These 6 silent signs could reveal dangerous cholesterol levels

 Cholesterol is vital for the body, but when levels get too high, it can quietly become a serious health risk. What are the warning signs of dangerously high cholesterol? And how can you lower your risk of heart disease? Here are six symptoms to watch for—and what you can do to protect your heart

 Cholesterol is a vital fat in our bodies, playing a key role in hormone production and cell structure. However, when cholesterol levels become too high, they can significantly raise the risk of heart disease. Although high cholesterol often doesn’t show symptoms, there are a few warning signs to look out for. In this article, we’ll dive into those signs and how to manage cholesterol effectively.

 6 Warning signs of high cholesterol

Excess cholesterol can show up in different ways, sometimes in subtle forms. Here are the 6 main signs to watch for:

1. Localized pain: Pain in your chest or calves could be a sign of plaque buildup in your arteries.
2. Dizziness: Frequent dizziness may indicate poor circulation caused by cholesterol buildup.
3. Shortness of breath: Struggling to breathe, even with light activity, might suggest a heart-related issue due to cholesterol.
4. Balance issues: Trouble maintaining balance may be linked to poor blood flow.
5. Xanthomas: yellowish bumps on your eyelids are visible indicators of excess cholesterol.
6. Erectile dysfunction: Men with high cholesterol may experience erectile difficulties due to poor circulation.

It’s important to remember that these symptoms can also point to other health conditions. If you’re concerned, it’s best to consult a doctor for a proper diagnosis and treatment.

What cholesterol does to your body

Cholesterol travels in your blood in two main forms:

• LDL cholesterol (“bad” cholesterol) can build up in the arteries.
• HDL cholesterol (“good” cholesterol) helps clear away excess LDL.

When LDL cholesterol levels are too high, it leads to plaque buildup, narrowing, and stiffening of the arteries. This condition, called atherosclerosis, can lead to severe health problems like heart attacks or strokes.

Here’s a summary of the recommended cholesterol levels:

Cholesterol Type	Normal Range
Total Cholesterol	< 2 g/L
LDL Cholesterol	1 – 1.29 g/L
HDL Cholesterol	> 0.4 g/L

Risk factors and how to prevent high cholesterol

Several factors can contribute to high cholesterol:

• Being overweight or obese
• Poor diet
• Lack of exercise
• Smoking
• High blood pressure
• Diabetes

To prevent and control high cholesterol, it’s important to live a healthy lifestyle. Here are some tips:

1. Eat a diet full of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
2. Choose lean protein sources like chicken and fish.
3. Use unsaturated vegetable oils (like olive or canola oil).
4. Get moving with regular physical activity.
5. Quit smoking.
6. Limit alcohol intake.

If your cholesterol levels are high, your doctor might prescribe medication, typically statins, to help manage it along with these lifestyle changes.

Taking charge of your heart health

Tracking your cholesterol is crucial to keeping your heart healthy. By recognizing the signs of high cholesterol and making lifestyle changes, you can significantly lower the risk of heart disease. Remember, prevention is always the best approach to avoid heart problems. Regular check-ups and blood tests are essential for spotting potential issues early, so you can take action for a longer, healthier life.

 

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

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These Symptoms Could be a Sign of Imminent Danger

 Unless we’re in extreme pain or one of our bones is sticking out, few of us want to admit that we need to go spend hours waiting in the emergency room, just so we can spend a load of money on health insurance bills. After all, it might be nothing, and we’d have wasted all that time and money for nothing. 

However, this is not a wise move to make for your health. We fully understand why you would not want to make a trip to the ER, but while it’s easy to push your symptoms aside, there are some that you should never ignore. Below are 8 red flag signs that you need to see a doctor as soon as possible:

1. Spiked fever

The only time it’s normal to have a spiked fever is when you have a cold or flu – the raised body temperature shows that your body is fighting something. However, if a fever suddenly spikes out of the blue – and spikes high – you should take yourself to the ER. According to doctors, any temperature higher than 105 degrees in an adult is a medical emergency. A consistent fever over 103 degrees indicates a serious infection that needs to be treated urgently. 

 

2. Feeling Faint 

If you stand up quickly, or haven’t had much to eat or drink, then you might feel lightheaded. But if it comes out of the blue and is so extreme that you feel like you might faint, you need to go to the ER. Not only can this indicate some larger problem, but you could injure yourself if you do fall over.

