“Health is much more dependent on our Habits and Nutrition than on Medicine”.
There are sorts of things you can do to manage your health. You can help avoid some diseases or minimize symptoms of some conditions by eating healthy, fresh food, and being physically active. It’s a great idea to see your doctor at least once a year, and you can stay up to date by reading current and accurate health.
The advantage of living a healthy lifestyle includes:
- Lower the risk of most diseases, including heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.
- Improving your joint stability, flexibility, strength, stamina, and range of movement.
- Helping to maintain flexibility, balance, and coordination.
- Maintaining bone density, preventing osteoporosis, and bone fractures.
- Reducing the symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression, and improving your sense of wellness and mood.
- Improving self-esteem and self-confidence.
- Improving sharpness and clarity of mind, including memory.
- Improving your ability to recover from illness.
- Increasing the length of your life.
Being physically fit means you are rarely probable to get injured doing physical activity in day-to-day life. If you do get injured, you will recover quickly.
Eating a well-balanced diet that is excessive in fruits and vegetables, and little in processed foods and fats will help you to maintain a healthy weight.
For expert advice, including selected nutrition and dietary recommendations to improve your overall health or to help you manage specific health needs, contact a nutritionist or dietitian.
Types of Health
There are mostly two types of health are discussed: the mental and physical health.
Financial, emotional, or spiritual health also contributes to our overall health. Medical professionals have linked these, to lower stress levels and improved mental and physical well-being.
People with strong financial health, may worry less about their finances and have the means to buy fresh food, and fruit juices more regularly. Those with good spiritual health may feel a sense of calm and purpose that energizes good mental health.
Physical Health
A person who has good physical health is possible to have bodily functions and activities working at their crest.
This is not only to an absence of disease but also regular exercises, a balanced diet, and enough rest, all these provide good health. People can take medical treatment to maintain balance when required.
Physical well-being requires taking a healthy lifestyle to decrease the risk of disease. Maintaining physical fitness can protect and mature the stamina of a person’s heart functions, muscular strength, flexibility, and body composition.
Nourishing physical health and well-being also involve reducing the risk of injuries or health issues.
Good physical health can work together with mental health to improve a person’s overall quality of life.
Mental Health
Mental health describes a person’s emotional, social, and psychological well-being. Mental health is as important as physical health because it is also a part of a full and active lifestyle.
It is difficult to define mental health than physical health because many psychological diagnoses depend on an individual’s sense of their experience.
Good mental health is not only categorized by the absence of anxiety, and depression, or any other disorder. It also depends on a person’s ability to enjoy life such as:
- overcome after hard experiences and adjust to change
- balance different part of life, for instance, family and finances
- achieve their full aptitude
- feel safe and assured
Eating well and exercising can help protect against depression. Being healthy sharpens your memory and calm your mood. A low-stress life can help you sleep better, which leads to more energy. Good mental health can also be about maintaining healthy relationships, feeling positive about life, and experiencing a sense of belonging.
Physical and mental health have bold interconnections. For example, if a persistent illness affects a person’s ability to complete their regular tasks, it may create depression and stress. These feelings could be due to financial problems or portability issues.
It is important to detain “health” entirely, instead of as a series of different components. All types of health are associated, and people should focus on overall well-being and balance as the keys to good health.
Aspects of Good Health
Good health is based on a vast scope of features:
Genetic factors
An individual is born with a variety of genes. In some people, a familiar genetic pattern can lead to a lower optimum level of health. A person may inherit genes from their parents that increase their risk for some health issues.
Environmental factors
Environmental factors alone play enough roles to impact health. An environmental trigger can cause illness in a person who has an increased genetic risk of a particular disease.
It is possible to categorize as follows:
The physical environment: This includes which germs exist in an area, as well as pollution levels.
The social and economic environment: This may include the financial status of a family or community, as well as the social culture and quality of relationships.
A person’s habits and behaviors: A person’s genetic structure and lifestyle choices can affect their overall health.
According to various studies, the higher a person’s socioeconomic status, the more they can enjoy their good health, have a good education, get a well-paid job, and can afford good healthcare at the time of injury or diseases.
And, people with low socioeconomic status may experience stress in everyday life, such as financial difficulties, marital disturbance, and unemployment.
The social factors may also impact the risk of poor’s health for people with low finances, such as marginalization and discrimination.
Cultural issues can also affect our health. The traditions and customs of a society and a family’s response to them can have a good or bad impact on health.
Many studies indicated that people who ate a healthy diet are more likely to consume high levels of fruits, vegetables than people who regularly consume fast foods.
How a person manages stress will also affect their health. People who smoke tobacco, drink alcohol, or take illegal drugs to manage stressful situations are more probably to develop health problems than those who manage stress through a healthful diet, relaxation techniques, and exercise.
Preserving Health
The best way to preserve health is to preserve it through a healthy lifestyle rather than waiting until sickness or fragility to address health problems. Many times people use the name it ‘wellness’ to describe this continuous state of enhanced well-being.
The definition of best health is completely individual, like the steps, a person may take to get there. Each person has different health goals and various ways to achieve them.
It may not be possible to avoid disease thoroughly. However, a person should do as much as they can to develop flexibility and prepare the body and mind to deal with illnesses as they arise.
Monitoring Health
The best way to stop illness when you get sick is to see your general practitioner for regular health checks, healthcare advice.
Regular health checkups
Regular health checks are an important part of your personal health management at all stages of life.
The checkups that are recommended at the age of your 20s and 30s include:
- Blood pressure (every two years).
