Lowering your blood pressure by changing your lifestyle

Research has shown that losing some weight can lower blood pressure. If you want to lose weight, there’s usually no way around making changes to your diet. The important thing is to make adjustments that you can also stick to over the long run. Extreme dieting doesn't help. If you are looking for support, you can get special dietary counseling. In Germany, that could be in the form of a course for preventing high blood pressure that is sponsored by the statutory health insurers.

Weight loss was most successful when changes in diet were combined with more exercise. Even people who aren't that enthusiastic about exercise often find it enjoyable after a while or might end up finding a sport they like.

Eating less salt can also lower your blood pressure. Doctors recommend eating less than 6 grams of salt per day, the equivalent of about one teaspoon. If you cook your food yourself, you have more control over how much salt you use. Fresh and unprocessed foods hardly contain any salt, but convenience foods and instant meals usually have a lot.

Another option is to switch from regular table salt (sodium chloride) to low-sodium salt, such as potassium (low-sodium) salt. Research has found the following: Switching to potassium salt lowers both blood pressure and the risk of cardiovascular disease like strokes in people who have high blood pressure or who have already developed complications of high blood pressure. That also increases life expectancy.

In healthy people, the body simply releases any excess potassium. Potassium salt can increase the concentration of potassium in your blood, though, if you are taking medication that affects how your body eliminates extra potassium or if you have kidney disease. The signs of this include tingling skin, muscle problems or stomach and bowel (gastrointestinal) problems. So it is a good idea to talk with your doctor before switching to potassium salt.

Physical exercise and sports have the short-term effect of increasing blood pressure because the heart needs to pump more blood through the body. But over the long term, regular exercise causes blood pressure to fall because the blood vessels are then in better shape and more elastic.

Studies have shown that people with high blood pressure can lower their blood pressure by doing exercise for two to three hours per week. The types of exercise studied included brisk walking, hiking, bicycling and low-intensity jogging.

Exercise should increase your pulse and rate of breathing. But you don’t need to get completely out of breath. You only need to have a general exertion level of about 4 to 6 on a scale of 0 to 10, and still be able to carry on a regular conversation while walking or jogging.

If you find it difficult to get more exercise, it might help to

• join a group,
• use a step counter to help motivate yourself (like a fitness armband or smart watch), or
• make exercise a part of your daily routine – like taking the stairs instead of the elevator, using your bike more or getting off the bus one stop early.

Smoking greatly increases the risk of cardiovascular disease and many other medical conditions. So quitting smoking has a lot of health benefits.

It is often easier to quit smoking with help. Nicotine replacement therapy and various medications can increase the likelihood of successfully quitting. Even e-cigarettes (“vaping”) can help some people to get by without nicotine or at least to stop using tobacco, which is more harmful. Tobacco heaters are both less harmful than cigarettes, they are not without risks.

Studies show that drinking alcohol increases your heartbeat by several beats per minute for many hours. If you drink larger amounts of alcohol, your blood pressure also increases after about twelve hours. So experts believe that alcohol can help to increase blood pressure. It also increases the risk of atrial fibrillation – the most common heart rhythm disorder. There are many other reasons to drink little or no alcohol. But that is not always so easy, because drinking alcohol is so widespread in our society. If you want to drink less, you can try out different strategies, like keeping a diary of how much alcohol you consume.

Getting more exercise, losing weight and eating less salt can lower your systolic blood pressure by about 4 to 5 mmHg. To give you an idea of what this means: A single medication can lower your blood pressure by about 7 to 8 mmHg. So if you can manage to change your lifestyle over the long term, you have already achieved a great deal. But that takes a lot of motivation and it isn't always enough. Sometimes you will need to combine changes in lifestyle with medication to reach healthy levels.

The good thing about these recommendations is that they not only have a positive effect on your cardiovascular health, but that they also lower your risk for other diseases, such as cancer.