3. Feeling breathless

 

Did you just climb a load of stairs or go for jog? If that’s the case, then it’s okay to feel a little out of breath. However, this is a totally different story if you get breathless out of nowhere and cannot seem to catch your breath. If you start to feel short of breath and your lungs and throat start to feel tight, you should head on down to the ER.

 

4. Splitting Headache 

It’s so easy for us to consider a headache to be “normal.” You might take a pill, drink a glass of water, and sleep it off. However, you need to draw the line at some point. Should you have a headache for more than a day, or if you’re experiencing excruciating pain, seek medical help. 

 

5. Upset Stomach 

If you have been around someone who is ill or you ate something a little funky, having an upset stomach isn’t the end of the world. However, if diarrhea continues for more than five days, or you start becoming dehydrated, go straight to the ER.

6. Chest pain

There are different types of chest pains. If you’re experiencing a squeezing feeling that turns into a tight and painful ache, seek medical attention immediately. This is especially important do if you’re experiencing these pains straight after exercising as this could be a sign of cardiac arrest. 

 

 7. Pins and Needles 

If you’ve been sitting on your foot and you get pins and needles, that makes sense since you’ve been restricting the blood flow. However, if you get this feeling out of the blue, especially in your limbs, this could be a potential sign of a stroke and should be immediately examined. 

 

8. Random bump 

Everyone should know that an unrecognized lump anywhere on your body should be handled with care. Unexplained lumps can indicate all sorts of things. If it hurts, it could be an infection or a small fracture. If not, it could be cancerous. Either way, going to the ER will give you peace of mind.

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

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Why Do I Get Out of Breath Walking Up Stairs If I’m in Good Shape?

Even if you can run a 5K with ease, crush a 45-minute spin session, or power through a HIIT class, that looming flight of stairs can make you really start to doubt your fitness prowess—especially when you know you’ll be huffing and puffing your way up. “Am I really not in as good shape as I think?” Or: “Is something wrong with my heart!?”

Those questions are perfectly understandable, but let us reassure you: This phenomenon is way more common than you may think, and in lots of cases it’s actually NBD.

In fact, even the most fit folks among us can be humbled by a staircase. Exercise physiologist Heather Hart, CSCS, runs ultramarathons (that’s any race longer than 26.2 miles) and absolutely can sometimes still experience breathlessness when climbing up one. “For the majority of us, it’s totally normal,” Hart, a South Carolina–based certified run coach and founder of Hart Strength and Endurance Coaching, tells SELF. To find out why you might be feeling it—and what it actually means for your fitness—keep on reading.

1. You didn’t warm up.

Chances are, you probably don’t do a full-blown warm-up prior to climbing a flight of steps. “You're not stretching and jumping up and down and going for a jog [first],” Anuradha Lala, MD, advanced heart failure and transplant cardiologist at Mount Sinai, tells SELF. And while that’s totally understandable (you’d probably get some side-eyes if you busted out a whole calisthenics routine at the foot of a staircase), it also means your body isn’t really prepped for the work ahead.

“The whole point of a warm-up is that we’re priming our entire body—our muscles, our heart and our lungs—for exercise and we ease into that,” Hart explains. “When you’re climbing the stairs and you haven’t done any sort of warm up, it’s a very sudden change in oxygen needs for our body.” After all, that’s what it needs to create that extra energy to power you up them.

This rapid jump-in demand can quickly spike your heart rate and breathing rate. “You literally are going from zero to a hundred without warning,” Dr. Lala explains—and that just plain feels hard. It’s the same as if you were to spontaneously start sprinting versus beginning with an easy jog and building up your pace. The former would probably feel pretty uncomfortable, since your body hasn’t had a chance to gradually acclimate to the work you’re asking it to do. So if you notice that climbing stairs after you’ve power walked a couple blocks feels easier than when you’ve literally just gone from the couch to staircase, this might be why.

2. A bunch of muscles, including some really big ones, are at play here.

There are a lot of different parts working together to move you up the stairs. Climbing engages the largest muscles in your body, including your glutes, quads, and calves, Dr. Lala explains. It also recruits your core muscles too, Hart says.

