Info on High Blood Pressure – How to Lower It
If you suffer from high blood pressure (BP) there are two main ways to lower it back to a safe level.
The best way to lower your BP and get your body back in balance is through diet and exercise. It’s really as simple as that.
The worst way, in my opinion, is also the most common – taking prescription medication to artificially lower your BP (while not changing the factors that led to high blood pressure in the first place.)
So what causes high blood pressure / hypertension? Some people might object saying that hypertension is caused by genetic factors outside if their control.
I would agree that a lot of BP problems can be ascribed to genetic factors. But that’s not the same as saying there is nothing can be done about it – or saying prescription medication is the only solution.
Some people, like myself, seem to be genetically predisposed to high BP.
It runs in my family apparently. My mother had high blood pressure and my father who is still alive regularly takes half a dozen pills a day for this and that including high BP.
I have taken another path. Instead of resigning myself to a lifetime on pills I have made an effort to re-regulate my blood pressure through diet and exercise.
What is considered high blood pressure / hypertension?
The old rule of thumb was 100 plus your age was an acceptable systolic reading. It was accepted that BP naturally rises with age. The new regime says that everyone should be at or below 120/80. This has been a great boon to international pharmaceutical corporations given that virtually everyone above the age of forty is now eligible to be prescribed a lifetime of daily pills. If I sound cynical it’s because I am.
So why do I shun hypertension medications? It’s not the cost. (I could get them for free here in the UK.) No, it’s because BP lowering medications do not fix the problem. If they did, after your BP was down you could stop taking them. But the pharmaceutical industry has yet to create a drug that can really fix blood pressure. Sure, their drugs artificially lower your blood pressure. But stop taking them and it shoots right back up.
My only experience with a BP lowering medication was for 8 week with Rampril – an ACE inhibitor. For 8 weeks I had an irritating dry cough day and night while my BP refused to come down from its 190+/120+ readings. (I’ve read about even worse side effects with some other medications but have no experience to validate them.)
So .. the Rambril went in the bin and I embarked on a new regime of diet and exercise. Within one month my blood pressure was beginning to drop. Within 3 months my BP readings were consistently below 135/95 occasionally as low as 118/79 (rare but does happen).
Lowering my BP through diet and exercise hasn’t been instant. But my BP has kept down over the months to an acceptable level. No, I’ll probably never enjoy BP consistently below 120/80 – it’s not in my genes. But as long as I consistently remain below 140/105 (usually in the 130/90 range) I figure that’s OK for me. I’m no longer in a high risk category for heart disease or stroke. And I feel better and more fit than I have for many years.
Diets to control high blood pressure
BP lowering diet means eating less of some things and eating more of others. It’s not all about moving simply to a bland diet of ‘healthy foods’ that suck much of the culinary pleasures out of life. Not at all. My new diet included things like a glass of red wine and dark chocolate one a day … among other things.
BP lowering exercises involve walking more. For me it’s a 20 minute hike up the mountain when the weather is friendly. (I live part way up a mountain in Wales). When I get to my summit I eat an apple. All of it
Other exercises involve slowing your system down with breathing exercises and the like. One exercise involves a kind of rhythmic walking which I do indoors when the weather is miserable.
For an overview of the most popular alternative methods to lower your blood pressure naturally go to my Alternative High BP Cures page where I discuss and expose the good, bad and ugly.
Simon Foster was a sufferer of dangerously high blood pressure but has now achieved healthy levels through exercise and diet without the use of medications. His mission is to share this knowledge and techniques with fellow sufferers of acute hypertension.
