With High Blood Pressure, Start Making Lifestyle Changes Sooner Rather Than Later.

With High Blood Pressure, Start Making Lifestyle Changes Sooner Rather Than Later.

There is an old-style sales and motivational maxim that says “success by the inch is a cinch by the yard it is hard” and nowhere is this more true than in personal and private health matters. How many times have we said to ourselves “I'm going to go on that diet and I'm going to lose the extra few pounds or so” only to fail dismally and find ourselves even more depressed and quite often worse off than we were when we started out.

How many times have we said to ourselves “I'm going to go on that diet and I'm going to lose the extra few pounds or so” only to fail dismally and find ourselves even more depressed and quite often worse off than we were when we started out.

The trouble is that quite often we set ourselves totally unrealistic targets and then wonder why we continually fail to hit them. The answer to this cycle of boom-bust personal healthcare management is to be slightly smarter at the outset and not set our goals too high.

Now this is not to countenance mediocrity and appeasement with regards to personal health matters rather it is an attempt to create an environment where we can be more honest with ourselves and at the end of the day accomplish more of what we set out to do at the very start.

I make this comment as somebody who can talk about this matter with a fair amount of experience. In my own personal case it was after being diagnosed or being told that I suffered from malignant hypertension and if I didn’t start to take better care of myself sooner rather than later then I would have to confine myself having to rely on some fairly serious and powerful drugs for the rest of my life and all that entailed.

I had to make the lifestyle changes and looking back after some five years some of them turned out to be fairly drastic ones but at least some five years later those lifestyle changes have started to develop a routine of their own.

It wasn't easy and I wouldn’t want to start by saying that it was but in my case I started small and built gradually. Going back to the maxim “success by the yard is hard”, some of the lifestyle changes took several years to accomplish while some of them took several weeks.

The important thing is that at all times stay focused on the big picture and expect that in some cases that for every two steps forward you take, you wind up taking one step backward. In my case my initial blood pressure reading was 216/160 (the generally accepted target level should be 120/80) and so I fell fairly and squarely into the middle of the bracket entitled “Malignant Hypertension”.

Here we are five years later and as a result of an entire campaign of lifestyle changes some bigger than others and conversely some smaller than others I now find myself with that ideal blood pressure reading of 116/76.

As I said some lifestyle changes were easier to accomplish than others but in all cases the end result has been worth it.

So the message of all of this has to be if you are confronted by necessity of a situation where you have to make lifestyle changes then plan your changes across the board and if necessary start slowly and build up.

Author: Stephen Morgan