5 Benefits Of A Healthy Lifestyle That Will Bring You Into Old Age

Living a healthy lifestyle is perhaps the single most important thing that you can do to prevent yourself from developing a wide array of deadly diseases that will shorten your lifespan. The benefits of a healthy lifestyle are seemingly endless and all of the things that we are going to mention will contribute to you feeling good and seeing old age without the risk of developing a ton of different diseases. We’re going to talk about the various aspects of living a healthy lifestyle and give you some tips on the way you should live in order to be as healthy a human as you can possibly be!

What Is A Healthy Lifestyle?

For the purposes of this article, it would probably be wise to define what exactly we mean by living a healthy lifestyle. First and foremost a healthy lifestyle means exercising on a regular basis as well as eating a nutritionally balanced diet. Another really important part of a healthy lifestyle involves not drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, doing drugs, or smoking tobacco. If you do all of these things and stay healthy you should be able to grow very old, so let’s look at all of the different benefits of living the way a healthy human should live.

Benefit #1: Living Smoke-Free & Your Health

The fact of the matter is that smoking cigarettes or any other form of tobacco is downright horrible for your health, with one of the worst effects taking place on your cardiovascular system. Smoking tobacco can cause things like strokes and coronary heart disease which is one of the leading causes of deaths in North America.

The effect of cigarettes is so great that even just 5 per day can cause cardiovascular disease. Smoking cigarettes will also cause your heart pressure to rise to an unhealthy level because it causes your blood vessels to thicken and become narrower. This forces your heart to work harder to pump blood throughout your body, ultimately making it work too hard.

Smoking can also cause arterial blockages which ultimately reduce blood flow to the extremities, something which can cause embolisms and clots to form. This is not only very dangerous to your health, but a lack of blood flow also reduces your ability to perform physical activities.

Smoking cigarettes is of course also terrible for your respiratory health. Aside from all of the diseases you get, having an inefficient and unhealthy oxygenation system means that your muscles and extremities are not getting enough oxygen to function properly, something that will greatly impede your ability to perform physical activities.

Besides that, smoking also causes things like emphysema, chronic bronchitis, lung cancer, and other severe respiratory illnesses that can greatly shorten your lifespan. In fact, smoking can cause cancers to appear almost anywhere in your body, not just in the lungs.

There are so many other things that smoking does to your body such as increasing your chances of getting rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, cataracts in your eyes, decreased bone health, decreased dental health, inefficient or damaged sperm, and an inefficient immune system. As you can see, if you want to live a healthy life and grow old, you need to quit smoking tobacco as soon as humanly possible.

Benefit #2: Limiting Your Alcohol Consumption & Your Health

Another thing that you should avoid as much as possible for the benefit of your health is alcohol. Now we aren’t saying that you can’t have the occasional drink with friends, but the overconsumption of alcohol is definitely not good for you.

One of the biggest negative effects of drinking alcohol, especially way too much, is that it lowers your immune system’s ability to fight off infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, the flu, and other virus and bacteria-borne diseases. A single heavy night of drinking can lower your immune system’s ability to fight off these things for up to 24 hours, plus it also increases your chances of contracting them in the first place.

Moreover, drinking too much alcohol of any kind can greatly increase your risk of developing various types of cancer. Just some of the types of cancer that alcohol is known to cause include mouth, throat, esophagus, liver, and breast cancer, all of which are of course not desirable in the least.

Drinking way to much liquor can also cause your pancreas to release toxic chemicals in your body, something which leads to pancreatitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels in the pancreas that inhibits the proper digestion of foods.

Of course, one of the main effects that alcohol has on your body has to do with the liver. Your liver is the thing that ends up filtering out the alcohol in your blood, therefore too much of it can cause things like cirrhosis, fibrosis, alcohol hepatitis, and steatosis (fatty liver). All of these diseases will greatly shorten your lifespan and are all known to be fatal in the long run.

Drinking too much liquor and alcohol is also very bad for your heart and can cause things like cardiomyopathy, which is the stretching of the heart muscle, arrhythmias, stroke, and high blood pressure. Once again all of these things can prove to be fatal to human health. Too much alcohol can even cause your brain function to lower, lower coordination, disturb your thought process, and cause major mood swings too.

Benefit #3: Limiting Your Consumption Of Sugar & Your Health

The next part of living a healthy lifestyle involves eating a proper diet and one of the most important things to doing that is to limit your intake of sugar. Sugar can have some disastrous effects on your health, all of which we are going to talk about.

