7 Habits for Living a Longer and Healthier Life

Is your goal for yourself to live as long and as well as you possibly can?

This will require a lifelong discipline with your health habits.

Did you know that good health is one of the ingredients of overall  happiness?

Today I will share a chapter from the Book... No Excuses by Brain Tracy.


Seven Key Health Habits

The Alameda Study, covering many thousands of people for more than twenty years, concluded there were seven key health habits that contributed the most to long life:

1. Eat Regularly rather than fasting, starving, or gorging. Eat normal., healthy meals, preferably five or six times per day, with your last meal fully three hours before you go to sleep.

2. Eat Lightly: Overeating makes your tired and sluggish, whereas  eating lightly makes you feel healthy and alert. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, "No one ever regretted eating too little after a meal."

3. Don't snack between meals: When you eat, your body has to break down and digest the foods in your stomach so that they can move into your small intestine. This requires four to five hours. If you put food on top of food that you have already eaten, the digestive process must start over again, with part of your food at one stage of digestion and another part of your food at another stage. This leads to upset stomach, heartburn, drowsiness (especially in the afternoon), and constipation.

4. Exercise Regularly: The ideal is about thirty minutes a day, or 200 minutes per week. You can achieve this by walking, running, swimming, and/or using exercise equipment. You should fully articulate every joint every day.

5. Wear a seatbelt: Right up to age thirty-five, the most common cause of premature death is traffic accidents.

6. Don't smoke: Smoking is correlated with thirty-two different illnesses including lung-cancer, esophageal cancer, throat cancer, stomach cancer, heart disease and a variety of other ailments.

7. Drink alcohol in moderation: Studies show that one to two glasses of wine per day aid digestion and seem to be beneficial to your overall health. Anything in excess of that can lead to all kinds of problems, including overeating, traffic accidents, personality problems, and antisocial behavior.

Each of theses seven factors that contribute to long life are completely a matter of self-discipline. These seven factors are a matter of choice. They are actions that you can choose to take or not to take deliberately. They are completely under your control.

                                               Karin Glannstam - Personal Success Coach  
                                                           www.karinglannstam.com