13 Lifestyle Tips To Make You Live Longer & Healthier

A great majority of us want to live long enough to see our grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and possibly our great-great-grandchildren. But not all of us live that long enough, and if I may ask, is there anything one can do to live longer and healthier?

I have interacted with a few persons who had expressed their concerns about living too long. They have expressed their satisfaction with the common problems of the elderly and wish they leave this world without becoming a burden to other people like most aged people to their children.

What if there are simple lifestyle tips you can start adopting now to live longer and also in good health without becoming a burden to your children and grandchildren?

Some of life’s best things are the cheap things we take for granted. In this post, I am going to show you simple lifestyle tips that can help us prolong our lives and be healthy till we eventually leave this world.

Simple Lifestyle Tips To Make You Healthier & Live Longer

The World Health recommended the following health tips for a longer and healthier life for you and your entire family. Let’s see these healthful lifestyle tips right away.

Some of these lifestyle tips you will see here were adapted from WHO Health tips for 2020, but those lifestyle tips will remain recommended. Let’s see all 13 lifestyle tips for healthier living for you and your family now.

1. Eat a healthy diet

Good and healthy food is very important for your health and vitality, making diet one of the most important lifestyle determinants of health. As simple as it may sound, good food is the first medicine you will ever require, beginning from the day you made your first cry.

A healthy diet should be balanced containing all the essential body nutrients in adequate proportions. It should contain as less synthetic food additives as possible.

For example, consider limiting your intake of high amounts of food additives like salt, sugar, and saturated fats. About 1 teaspoon of table salt (approx. 5g per day) is enough. Also reduce your intake of other high-sodium products like soy sauce, fish sauce, and salty snacks and pastries.

In both children and adults, intake of free sugars should be less than 10% of energy intake daily (that is, about 50g or 12 teaspoons for an adult). Consuming sugar less than 5% of total energy intake has additional health benefits. Subsisting on sugary snacks, candies, and sugar-sweetened beverages is not a healthy lifestyle choice to prolong your active life.

When eating healthy is talked about, quality is more important than quantity. Your aim should be to get as many nutrients as are required by your body daily. This is why patronizing cheap food vendors too regularly might not be the best thing to do because they keep their food quality low to make enough profit.

Eating a healthy diet is an important lifestyle tip that can prolong your life because it ensures that your body has enough nutrients to combat the effects of ageing, stress, and disease.

Vitamins, minerals, and proteins are important nutrients for the optimal function of the body’s immune system to defend against infections and diseases. Vitamins C, A, and E, and glutathione are antioxidants that help protect against oxidative stress, prevent fast ageing, improve skin health, and fight off diseases. Read up on other glutathione IV benefits here.

Consuming unhealthy fats and cholesterol has been linked to many non-communicable diseases like obesity, hypertension, and stroke. Unsaturated fats are healthier than saturated or trans-fats (or trans-unsaturated fats).

Total fat consumption should be less than 30% of your total energy intake; saturated fats intake should be less than 10%; while trans-fats reduced to less than 1%.

Unsaturated fats remain liquid at room temperature e.g., fish oil, avocado, nuts, sunflower, soybean, canola oil, and olive oil. While saturated fats solidify at room temperature, e.g., fatty meat, butter, palm oil, coconut oil, cheese, milk cream, ghee, and lard. Trans-fats are found in baked and fried foods.

Lastly, consuming a healthy diet with fruits and vegetables has been shown to help reduce the risk of diseases like heart disease, diabetes, stroke, and cancer.

2. Exercise more regularly

Adequate exercise, particularly now that you are much younger, can make you live a longer and healthier life. Physical exercises help to build up muscles in your body, most especially the muscles of your heart.

Ageing is associated with gradual deterioration of the function of body organs and tissues, including muscles. Regular exercise helps to stimulate hypertrophy (increase in size of cells), which can counteract the natural effect of ageing in decreasing the mass and functionality of cells, tissues and organs.

Regular exercise involves physical activity associated with the production of bodily movement by skeletal muscles and energy expenditure done at least once every week.

Exercise includes intentional and unintentional activities undertaken while working, playing, travelling, or during recreation. Some exercises are aimed at body strengthening, others at joint flexibility, while others (cardio) are aimed at heart muscle building. It is recommended to mix up different types of physical exercise throughout the week.

Depending on your age, your exercise requirements may vary. Adults aged 18-64 years require at least 150-300 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week, or at least 30 minutes a day; or at least 75-150 minutes of vigorous-intensity exercise per week.

Regular physical exercise is necessary for the proper function of the skeletal muscles, brain, and heart. A sedentary lifestyle has been linked to a number of health problems including heart disease, stroke, and cancer.

To keep up with routine exercise, you can do daily workouts that do not require equipment (e.g., push-ups, jogging, brisk walking), get basic home gym equipment, get a more sophisticated gym room, or register with a local gym centre. Depending on your budget and compound space, you can consider installing a swimming pool in your home. Swimming is both a recreation and a good aerobic moderate to vigorous-intensity exercise.

If you want to install a home gym, you can convert some space in your garage to a fitness area by using custom garage flooring which can make the floor more durable and impact-resistant to your machines, tools and your exercise equipment.