First of all, sugar is what we like to call empty calories, meaning that it does give us short bouts of energy, but it doesn’t actually contain any nutritional value and doesn’t contribute to our health in any way. The general rule is that a maximum of 15 percent of your daily calories should come from sugar, and that is being very generous. Moreover, sugar is just very bad for your teeth and causes cavities and other major mouth related diseases.

Next, many sugars contain a type of sugar known as fructose, something which is especially bad for your liver. Eating way too much fructose can cause your liver to turn that fructose into fat, thus causing you to develop a disease known as a fatty liver, something which can be fatal over a prolonged period of time. For a long time, it was thought that only alcohol could cause a fatty liver, but that is now known to be inaccurate.

Moreover, eating too much sugar on a daily basis can cause an insulin resistance in your body, this lowering your body’s ability to effectively deal with and digest sugars. An insulin resistance is known to be the major cause of several health issues such as obesity, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease, and worst of all, type II diabetes. One of the worst parts about eating too much sugar is that it can actually cause you to develop various types of cancer.

One of the worst parts about eating too much sugar is that it causes the brain to release a lot of dopamine. Dopamine is something that makes us feel happy and elevates our mood, the problem is that it is highly addictive and we keep wanting more of it. Since sugar creates dopamine releases we keep eating more and more of it, thus increasing our chances of developing any one of the sugar-related diseases that we have mentioned above.

The bottom line is that sugar can cause a whole variety of diseases in your body, worst of all being cardiovascular disease and obesity, both things which come with a wide array of their own consequences.

Benefit #4: Getting Your Vitamins & Minerals

We aren’t going to go very in depth about every single vitamin and mineral out there, but we definitely want to give you a rough idea of what it means if you don’t get enough of them. The sad fact of the matter is that many people do not get enough of these nutrients, especially so in places like America and Canada.

First of all, not getting essential vitamins and minerals such as Vitamins A, C, and E, as well as different antioxidants, can cause your immune system to be weak and not be able to fight off various infections. Getting these vitamins and minerals is not that hard because they are contained in a variety of leafy greens, nuts, beans, whole grains, poultry, and red meat.

Another thing that you are at risk of if you don’t get enough minerals is the development of brittle bones, which can lead to breakages and things like osteoporosis. One of the most important elements in preventing brittle bones is calcium, among several other minerals. The easiest way for you to get enough calcium is by eating various dairy products, soy-based products or vegetables such as broccoli, cucumber, or celery.

Moreover, not getting enough vitamins and minerals such as vitamin B12, niacin, iron, and Vitamin C can lead to gum degradation, tooth loss, gum disease, and other forms of oral diseases that can put your health at risk in the long run. It is also shown that a severe vitamin and mineral deficiency can cause mental problems, especially when it comes to mood stability and the ability to remember things in both the short and long run.

Benefit #5: Regular Daily Exercise & Your Health

There are so many different things that exercising on a regular basis can do for you. Perhaps one of the best things that it does is to increase your mood, make you happier, and decrease the effects of things like anxiety and depression. Exercising regularly causes your brain to release several different chemicals, with one of the most important ones being serotonin, something which can make you feel happier in both the short and long run.

Another major benefit of exercising on a regular basis is that it helps to control your weight and it helps to prevent obesity, something which is a leading cause of various major and fatal diseases. Regular exercise helps to prevent things like diabetes, various types of cancer, it helps with controlling your blood pressure, it can prevent metabolic syndrome and strokes, and it helps control good and bad cholesterol levels too.

The next big benefit of getting regular exercise is that it improves your energy levels and it does so through a variety of means. First off, regular exercise boosts your metabolism to work in overdrive, meaning that more of the foods you eat get rapidly converted into both short and long term energy instead of being stored as body fat. Moreover, it helps to boost energy by facilitating the delivery of oxygen and vital nutrients throughout your body. Not only will you have more energy during the day, but regular exercise will also help you sleep better during the night time.

In our opinion, one of the greatest benefits of regular physical activity is that it can boost sexual relations for both men and women. Women are shown to increase their arousal with regular exercise and men are shown to experience fewer sexual problems such as dysfunction when engaging in regular daily exercise. For men, testosterone gets released and created during exercise, something which is very important for a healthy sex life.

Conclusion

As you can see, living a healthy lifestyle has so many different benefits that we can hardly keep track and count them all. The benefits of a healthy lifestyle all arise from 5 main points that we have discussed. Those points being a limited consumption of alcohol, not smoking tobacco, getting your vitamins and minerals, reducing your intake of sugar, and engaging in regular daily exercise. Together these 5 aspects can really help to keep you in top shape for a very long time and lead you to old age with ease!

If you have any questions or comments about living a healthy lifestyle, please feel free to drop us a note!