Being healthy
Along with being active and
eating healthily, many other parts of your lifestyle can affect
your heart health.
Take our online
lifestyle checker today: it's quick and easy to fill in and
when you're finished, you'll get a personalised report with tips
and support on how to improve your lifestyle and areas that you
might want to focus on.
Know your shape
Make sure you’re not carrying too much weight around
your middle. It puts you at risk of getting heart
disease or diabetes and having high
blood pressure. Being overweight
generally, wherever you carry the excess, increases your risk
too.
Your body weight and shape is important for your general
health and heart health too. Make sure you're accurately measuring your waist size and
work
out your BMI to find out what you need to do.
Staying a healthy weight
Reducing your weight
Smoking
Smoking damages the
arteries that provide your heart with food and oxygen and
cigerettes contain harmful chemicals which can increase your risk
of having a heart attack.
Giving up smoking is the single most important
thing you can do to improve your heart health.
Shisha
smoking is harmful too. Recent research has shown that some shisha
smoke contains large quantities of the chemicals that can lead to
heart disease, lung cancer and other cancers, and addiction. Did
you know that one shisha smoking session may expose the smoker to
more smoke over a longer period of time than occurs when smoking a
cigarette?
Chewing tobacco is not a
healthier alternative to smoking; it can increase your risk of
mouth cancer, throat cancer and cancer of the oesophagus. It is
highly addictive and can make your teeth more vulnerable to tooth
decay and can cause tooth loss.
It’s never too late to give up smoking and the risk to your
heart health decreases significantly soon after you stop.
Some tips
- Make a date to give up, and stick to it! Throw away all your
tobacco, lighters and ashtrays.
- Draw up a plan of action. Think about what could help you stop
smoking – such as using a nicotine-replacement product – and have
it ready before the date you plan to quit.
- Keep busy, to help take your mind off cigarettes. Try to change
your routine and avoid the shop where you usually buy
cigarettes.
- distract yourself change environment
- Get support. Let your family and friends know you are quitting.
Some people find that talking to friends and relatives who have
stopped can be helpful.
- Treat yourself. If you can, use the money you are saving by not
smoking, to buy yourself something special.
- Read more about
Smoking, shisha and chewing tobacco - how to stop
The following organisations may also be able to help:
Stress
Stress over a long period of time affects us all differently.
While it may play a part in your risk of getting heart
disease or having a stroke, it’s more likely that the
unhealthy habits we adopt to help us cope with stress increase
our risk more.
Think about what affects your stress levels, how you cope and
what changes you want to make.
Learn how to assess
your stress levels and how to deal with it
Alcohol
Drinking too much alcohol is one of the most common causes of
hospital admission in the UK.
Drinking more than the recommended amount can have a
harmful effect on your health. It can cause
abnormal heart rhythms,
high blood pressure, damage to the heart muscle and
other diseases such as stroke, liver problems and some
cancers.
Use our Alcohol Calculator
to figure out how many units you drink. You can also sign up to our
free Heart
Matters service for more information on alcohol and other
ways to keep yourself and your heart healthy.