension: too much tension. So, if we are practicing things to get rid of that tension, blood pressure will also come down, and that's why stress relief is so important as well.

And, we also know that stress has an effect on cholesterol. So, putting all these things together, eating more plants, exercising more, stressing less and loving more, getting that support in your life, will do wonders for blood pressure and cholesterol.