How to Reduce Your Risk for Heart Disease
You can reduce your cardiovascular disease risk with lifestyle changes. Here's what you need to know to make healthy changes.
Medically reviewed by Christine Wilmsen Craig, MD
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While a healthy lifestyle won’t eliminate cardiovascular disease risk altogether, it can lower your heart disease risk substantially.
Getting your body in shape through physical activity and healthier eating will help reduce cardiovascular disease risk by reducing your unhealthy cholesterol (LDL) and lowering your risk of diabetes and obesity.
Start Slow in Reducing Heart Disease Risks
When we try to make changes, it can be very easy to slip back. That’s why attempts at living a healthier lifestyle often fail: People get discouraged and start cheating, before giving up completely.
It doesn’t have to be that way. You can increase your chance of success by starting slowly. “Incremental, gradual, and persistent changes in lifestyle are by far the most powerful means of altering long-term risk [of heart disease] in any individual,” says Mehdi Razavi, MD, a research scientist specializing in cardiac electrophysiology at the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital and an associate professor of medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “The earlier these changes are made, the more powerful the long-term effects and benefits.”
In other words, don’t change your diet completely, begin a new exercise routine, and maybe even stop smoking, all at the same time: That’s a recipe for failure. “My advice to those of us trying to make lifestyle changes is to start with something manageable and not too drastic,” suggests Dr. Razavi. “As a first step, consider eliminating one can of soda or adding one serving of fruit per day. Or start exercising one or two days per week. Once this becomes a habit, then add another goal. The process will be gradual, but the long-term results will be much more powerful.”
Reducing Cardiovascular Disease Risk With Exercise
It may be intimidating to read that you “should” be doing X number of minutes of exercise per day, particularly if you’re not exercising at all. But if you’re told you need to do get in a half-hour of exercise, you don’t need to start there. By doing only 10 minutes of exercise (walking at lunch time, getting off the bus a few stops early, parking as far as you reasonably can from your work place), you’ll to take your first steps toward fighting and preventing heart disease.
Start by doing an activity only once a week, then go up to twice a week as the new routine becomes a habit. Once you’ve made the activity exercise program a regular thing, try increasing the time you do it or trying something new, like signing up for a dance class.
The important thing to remember is that getting more exercise doesn’t mean jumping in with an expensive gym membership and a huge time commitment. You’ll do much better with an incremental approach.
Reducing Cardiovascular Disease Risk With Diet
Making changes to your diet can start with adding an apple or banana, for example, to your daily food intake. You can also adjust how you prepare your foods. Try broiling, grilling, or steaming more often, and when you do use cooking oil, choose heart-healthy monounsaturated oils such as canola or olive oil. Also, try chopping up some vegetables and adding them to your soups, making yourself a fruit smoothie instead of a milkshake, and eating whole wheat bread instead of white bread. And try to gradually limit or cut out foods that are high in unhealthy fat (saturated and trans fats). Don’t make all the changes at once, so you don’t feel like you’re missing out on anything.
Slipping back into old habits isn’t inevitable, but if you do make a mistake, don’t give up. One slip isn’t going to undo all the good you’ve done. Just ignore the setback and get back to your new, healthier way of life.
It’s what you do in the long run that counts.
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