3. Avoid the harmful use of alcohol

The divide between harmful alcohol use and normal use can be hard to delineate. Alcohol is a natural substance present in many foods and fruits. It is also useful as a preservative for some foods, and cake, as well as a solvent for many chemical products.

However, many people who consume alcohol for its euphoric and high effects end up abusing it and that is not without its consequences.

Alcohol is a risk factor for many diseases including stomach cancer, prostate cancer, liver cirrhosis, as well as mental and behavioural disorders.

The alcohol level in foods, fruits, cakes, and most manufactured foods, is usually safe for most consumers. However, the World Health Organization has noted that there is no safe level for drinking alcohol for recreation because alcohol can predispose to mental and behavioural disorders even in moderate amounts.^[1]20 health tips for 2020 – WHO International

Other conditions that can result from alcoholism include liver cancer, fatty liver, and injuries and death from alcohol-precipitated violence or road accidents.

Therefore, avoiding alcohol use, especially as a recreational substance can make you live longer and healthier in old age. If you must drink, keep your intake as low as possible while ensuring you take more fruits and vegetables to handle oxidant stress caused by alcohol.

4. Avoid smoking

Smoking is the number one thing that has been implicated as a risk factor for all cancers. Avoiding it can make you live longer and healthier as you age.

Tobacco has been linked to several diseases like lung cancer, tuberculosis, obstructive lung disease, heart disease, stroke, etc. Also, inhalation of all psychoactive vapours carries a high risk for the development of mental conditions.

If you are a smoker, it is not too late to quit. Generally, 7 out of every 10 smokers are interested in quitting smoking. With a series of helpful interventions and help from addiction recovery centres, you can stop any addiction to tobacco.

If you are a non-smoker, continue to resist any pressure to start smoking. It does more harm than good. Also, avoid inhaling smoking from a smoker nearby (referred to as secondary smoking), and continue to fight for your right to breathe tobacco-smoke-free air in public spaces.

Overall, cessation of smoking reduces the chances for the development of the associated disease conditions and can thus make you live longer and healthier.

5. Seek medical care promptly

One of the most prevalent causes of serious disability and death from illness in many parts of the world is late presentation to the hospital. Oftentimes, this is due to the indecisiveness of the patient or the caregiver, as well as due to a lack of money or insurance to cover medical bills.

People in resource-poor countries often try cheaper alternatives before visiting the hospital. Sometimes, these interventions help but most of the time, they make matters worse due to the increased number of preventable deaths from medically-treatable causes.^[2]Deaths due to delayed presentation to the hospital from fear of contracting COVID-19 during lockdown period: a tertiary care center experience – Taylor and Francis Online Journal

To strike a balance between resource paucity and health-seeking, know when to see a doctor when you have tried cheaper alternatives. Delay in seeking medical care early enough can result in deaths and disability that could have been prevented otherwise.

Thus, seeking medical care promptly can make you live longer and healthily as you age.

6. Attend routine medical checkups

I recently saw a patient who only knew she had hypertension after she had been rushed to the hospital with features in keeping with heart failure. She has been living with hypertension without receiving treatment for many years. If she had been having routine medical checkups, it would have been detected and treatment started earlier.

Routine checkups are visits to the hospital when you are apparently healthy. It doesn’t always have to be when you are sick.

Medical checkups also help to assess the state of your body to detect any problems long before they become clinically visible. And as little as they may seem, routine checkups have helped many people avoid the scourge of a full-blown disease.

Some specific health checkups you should pay attention to include dental checkups, blood pressure monitoring, regular eye checkups, etc.

Your dental health is an important aspect of your overall health. Diseases like gum disease, tooth decay, and caries can be very problematic, and can also affect other areas of your life including your confidence, social performance, and mental health^[3]Association Between Mental Health and Oral Health Status and Care Utilization – PMC.

Also, several systemic conditions show early signs in the mouth long before they affect other parts of the body. These include diabetes, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis. Thus, seeing the dentist every 6 months is not going to be a waste of precious time at all.

As already mentioned, hypertension may not manifest with serious symptoms early in its course. Hence, it is regarded as a “silent killer”. Symptoms often begin to present after it has caused significant damage to the heart and blood vessels. Thus, routine BP check is recommended for adults greater than 40 years, especially those with a family history or other risk factors.

Notable sequelae of hypertension include heart failure, stroke, kidney injury and failure, retinopathy, and others.

Eye checkup is another type of routine medical checkup you should get. It can make the difference between a healthy living and good quality of life, and permanent visual disability.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 11 million Americans over 12 years of age require some form of vision correction. Routine eye examinations can detect common eye diseases like cataracts, diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma, and age-related macular degeneration, early enough before the development of severe visual loss or blindness.

Also, some systemic diseases can present with early telltale signs that can be picked up from eye examinations while also allowing the ophthalmologist to educate you on the best ways to take care of your eyes and live a healthier life.

7. Drink safe water regularly

Adequate water intake is an important requirement for overall health and vitality. The average daily water requirement by adults is about 2.5L. This is about 3 bottles of 75cl cans and a standard teacup.

