Healthy Eating

A good diet is essential to overall good health. Avoiding certain foods and drinks may help prolong your life. Eating too much high-calorie food rich in simple carbohydrates (sugars) or fat could lead to weight gain or obesity.

The key to maintaining a good diet is to have a balanced diet. A balanced diet requires moderation. Some foods are particularly bad for you. They should be avoid or eaten in moderation. Eating food with high fat content can raise the level of your "bad" cholesterol. Which can lead to heart disease and stroke. You should eat foods such as fast food, cakes, biscuits and margarine in moderation.

Reducing salt consumption is also important to keep your heart healthy. Eating too much salt could lead to high blood pressure. Which can lead to heart failure, stroke and other complications. You can reduce your salt consumption by checking food packaging. Which will tell you how much salt is in that item. If an item has high salt content you don't need to add salt yourself.

Drinking too much alcohol can also have damaging effects on your health. Not only can it leave us with a hangover the next day. Regularly drinking more than the recommended limit can lead to damaging organs. Commonly, leading to liver disease.

Smoking increases your risk of more than 50 serious health conditions. It causes about 90% of lung cancers. It can damage your heat, your blood circulation and worsen any respiratory/breathing conditions. Smoking can also affect fertility. Smoking whilst pregnant can affect the unborn baby's development.

More information can be found on the stop smoking website.

Watch Your Weight

Weight gain is regularly caused by taking in more calories then you use up. Fast foods, snacks and large portions give us more food than we really need. 

At the same time, today's way of life is much less physically active. It can be very easy to eat more calories then you actually burn off. Leading to the excess being stored as fat. Doing this regularly will eventually lead to becoming over-weight and obese.

Obesity is when a person's body mass index (BMI) is 30 or above. Meaning htey are carring too much fat for their sex and height.

You can work out your own BMI. Divide your weight in kilograms by your height in metres squared. Lets say, 70 kg weight and 1.75 metres tall (or, 5 foot 7 inches). That would be: 70 / (1.75 * 1.75) ≈ 22.86.

Don't worry if that's confusing. There is a BMI calculator on the NHS website here.

Moderate exercise and changes to your diet are vital to losing weight. Losing weight can also reduce risk of illnesses like high blood pressure and diabetes.