Love your heart!
Our body is an amazing and awesome creation!
God designed all our body parts to work in precision with each other. Every aspect is important, but our hearts certainly deserve high marks for achievement.
The pump we have in our chest is incredible. Our hearts work all the time–contracting to send blood that supplies all cells in our body with oxygen and nutrients. The heart doesn’t get to take a break at night when the rest of our body snoozes. On average, your heart beats about 40,000,000 times per year–over two billion beats in a typical lifetime.
Unless we are scheduled for a heart transplant somewhere in our future, we need to take REALLY good care of our hearts because it’s the only one we will have.
How can you love your heart?
- Exercise regularly, activities and duration that are appropriate for your age and current health
- Utilize the FIT principle (we’ll talk about this next week)
- Healthy nutrition
- Adequate rest and sleep
- Keep our stress at a manageable level
We’ll discuss all of these strategies in more detail at a later time. For today, my focus is on physical activity.
Exercise is important to us no matter our age. From young childhood to the elderly, we need to be physically active. Our heart is a muscle and is strengthened by activity.
Lack of physical activity is a major risk factor in the development of chronic disease. Three other unhealthy lifestyle behaviors that are detrimental for us are poor nutrition, tobacco use and too much alcohol. We can control these behaviors–these actions are lifestyle choices that have tremendous impact on our current and future heatth. I’ll focus more on chronic disease in a future blog, but I emphasize here that chronic disease is the leading cause of death and disability in the United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
Heart disease is a chronic condition and can include Coronary Artery Disease (narrowed coronary arteries cannot provide adequate oxygen to the heart muscle), Hypertension (high blood pressure; increased pressure weakens artery walls, decreases elasticity of the vessels and forces the heart to work harder to meet the body’s needs), and Peripheral Vascular Disease (disorders that affect blood vessels in the extremities of the body–can lead to blood clots).
Regular physical activity can help prevent heart disease. If you are not currently physically active, please consult with your health care provider before beginning an exercise program.
How to start an exercise program?
- Consult with your health care provider
- Walking is one of the best things we can do for our heart
- Make sure you have a good pair of walking shoes
- Start gradually
- Find a safe place to walk
- Recruit a buddy for companionship and encouragement
If you are already exercising regularly–wonderful!! What motivates you? Sharing with others can help encourage them.
If you are not physically active–what is holding you back? How can I encourage you?
Starting a new and healthy habit is not easy, but God will be with you. He wants you to be healthy–to honor Him by keeping your Temple of the Holy Spirit healthy. If I can pray for you or if you have questions, please contact me.
The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 2 Corinthians 10:4-5