And the steeper the stairs, the harder they’re going to have to work, Hart says, since taking bigger steps requires you to recruit a greater number of muscle fibers. Like we mentioned, your body needs oxygen to supply your muscles with energy; the more in play, the more oxygen you’ll need to sustain that effort—hence the increased breathing you may notice when tackling stairs.

3. You’re tapping into different types of muscle fibers.

Speaking of muscle fibers: When you’re doing easy aerobic activity, like walking on even ground, your type one fibers, or endurance-based slow-twitch ones, help you along. But when you start climbing stairs, you engage your type two fibers—a.k.a. your fast-twitch ones, which support powerful movements like lifting heavy weights or sprinting.

This can lead to the buildup of hydrogen ions and carbon dioxide in your muscles and blood; you need oxygen to clear that out to help stop fatigue from creeping in. This higher demand forces your body to respond by increasing your heart rate and breathing rate, which is why you may arrive at the top of the staircase huffing and puffing, Hart explains.

If your workout routine is heavily focused in the endurance space—like steady-state running, biking, walking, or swimming, which trains type one muscle fibers—your body might not be as used to engaging type two fibers as, say, someone who lifts heavy weights or does explosive exercises like sprints or plyometrics. So when it comes time to use them to climb a flight of stairs, it’s going to be that much more taxing on your body.

4. The effects of gravity are real.

Stair climbing may seem easy since it’s essentially just walking, right? Well, the key difference is gravity. When you’re strolling on flat ground, you’re propelling your body forward. But when you’re walking up stairs, you’re moving forward and up. Most people take bigger steps—and lift their hips higher—to do this, which engages more muscle fibers, says Hart. At the same time, gravity is doing its best to pull you back down, and your muscles have to work overtime to surmount that resistance, as SELF previously explained.

All this increases the amount of work your heart needs to do, Dr. Lala says. As Hart puts it, your heart rate and breathing rate will then amp up to supply your body with the oxygen to complete that extra work.

5. You haven’t actually trained for stair-climbing.

There’s a principle in exercise called “specificity,” which basically just means your body adapts to the very particular demands you place on it, Hart explains. This means that if you want to become a better runner, you need to run regularly; spending hours on other forms of endurance exercise—like riding your bike or logging laps in the pool—just won’t be as effective.

Same goes for stair climbing: Even if you’re doing movements that train those type two muscle fibers—like squats, deadlifts, and leg presses—those exercises are still not the exact movement and probably won’t carry over as well as actually climbing stairs would, Hart says. So unless your workout or daily life includes ascending a whole bunch of steps, it’s no wonder tackling a staircase will feel hard and fatiguing when you have to do it.

But there are some cases where breathlessness can hint at a problem.

In general, feeling tired and breathless at the top of a staircase can be totally normal and not a sign of anything concerning. But there are a few instances in which stair climbing fatigue does warrant a check in with your doctor:

• It takes a while to get back to baseline: “If you need to take several minutes of rest to recuperate, that’s not normal,” Dr. Lala says, as it could signal a potential heart issue like heart failure or a blockage in one of the arteries that supplies blood to the heart.
• You feel discomfort in your chest. “You should really never feel chest pain with exertion,” Dr. Lala says. This can be a sign of those heart issues as well.
• It suddenly got a lot harder. If you notice any abrupt change in the difficulty of stair climbing—for example, maybe it usually feels like a 6 out of 10 intensity for you, and then one day the same flight is suddenly a 9 out of 10—that’s another sign something might be going on, Dr. Lala says.

But as long as you don’t notice any of those red flags, getting your ass kicked by a flight of stairs is “not a concern at all,” Hart says. But if you want this task to be a little less taxing? Try climbing stairs more often. “It can get easier over time,” Hart says.

 

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com. one can see my crochet creations  
https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
https://kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com. for info on knee replacement
https://cancersupportindia.blogspot.com  for infor on cancer and health related topics
https://GSiyers home remedies.blogspot.com   is the latest addition to my blogs. I'm going to add posts there, do give me your valuable feed back on my blogs. Thanks a lot, take care, be healthy and be happy.

 

 

Sedentary Lifestyle: Clear Signs You Aren’t Active Enough

We are all aware that exercise and movement are important components of health. But how many of us actually move enough throughout the day? The truth is that a lot of people end up following a sedentary lifestyle without even realizing it. The ongoing pandemic, which has forced millions of people to work from home and stay at home all day, has only aggravated the issue, as more and more people are sitting on a chair all day without moving much.

