Blood Pressure Guidelines, Or
What Can I Get Away With?

I hate following rules when it comes to my own body. Blood pressure guidelines? Give me a break! Sympathetic or not to my attitude, please read below what may be important - sigh ;>)

My lifestyle took many years developing on its own. I should change now that I'm settled into it like feet in comfortable shoes?

Darn straight!

First, I had to confront the hardest part - my attitude.

Attitude is the first thing to change if you want to have normal blood pressure.

You see, changing your attitude is basic to how to lower blood pressure.

I had to change my attitude about eating before I could adopt a diet that would eventually lead me to my ideal blood pressure.

How do you change your attitude to get closer to a normal range blood pressure?

What I did was change my attitude about what I was already doing. For example, some foods I enjoyed very much were just the foods I should be eating.

So, I decided that I was going to eat those foods because they were good for me, not because I was a lazy slave to my tastes.

I went on to pick out other things I did that were right and changed my attitude about them.

You can do this, too. It's fun to be right about stuff, to be spot on on some of these blood pressure guidelines and, so, avoid one of the most deadly of the lifestyle diseases.

Here is my list of lifestyle changes from easiest to hardest (for me). Probably, being different from me, you would have a another order to your list.

Here we go:

1. Regularly measure blood pressure with a monitor and weight with a digital scale.

2. Rather than be a servant to your doctor, be responsible for and take charge of your own plan of how to lower blood pressure.

3. Get enough sleep, rest and relaxation.

4. Avoid caffeine, alcohol, tobacco and drugs (legal and illegal).

5. Lose weight if you are overweight.

6. Limit salt.

7. Eat more fresh preservative-free food.

8. Limit processed easy-to-prepare-or-serve food.

9. Find the foods, supplements and herbs that act as medicine for you and adopt these into your diet.

10. Increase activity and exercise over sitting around much of the time.

11. Plan your activities rather than do them on the spur of the moment.

12. Go shopping for what you need in your blood pressure program.

You may not be able to follow all these fully right now. For instance, you may be on prescribed blood pressure medication. If so, number 4 above might move to number 10 for you. But, you would still work toward eliminating the medication, with your doctor's help.

Your normal blood pressure and length of healthy life depend on following these blood pressure guidelines, but you may not have to follow them all.

Choose the easiest ones first and see what happens. If you don't get the results you want, change something else, too.

And, when you are making the changes use the other pages on this site liberally, especially diets.

And remember, get away with what you can - only change what you decide to change.

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