There are no real tricks to devising a diet to lower cholesterol, blood pressure, and weight. In fact, it seems so easy many people are convinced it just won’t work. Not for them, anyway.
What’s the trick? If you want a diet to lower cholesterol, reduce blood pressure, and stabilize your weight at a healthy level, you’ll need to eat a diet high in nutrient-dense, natural foods.
You’ll need to avoid fast foods and pre-prepped and processed foods like the plague. After all, the industrialized nations of the world are said to be plagued with an obesity epidemic although the general public doesn’t seem to take issues of excess weight with the same degree of seriousness as the plague.
The third step to the trick of a diet to lower cholesterol and improve vital signs throughout the body is to get a moderate, but regular, amount of physical activity every day. It’s hard to convince some people that regular exercise is truly a part of a healthy diet but every diet book written thus far includes serious discussion of the value of regular exercise.
What are those nutrient-dense, natural foods? Fruits and veggies eaten as close to raw as possible. Think salads, sautés, stir-fry, and steamed. Nuts and seeds are fruits, too, so don’t leave these nutritional powerhouses out. All fruits and vegetables begin to lose nutrient value when exposed to heat. In other words, over-cooking leads to less nutritious fruits and vegetables. The more gently cooked, or raw, the fruits and veggies, the more nutrients are consumed.
Many of the ingredients required to make mass-produced food products from factories are not available to the home cook. Many of them didn’t even exist twenty years ago. Our bodies rely on a digestive system that was perfected many, many generations ago. We simply do not have the ability to digest many of these ingredients so they sometimes accumulate in our bodies in quantities that become toxic.
A diet of fast foods, refined, processed, pre-made, ready-to-eat, single serving, grab-and-go food choices doesn’t provide the necessary nutrients to fuel the body so we stay hungry. Hunger is our body’s way of saying I need some fuel now. A diet to lower cholesterol and feed healthier living in general will contain a minimum, if any, of this type food products.
The sweaty part of a diet to lower cholesterol involves no less than 30 minutes of moderate exercise three days a week. Thirty minutes can be done all in one session or broken down into several smaller exercise sessions throughout the day. Moderate exercise means you can maintain a conversation with an exercise partner.
Even though this is a diet to lower cholesterol, following it faithfully will relieve symptoms of almost every chronic disease known to modern man. It’s a diet the entire family can follow so meal planning and preparation don’t have to be grueling affairs.
This diet to lower cholesterol does work. And it will work for everybody.
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