Living With High Blood Pressure
- 0About this program
- 1Understanding blood pressure
- 2Understanding your diagnosis
- 3Blood pressure medication
- 4What causes high blood pressure?
- 5Just a pinch of salt
- 6Non-alcoholic drinks and your blood pressure
- 7Reducing alcohol and your blood pressure
- 8Being more physically active
- 9Weight loss and high blood pressure
- 10Eating well to lower your blood pressure
- 11Keeping up healthy changes
- 12Changes for life
- 13Being there for you in the long term
- 0About this program
- 1Understanding blood pressure
- 2Understanding your diagnosis
- 3Blood pressure medication
- 4What causes high blood pressure?
- 5Just a pinch of salt
- 6Non-alcoholic drinks and your blood pressure
- 7Reducing alcohol and your blood pressure
- 8Being more physically active
- 9Weight loss and high blood pressure
- 10Eating well to lower your blood pressure
- 11Keeping up healthy changes
- 12Changes for life
- 13Being there for you in the long term
Content on HealthUnlocked does not replace the relationship between you and doctors or other healthcare professionals nor the advice you receive from them.
Never delay seeking advice or dialling emergency services because of something that you have read on HealthUnlocked.
What causes high blood pressure?
Why do I have high blood pressure?
A lot of different things can lead to high blood pressure but there are risk factors you can control. There are very clear lifestyle choices that play a key role in your heart health.
Take some time to keep track of what you eat, how much you move about and your less healthy habits. From there you can target what is affecting your blood pressure.
6 tips to help reduce your blood pressure
There is lots of information out there on lowering your blood pressure and sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. There’s no trendy superfood or complicated gym workout that will change everything overnight. Instead, you need to make small changes in several areas of your life, and stick to them.
6 areas for small changes:
- Exercise for 150 minutes a week – that’s 30 minutes a day
- Make sure you stay a healthy weight
- Eat more fruit and veg
- Cut down on salt
- Avoid drinking more than 14 units of alcohol a week
- Always take your medication as prescribed
Remember to build up these habits gradually. Changing one thing at a time will make it easier to stick to them.
How to set goals that really work
Making gradual changes over time is the best way to make a real impact on your heart health. But to start, you need to set some goals that you can stick to. Try to focus on things that are:
Achievable – for example ‘eat more fruit and veg’
Measureable – for example ‘5 portions of fruit and veg a day’
Time-specific – for example, ‘start today, see how I’m doing in 1 week’
While it’s good to have an end goal, make sure you set smaller goals along the way. It will help you stay motivated.
BHF researchers uncover the causes of hypertension
Professor Rhian Touyz has been working at one of the BHF’s Centres of Excellence to discover the causes of high blood pressure.
“I have always been very interested in the biology of vessels in health and disease, and that’s what the Centre of Excellence allows us to study,” she says.
Prof Touyz and her team are focusing on one of the possible causes of damage to blood vessels from hypertension (high blood pressure). She hopes that by developing her groundbreaking treatment, we will be able to better treat the damage to blood vessels caused by high blood pressure.
Join the conversation on HealthUnlocked
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Content on HealthUnlocked does not replace the relationship between you and doctors or other healthcare professionals nor the advice you receive from them.
Never delay seeking advice or dialling emergency services because of something that you have read on HealthUnlocked.