8 Tips To Reduce Your Blood Pressure Naturally: Expert Shares Guidelines to Address Hypertension

An unhealthy lifestyle may be the cause of your high blood sugar. Integrative Health Coach shares some guidelines to address this problem.

Today is World Hypertension Day and the first thing all of us want to know in this fast paced life is 'How do we reduce our high blood pressure'. Maybe this is presumptuous of me. So, let's break it down. What exactly is hypertension? High Blood pressure, also known as hypertension, is elevated levels of blood pressure in our bodies. Basically, our blood has a certain level of pressure as it pumps through our bodies (when our heart beats) that pushes against the walls of our arteries. The normal level is 120/80mmHg. When our pressures go above 140/90mmHg, we term this as hypertension.

Symptoms of high blood sugar

Now these are certain symptoms one might get when one is hypertensive but usually this is a silent disease. Certain symptoms may include

• Headache
• Nosebleeds
• Shortness of breath.

Untreated hypertension can lead to increased risk of heart attacks, stroke and chronic kidney disease.

Tips to reduce high blood sugar

Hypertension is mainly a lifestyle disease and lifestyle modifications are thus a large part of the treatment, of course with medications if needed. A mildly hypertensive person may find that they reduce their blood pressure and control it with the right and consistent habit changes. Some might need medications to control it, others won't.

• Adopt some kind of regular physical activity. The AHA (American heart Association) recommends 150 mins of moderate activity per week or 75 mins of intense physical activity per week. Even relatively small amounts of physical activity have been proven to reduce blood pressure
• Follow a heart healthy diet! A DASH diet or a Mediterranean Diet is heart healthy
• Maintain a healthy BMI, this helps reduce blood pressure
• Quit smoking. Smoking is the biggest cause of heart disease and quitting this directly impacts and reduces a persons blood pressure
• Limit sodium intake. A diet high in salt raises BP so controlling our salt intake is helpful to control hypertension
• Limiting alcohol intake also helps
• Regularly check your blood pressure. It is a highly common and silent disease and creeps up without one knowing it. So regularly checking this will help detect and correct it sooner
• Medicate if and when necessary.

Key to healthy life

Remember the answer lies in early detection, a healthy lifestyle and treatment! Hypertension is a very preventable risk factor for heart disease and if we can take away one thing from this conversation today it would be that the key to our problems lies in our lifestyle habits!

(This article is authored by Dr Prarthana shah, Integrative Health Coach)