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HEALTH
Adding
life years
The general recommendation for pretty much every human on the planet is to do at least 150 minutes per week of moderate intensity physical activity. Moderate intensity is easy to measure: it means you can only just keep a conversation going while you’re exercising.
To Your
By Simon Matthews, CEO Wellcoaches Australia & Singapore
Not so long ago, keeping your health in top shape was generally a matter of doing your day-to-day work. Most people had manual labor jobs that involved a lot of physical activity and they slept well at night simply because they were tired. There were no electronic devices to keep them sedentary or disturb their sleep. Pre-packaged processed meals didn’t exist and food was either grown on their own property or traded with neighbors. It’s a very different story now, and staying healthy means thinking carefully about the daily choices that we make. Today, the illnesses most likely to make you seriously sick, or even cause death, are chronic or “lifestyle” diseases. These include heart disease, stroke, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, respiratory disease, arthritis, obesity and a number of cancers.
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Eat a whole food, plant-based diet. What does this mean? It means as far as you can, eat foods that look the way they did when they were grown. Minimize highly processed foods. While processing involves a lot of different things, depending on the food that you’re talking about, it typically means that some elements of the food that are beneficial to our health (such as dietary fibre) are stripped out and other things are added (frequently salts and sugars).
Any addictive substance can be harmful to health, so eliminating tobacco altogether can drastically lower your risk of chronic disease. Being careful about alcohol intake will do likewise.
Nearly half the US population has at least one chronic disease resulting in about 70 percent of all deaths. The good news is that there are steps that you can take right now to help keep you healthy and prevent chronic disease or combat it, if it’s something that you’re already dealing with in your life. I’m speaking about the principles of lifestyle medicine. Lifestyle medicine revolves around six straightforward guidelines that you can either introduce to or increase in your day-to-day life.
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