With September right around the corner, I want you to turn your attention from looking at what’s around to you to what’s happening inside of you. Vascular Disease Awareness Month is a time to get more people thinking about their veins and arteries, and how they’re affected by our lifestyle. We spend so much time worrying about how we look and what others are doing that we often don’t leave enough to look at what really matters.
The Circulation Foundation list the top risk factors of vascular disease as:
- being male
- family history of vascular disease, angina, heart attacks or stroke
- high blood pressure
- smoking
- diabetes
- being overweight
- high cholesterol levels
- an unhealthy diet
- lack of exercise
- stress
Some of these can’t be affected by your lifestyle, but a lot of them are easily avoidable. 26 million of us are living with high cholesterol whilst 18.7 million of us have high blood pressure. As well as this, there are around 6.3 million obese adults in total. If you’re part of this population, then it’s time for a change.
The good news is that it simply involves a quick change up of your lifestyle. It’s the same advice I’ve always given: eat more wholesome and natural foods, move as much as you can, and take care of your mental health. If you take care of these three aspects of your lifestyle, then everything else will fall into place.