I have an important message for you today that I hope 1) inspires and 2) motivates you.

It’s all about how POWERFUL a healthy lifestyle can be!

The payoffs of your healthy habits are REAL. Check out the results of this study by Johns Hopkins!

They performed a multi-ethnic atherosclerosis study that tracked more than 6,000 people aged 44 to 84 for seven years.

The people who made healthy lifestyle changes cut their risk of dying during that time frame by 80%.

WOAH! How amazing is that?! (Pretty darn amazing.)

Here’s a quick checklist of changes the researchers recommended, based on the study.

Move your body.

You already know that exercise cuts your risk of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, dementia, and certain cancers.

But it also helps with something else – the “compression of morbidity.” That basically means you stay healthy for more years of your life, avoiding the decade-long decline into illness that many people experience at the end of their lives.

Upgrade your diet. 

Eating less processed foods and more whole foods minimizes health risks.

Anti-inflammatory foods include veggies, fruits, nuts, healthy fats like olive oil, and wild-caught fish. The Mediterranean diet is often used as the hallmark for this way of eating.

Make sure you get enough sleep.

Getting 7-8 hours of quality shut-eye every night can boost your mood, your brainpower, and even how you look!

That’s because your body (and especially your brain) does a ton of work each night to help repair and recover from the day before – and also prepare for the day ahead.

Keep your brain challenged.

Find ways – big and small! – to keep your brain engaged. Learn to play a new musical instrument … travel … read … try new hobbies … the goal is to keep challenging your brain with new and different tasks and opportunities, to keep it nimble and improve memory.

Stop smoking.

This one might seem like a no-brainer, but did you know that within 24-hours of your last cigarette, your risk of heart attack drops? And that over the long term, quitting cuts smokers’ risks of dying early by almost 50%.

Building those 5 actions into your lifestyle can help put you on the road to a healthier body now and into the future!

Which item on that list are YOU going to focus on this week? Let me know.

REFERENCE:
www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-prevention/its-never-too-late-five-healthy-steps-at-any-age