2893 Living healthy with heart failure

As with any health condition, your health and fitness can help limit the impact of the disease on your life. The same is true with heart failure. This video tells you how you can lead a healthy life, and keep the symptoms of your heart failure under better control. Let’s start with your diet. Minimise how much salt you have. Salt holds onto water in your body and can worsen your symptoms. So, don’t add salt to your food and use herbs and other seasonings instead. Avoid cheese, bacon, canned soups, crisps, smoked fish and foods with a high salt warning on the label. We do not recommend salt substitutes as these are not good for people with heart failure. Reduce your saturated fat intake from dairy products, cakes and sausages. Drink semi-skimmed milk instead of full cream milk. It has the same calcium content, but much less fat. Eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Frozen vegetables are a cheaper alternative and have a good supply of nutrients. Eat at least two portions of fish a week, including one portion of oily fish such as mackerel, salmon or sardines. The British Heart Foundation website has lots of recipes to help you make these changes and help you to lead a healthy life. There are some other changes you can make to your lifestyle to help your condition. Most importantly, don’t smoke. Stopping smoking is the best way to increase your life expectancy, and it has a beneficial impact on those around you, especially children. Limit your alcohol intake to within the recommended limits as alcohol is known to worsen heart failure. Alcohol also contains a lot of calories, with no nutritional benefit, so it can lead to weight gain. If you are overweight, your heart has to work harder to pump blood around your body which can worsen your condition. By eating healthily and taking regular exercise, you can aim for a healthy body weight. Some people with heart failure can find exercise tiring, so do what you can and gradually increase what you can tolerate Do not think that you have to run miles to lose weight. Start by taking the stairs instead of the lift, and getting off the bus one stop earlier so you have a longer walk home. Taken together, these small changes can start to make a big difference to how you feel and the impact your condition has on your life.