Not all of us have the time to hit the gym every day, but doctors say that even light exercise and movement – from a walk around your block to a light yoga session – can have a significant impact on your overall health and well-being. But how can you tell that you're not moving enough? Your body will let you know through these subtle but clear signals, so all you have to do is to watch out for them.

 

1. You're regularly constipated

Constipation can happen due to various reasons, including dehydration and a diet poor in fiber. However, according to the Cleveland Clinic, constipation can also occur when you're not getting enough exercise. 

 

When we move more, our GI tract moves more as well, and that makes our bowel movements normal. To keep our bowel movements regular, we must move regularly throughout the day, especially as we age. On the other hand, if you keep sitting in a chair or lying on a sofa for most of the day, your bowel moments will suffer. Therefore, make it a point to take little breaks throughout the day where you get up and stretch or take a walk for a few minutes. That will certainly make a big difference in your gut health.

2. You’re always fatigued without even doing too much work

Have you been feeling sluggish or fatigued for most of the day, even though you are hardly doing any physical work? If this is happening even when you are having sufficient food and are sleeping properly, it could be a sign of too little movement. Research published in Fatigue: Biomedicine, Health & Behavior says that even one low to moderate-intensity exercise for 20 minutes can boost one’s energy and decrease fatigue. 

 

This isn’t particularly surprising, as previous studies have also suggested that exercise boosts the amount of oxygen and nutrients that reach your tissues. But if you spend most of your day sitting or lying down, then your tissues won’t get that necessary dose of oxygen and nutrients, leading to tiredness or fatigue. 

 

3. You're always out of breath

Do you often find yourself being winded or feel out of breath after climbing the stairs or taking a short walk? That may be another signal that you need to include some cardio exercises in your daily routine. 

 

If you don’t train the muscles that help your lungs expand and contract sufficiently, they will start losing strength. As a result, you will start feeling out of breath quicker. Over time, the lungs and the heart of those who have settled into a sedentary lifestyle will become weaker, and you will feel overworked as a result of even minor physical activity. The best remedy for a tired heart and lungs is to keeping your body active because the less activity you do, the more breathless you are likely to feel.

4. Your joints hurt

Stiff and painful joints can be an indication of inflammatory conditions like arthritis or an autoimmune disease. However, this may also mean that you aren’t using them enough during the day. Healthy joints need to move - plain and simple. Our knees, shoulders, and ankles have a lubricant called synovial fluid in them. According to Arthritis-health, the primary function of this fluid is “to provide cushion and lubrication for joints.” 

 

Additionally, synovial fluid delivers nutrients to cartilage (the tissue that keeps joint motion fluid). It is vital to keep joints active and moving frequently to circulate the synovial fluid throughout the joint. Being sedentary for long hours can slow down the production of this fluid in our joints, causing pain and stiffness. So, put your joints to work by making sure you walk at least 15-20 minutes every day.

5. Your muscles suddenly feel tight

Some muscles can get tight due to restricted movement too. This particularly happens when you spend long days and weeks working at a desk or when there's a lack of physical activity for an extended period altogether. Basically, when you stop moving your muscles, they tend to tighten up or freeze. When this starts happening regularly, even simple daily activities will start feeling uncomfortable. 

 

Just moving your muscles and getting the blood pumping to that area of your body will be sufficient to ease the pain and discomfort. You don’t need to start doing any high-intensity lifting or cardio to improve your muscle strength. Simply spending a few minutes three or four times a week stretching your body will keep them in good shape.

 

6. You're irritable or sad for no reason

Lack of body movement doesn’t just affect your body; it can also affect your mood. Regular exercise makes our body release chemicals called endorphins, also known as 'happy hormones.' These hormones help trigger a positive feeling in the body and also help relieve stress. Now, when you start leading a sedentary lifestyle and stop moving around much, those endorphins are unlikely to be released, and you might end up feeling irritable or sad for no reason. 

 

So, if not for anything else, you can start exercising regularly to keep yourself in good spirits in these difficult times. Try and include light-weight cardio exercises like walking, cycling, or swimming in your daily routine to keep your mood positive and stable.

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com. one can see my crochet creations  
https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
https://kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com. for info on knee replacement