- Regular dental checks (every 4-6 months).
- Regular skin cancer checks for those at higher risk.
- Pap test and pelvic exam (women, every two years).
- Regular testes examination (men).
The checkups that are recommended at the age of your 40’s, includes:
- Eye checkups
- Regular breast checks (women who are high-risk).
- Health evaluation if you are at risk of developing the incurable disease.
- Health evaluation if you are at risk of heart disease.
- Body cholesterol checkups.
- Health evaluation if you have a high risk of developing type-2 diabetes (every three years).
The checkups that are recommended above the age of your 50’s, includes:
Now, it is important to have all above tests as well as to have:
- Breast checks and mammograms (for women, check yourself regularly, and have a mammogram every two years).
- An assessment of your bone health.
- Fecal occult blood tests (FOBT) to detect bowel cancer (every two years using a self-test)
- A hearing assessment (when you have symptoms).
How to prevent illness
Taking steps to help prevent illness involve:
- All your necessary vaccinations should on time and up-to-date.
- By using proper sun protection.
- Keep good personal and food-handling hygiene.
- Knowing the difference between healthy food choices and unhealthy ones. Visit a dietitian or nutritionist for help with planning a diet that meets your needs.
- By taking action in the case of symptoms arise and not waiting until it gets worse.
- Managing your health by tracking and monitoring your own health, and asking healthcare professionals or doctors for advice.
A persistent or long-term illness means having to make changes in your life. You will have to adjust to the condition and the therapy used to treat it. Living with a continuous illness may change the way you live, see yourself, and relate to others. This can create more stress.
Frequently symptoms, like tiredness, aches, and pains, are not visible, so no one can always appreciate the weakening effects. It is not just the physical symptoms that can affect a person. But the control on lifestyle and living with chronic pain can take a charge mentally as well.
Knowing the facts about your illness will help you feel more comfortable and in control. You may have to share information about your illness with your family or close friends who may help from a better understanding of it.
To get the facts about your illness or condition to talk to:
- Healthcare experts, including doctors and counselors, can provide good advice about living with your illness.
- Other people living with those illnesses as most chronic illnesses have support groups available, where you can connect with others who are addressing the same issues as you.
Vaccinations – Vaccinations are the easiest and most effective way of protecting people against certain diseases. When someone is injected with vaccines they are taking in a dead category of the disease-causing bacteria or virus to the body’s immune system. This way the body into thinking it has the disease, so it starts to build immunity to it without causing the definite disease.
If a vaccinated person then comes into contact with the disease, their immune system is better provided to fight it, either preventing the disease from increasing or at least reducing its seriousness.
The vaccination protects the community by helping to control serious infectious diseases.
You can protect yourself by making sure you and your children are up to date with immunizations.
Sun Protection – Although a definite amount of sun is beneficial for you as a source of vitamin D, which is essential for strong bones and overall health, time in the sun should be observed so that you don’t get sunburn or damage your skin by its UV (ultraviolet) rays
UV is the radiation that causes skin cancer. This radiation is strong enough to cause sunburn in a few minutes in extreme summertime.
During summer, protect yourself from sunburn and the possibility of skin cancer by:
- Wearing a hat when you go outside between 10 am and 4 pm
- Using sunscreen on your body
- Finding shady areas if you are going to spend time outside
- Covering up with lightweight clothes, including long sleeves and pants.
Hygiene – Good personal hygiene can stop the growth and spread of disease. Every day, we interact with other people and touch things such as door handles, money, and many things in day-to-day life that have been touched by many people before us. Touching these items and then touching your face (nose and mouth) invites many diseases such as the common cold are spread.
Good personal hygiene means:
Washing your hands before eating or preparing food, after the toilet, and after sneezing or coughing.
Having a daily shower or bath, using soap or body wash to kill the bacteria that grows on your skin.
Good dental hygiene is also important for health and it starts with brushing your teeth in the morning and in the night before going to bed. Maintains this hygiene and regular check-ups with your dentist will help prevent mouth and gum disease, which can lead to other illnesses in the body.
Food safety
Make sure that the food you buy, eat yourself, or prepare for your family or friends, remains safe by following these simple guidelines:
- Take care when eating out and do not eat food if you think it may be unsafe. See a doctor in case of illness, if your symptoms are severe.
- Buy your food from creditable suppliers and avoid spoiled foods, use-by dates, or foods in damaged containers or packaging. Take chilled, frozen, or hot foods straight home in insulated containers.
- Store food well and keep raw foods and ready-to-eat foods separate. Keep chilled foods cold at 5 °C or colder, and hot food hot at 60 °C or hotter.
- Wash your hands when preparing food. Rewash them after handling raw meats, chicken, seafood, eggs, and unwashed vegetables. Do not prepare food for others if you are sick.
- Keep things clean and separate. Wash raw fruits and vegetables with clean water before using them. Do not allow pets in the kitchen.
- Use the fridge (or microwave) to defrost frozen food – bacteria can grow in frozen food while it is defrosting, so keep frozen food below 5 °C to defrost. Avoid re-freezing defrost food.
- When in doubt, throw food out.
A healthy lifestyle helps to enhance your physical, mental, and emotional health.
Taking care of your health by observing what you eat, being physically active, having an active social life, getting plenty of rest, not smoking, and drinking too much alcohol.
You can take steps to reduce your risk of disease, such as making sure your vaccinations are on time and be conscious about your food safety.
Protect yourself from the sun in peak hours during summer to save against skin cancer.
Visit your doctor for regular health checkups, and meet healthcare experts when you first notice any symptoms.