3 Rules Of Thumb For Eating Healthy

3 Rules Of thumb For Eating Healthy (And Lowering Your Blood Pressure)

When you’re familiar with high blood pressure, you may well be aware that lifestyle changes can have a positive influence on your BP. Working out more regularly, sleeping better and eating healthier all help to lower your BP. 
In this blog, I want to focus on eating and drinking, and how 3 easy rules of thumb can help you to make healthier choices that will help to lower your BP.  

1) The fewer ingredients, the better
When you’re in the supermarket, it’s hard to know how to make healthy choices. There’s so much choice, and a lot of products claim to contain ‘less calories’, ‘less salt’ or to ‘add fibers to your meal’. Now how do you know if these claims are true? How to make sure your choice is healthy?
It’s important to start reading the list of ingredients. As a rule of thumb, the more ingredients, the more processed the food is. And processed foods often contain a lot of salt, sugar, and preservatives that are better to avoid. 

2) Try to shift your focus
When you start dieting, you may be too well aware that you shouldn’t eat that burger or that bag of chips. What if you try to shift your mindset? You’re still allowed to eat an occasional burger or a pint of ice cream, but you also try to add more healthy options to your menu.
Let’s say that you eat healthy 50% of the time. When you go to the supermarket now and buy more healthy foods, but you’re also free to add one or two less healthy options to your cart. That would mean a big win, because now you may be eating healthy 75% of the time! 
So try to focus on the healthy things you can still eat, and only buy healthy stuff that you really like. For me, it means buying a lot of snack veggies. I put a small box with cherry tomatoes, a mini cucumber and a few carrots in my bag every day, and leave my bag of (salty!) chips at home now.

3) Mind your drinks
Are you a coffee addict just like me? Only recently I discovered that coffee can give a peak in your blood pressure. That’s why I decided to still drink my coffee, but only 1 or 2 per day. For the rest, I now drink tea, water or flavored water. I like the variation, and although I missed my caffeine shots at first, I now notice I’m feeling a lot better and also that my BP doesn’t peak so much anymore. Flavored water is also a good option if you’re used to drinking sodas or sugared drinks. 

Get insights into your levels
You don’t know what your diet does to your Blood Pressure if you don’t know your levels. That’s why my advice is: start measuring your Blood Pressure! iProven’s BPM-337BLU has just been released, and it’s the perfect tool to get insights into your levels. It’s beautiful, shiny and very easy to use. The best thing? You can slide it into your bag easily, and take it with you wherever you go.