A healthy lifestyle is a collection of efforts that you need to put in every day. After a while, the efforts may become habits, but it’s important that you sustain the habits throughout your life. Most men have a perception that they don’t need to follow basic health routines to sustain a healthy life, but that isn’t even half true.
You need to follow guidelines set by experts or your healthcare provider to develop a lifestyle that’s healthy and enjoyable.
- Follow a Healthy Diet
An unhealthy diet and sedentary lifestyle is the leading cause of health risks in males globally. A healthy diet can keep you from malnutrition, obesity, and noncommunicable diseases. Whereas an unhealthy diet is responsible for diabetes, stroke, cancer, and heart diseases.
Maintaining a healthy diet often comes down to calculating your energy intake and keeping yourself from eating too much or too little. However, consult your nutritionist if you have a condition that keeps you from following the generic healthy diet.
According to WHO, a healthy diet must include:
- Whole fruits, vegetables, grains, lentils, and beans
- A minimum of 400 g of veggies per day, excluding sweet potatoes and starchy roots.
- Limit your fat intake to less than 30% of your total energy intake by boiling or steaming your food rather than frying it.
- An increased salt intake of more than 5 g per day causes 1.7 million deaths each year due to higher blood pressure and fasting blood glucose. Reduce your sodium intake.
- Avoid free sugars as often as possible. Keep it to a maximum of 10% in daily intake.
Your awareness of your diet is the most influential factor. Despite your best efforts, you may fail to fall into the habit of eating healthy. An unhealthy diet may be a result of the financial situation. An unhealthy diet may also be caused by depression, anxiety, and eating disorders.
- Physical Activity
A shocking 95% of adults, often understandably, don’t indulge themselves in daily physical activity of thirty minutes or more. The responsibility of you leading a sedentary lifestyle falls upon either your career or on your reluctance.
Whatever it may be, the absence of physical activity causes:
- Diabetes
- Blood Pressure
- Cholesterol
- Obesity
- Heart diseases
An increased alcohol and tobacco use has also been associated with a sedentary lifestyle among men. Although this study doesn’t specify the exact cause of it, we can at least assume that a heightened physical activity leaves less time for alcohol.
Weight training, cardio, and other strategic training aren’t the only physical activities that you can perform. Walking, cycling, swimming, sports, and anything that elevates the heart rate to a certain extent for a certain time is contributing to a healthy lifestyle. You don’t need to force yourself to go to the gym to get the daily recommended physical activity.
Regular physical activity:
- Relieves emotional stress and decreases anxiety
- Helps in weight loss
- Allows you to get a sound sleep
- Helps you get out of an alcohol addiction
If you are someone who is starting with the gym, consider consulting a physical trainer.
When going to the gym, start exercising with moderate warm-up sessions followed by cardio and weights that you find lighter than you can lift. Muscle soreness during the first few days is normal so don’t be discouraged.
As you progress, increase the intensity of cardio and weights. Don’t let your ego make you imitate someone with years of experience.
- Stay Safe From STIs
Safe sex, often known as safer sex, is the concept of adopting preventive action to prevent STDs from transmitting from person to person. Oral sex, vaginal intercourse, anal sex, and sexual fluids can all spread sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). STDs such as genital herpes are easily spread through oral intimacy. Despite the dearth of treatment choices, the symptoms of genital herpes may be managed with a natural herpes treatment.
Wearing a condom is the greatest way for a male to practice safe sex. Nitrile gloves, despite being unpleasant, are effective if you’re into mutual masturbation or exchanging sex toys.
The influence of alcohol may also increase the risks by making you forget about protective measures.
If you or your partner has an STD that isn’t treatable, engaging in safe intercourse will keep the infection from spreading. If you are sexually active, you should consider testing for STDs regularly to avoid spreading the condition to others.
- Don’t Smoke and Drink. Ever.
Most noncommunicative illnesses are heightened by two key factors: smoking and drinking. While occasional drinking and smoking may not have a significant negative influence on your health, using nicotine and alcohol daily may pose long-term health risks.
The following are some of the risks related to drinking and smoking:
- Erectile dysfunction (ED)
- Emphysema
- Experiencing premature aging
- Cardiac arrest
- Several cancers
- Breakdown of the nervous system
- Cirrhosis of the liver (liver cirrhosis)
While having a beer or two with acquaintances may not be as dangerous for most people, making it a habit can lead to permanent difficulties and negative health repercussions.
If possible and if you haven’t smoked ever, try not to indulge yourself in this habit. Hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide, ammonia, and nicotine are considered deleterious to both smokers and nonsmokers.
- Maintain Personal Hygiene
Your extent of hygiene depends on the circumstances, weather, and personal preference. But, in a general sense, keeping your external body parts clean and healthy is considered the objective of maintaining personal hygiene.
Clipping your nails, taking a bath, washing your hands with soap, and other small but significant lifestyle habits that help you keep yourself from spreading and getting diseases like Covid-19 are referred to as personal hygiene.
Poor hygiene conditions may introduce diseases like:
- Covid-19
- Diarrhea
- Scabies
- Tooth decay
- Staph infection
- Respiratory infections
For you to maintain personal hygiene, here are some tips:
- Bathe every day. Use mild soaps that suit your skin to remove bacteria that cause skin irritations and odor. In particular, clean your armpits, buttocks, and genitals.
- Wash your hands whenever you touch something that isn’t disinfected, like a staircase, food, or pets. Wet your hands and apply soap or hand wash. Rub your hands together thoroughly until every part of your hands, up to the wrists, is covered. Rinse with clean water.
- Wash your genitals with water and soap.
- Brush and floss your teeth at least twice a day.
Personal hygiene, in addition to being healthy, gives you a boost of confidence and an edge in meetings, dates, and everything social.
In Conclusion
Accept the fact that you can’t achieve a healthy lifestyle overnight. It demands putting in an effort.
Until and unless you are determined enough to make the change to yourself, you possibly can’t take a bath every day and brush your teeth twice. An active lifestyle is also a result of little endeavors that serve a significant change to you as a whole.
Refraining from drinking in a social gathering may also not be possible for you if you aren’t fixated on what your goal is.
However, these changes are possible through sheer determination and active participation in the process of making yourself healthier.
