Three steps to Healthy Street from Disease Street

Once you develop or are diagnosed with a chronic disease, it will change your life forever.  According to the World Health Organization (WHO), chronic diseases are diseases of long duration and generally slow progression – or in plain terms, an illness that cannot be reversed on its own and requires ongoing treatment and monitoring.

According to Statistics Canada, thirty-seven percent of Canadians aged 40 to 59 have at least one chronic condition and 30 percent have two or more. Leading the pack are heart and circulatory problems, chronic pain and diabetes/obesity. But more fearsome is how chronic diseases affect our lifestyle, loved ones and, ultimately, our everyday lives.

Canadians with multiple chronic conditions have twice as many visits with a family doctor, one-and-a-half times as many consultations with specialists and other doctors, and are four times more likely to stay overnight in hospitals. Do we really have time for these added activities in our already busy schedules? Baby boomers are developing chronic diseases at a fast rate. Can prevention truly reverse, stop or delay the hands of time? If so, what are some key things we can do to prevent these conditions from taking over our healthy lives?

In my opinion, prevention is key – the key to good longevity and good health. Turning back time or stopping the aging process is futuristic but changing our lifestyle is something we can do on our own and start now.

The two biggest modifiable risk factors we can change are:
• Physical inactivity
• Unhealthy eating

By simply increasing our physical activity and eating according to the Canada Food Guide we can change our path from Disease Street to Healthy Street.

There are many health and wellness plans easily available to us. No matter where we go, we can find health clubs, weight loss groups, even online self-help – but you have to be the one driving the bus, you cannot just be a passenger. You need to create a customized plan specifically for you. Everyone is different and has their own, unique life schedule. So how do you fit in physical activity and eating right? I am certainly a prime example of procrastination to adopting a healthy lifestyle, but if I start small and incrementally build on it, it will work. Age, sex and family history can’t be the escape goat. The time is now, and we need to fit our busy schedules into our healthy lifestyle plan.

Start with some easy steps:
• Next time you hit the ten-minute snooze button don’t roll over and go back to sleep. Do 10 minutes of stretching from head to toe – 10 minutes, that’s reasonable!
• Change your meal menu to include brightly coloured foods. It will force you to eat more fruits and vegetables. Bread and carbs are pretty much white, absent of colour.
• Monitor what you do. If you write it down you can’t escape it – you will truly know what you are doing or not doing.

There are two websites I would like you to visit that can help you adopt a healthier lifestyle. One is the Canada Food Guide and the other is Canada’s Physical Activity Guide.

Let’s do this together! Since spring is in the air, it’s time to start something new. For the next two months, let’s incorporate the above three steps into our lifestyle plan and reconvene in May. And just think when it’s time to start your backbreaking gardening, you’re going to feel like a half-a-million bucks!