Water is essential for many metabolic processes in the body. It constitutes a major part of the blood and body cells, serving as a milieu for many essential chemical reactions in the body.

Dehydration can reduce your total blood volume and reduce how much blood gets to your organs including the brain, adrenals, kidneys, and skeletal muscles. Reduced blood supply (perfusion) to the kidneys can predispose to obstructive stone formation within the renal/urinary tract, leading to several urinary tract diseases and ultimately renal failure.

The role of water in the body is too numerous to mention, every process in the body requires water in one way or another. Thus, adequately supplying your body with this essential commodity daily can improve your longevity and quality of life.

8. Check your blood pressure regularly

This is similar to routine medical checkups discussed above. Many of us cannot tell when we last checked our blood pressure and some of us have never checked it on our own without any request by a health worker.

Routine BP check is recommended for adults 40 years and above, or those younger but with a high risk of developing hypertension like having a family history of hypertension in first-degree relative, and obesity.

Regular BP checks can detect any anomalies in cardiovascular function long before irreversible damage is done. Thankfully, BP checking apparatuses are now readily available, less cumbersome, and more convenient. Electronic BP devices have been invented which does not require you to have any clinical skills before using them.

9. Practice safe sex

The global burden of STIs has risen to over 1 million new cases every single day. That is more than 694 new cases every minute.

More than 500 million people aged 15-49 years have genital infection with herpes simplex virus (HSV) and over 311,000 deaths have been associated with cervical cancer caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) every year^[4]Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) – WHO International.

The burden of HIV continues to increase despite the pursuit of more effective treatments, prevention, and cure. Millions of people die every year from HIV or its associated complications.

Unsafe or unprotected sex also leads to unwanted pregnancies which can affect one’s health in various ways. Unsafe abortion, which is a common pathway following unwanted pregnancies, is also associated with a high burden of death and disability.

It therefore stands to reason that sexual abstinence or practising safe sex is one essential way to protect oneself from diseases, live longer and lead a healthier life.

10. Get vaccinated

Vaccination protects you against vaccine-preventable diseases (VPDs) so that when you come intact with the disease-causing agent, your body can mount an effective immune response to it. Getting vaccinated against major VPDs can make you live longer and healthier.

Some important vaccine-preventable diseases include HPV which causes cervical cancer in women, Tuberculosis, Meningitis, and Hepatitis B. The good thing is many of these vaccines are available for free in some countries, or at very discounted prices supported by the government, NGOs, and international health organizations.

11. Prevent mosquito bites

If you are living in a malaria-endemic area (such as India, or Sub-Saharan Africa), preventing mosquito bites is one important way to prevent malaria infection. Different ways have been documented to help with the prevention of mosquito bites, especially the female anopheles mosquito which transmits the malaria parasite.

Long-lasting insecticide-treated nets (LLITN) are protective and safe in the prevention of mosquito bites and their use has been recommended. These insecticide-impregnated nets may be associated with skin irritation in some people but there is a solution to this irritation caused by mosquito nets.

Other ways to prevent mosquito bites include preventing mosquito breeding by removing stagnant water bodies around residential areas, and use of aerosolized insecticides against mosquitoes.

Malaria is an important cause of death and disability globally. Even though it has been more closely associated with death among children under five years of age, in the presence of weakened immunity or comorbidities, can carry a worse prognosis even in adults.

12. Do environmental sanitational frequently

The implications of these tips for a healthier and longer life are far-reaching beyond how you may imagine them. Keeping your environment clean can significantly reduce the incidence of environment-related diseases.

Environmental diseases include dust-related, water-related, food-borne, and vector-borne diseases. A hygienic environment can typically reduce the incidence of diseases like dysentery, typhoid, malaria, etc.

Environmental sanitation also involves reducing the pest burden in your surroundings. While keeping your environment clean through basic sanitation activities, you might also need to hire a bug and hornet exterminator to help you fumigate your surroundings against pests and bugs.

Lastly, tending your compound by yourself can also give you the needed exposure to early morning sunlight known to promote the synthesis of Vitamin D in the body. Vitamin D helps in bone development and prevents osteoporosis, amongst other important functions.

13. Obey traffic rules

According to WHO, approximately 1.3 million people die each year as a result of road traffic accidents. More than half of these people include vulnerable road users – pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists.

Accidents are preventable to a large extent if we adhere to road traffic rules and standard driving precautions, bearing in mind that your life and that of others are at risk.

The cost of injuries resulting from road accidents can be overwhelming. The victim might be rendered disabled and unable to return to work. This is coupled with the pain experienced by a victim’s family from a loss or disability resulting from a road traffic accident.

For these reasons, obeying traffic rules can help promote your health and make you live longer and healthier.

Final words

While there are many expensive drugs and technological inventions that promise to make you live longer and healthier, you don’t need to invest millions to live a healthy life. Simple lifestyle tips and precautions discussed above can help you prevent diseases, ill health, and disability.

In the order of management of diseases, prevention comes first. Followed by early detection as in screening and routine check-ups, and lastly, treatment and prevention of disability. These lifestyle tips discussed in this post are all-encompassing and will help you live longer and healthier.