I generally try to work out twice a week and limit my junk food (my discipline varies week by week). I do feel fatigue and blurry vision when I stop working out for a while and my blood pressure starts to rocket again. I take low dose medicine but it seems to give me a little depression. If I can get off the meds, that would be awesome. Aside from eating well and working out, I have been on the lookout for technology that can reduce high blood pressure.
Currently, I have two blood pressure monitors:
- OMRON Gold Blood Pressure Monitor – this one I like as well since it’s portable. I did use it for a few months but as of this writing though, I can ‘t seem to find it. I guess it’s too portably sized that I can easily lose it. I hope to find it one day.
Over the past few months, more and more articles came out about how breathing exercises can help lower your blood pressure. I thought “Breathing Exercises…that sounds easy. Is it like meditation breathing?” Seems like it is. Doing a google search, there are lot of new and old articles about how breathing exercises can help blood pressure. NPR has a good article on breathe training.
You don’t need a device to do the breathing exercise but the device seems to help strengthen your lungs. Supposedly, it’s like weightlifting for your lungs.
There are a lot of these devices online but I decided to try the following one:
Expand-A-Lung | Breathing Fitness Exerciser Device – This one is easy to use. One dial at end that controls resistance. It’s intuitive and the mouthpiece is pretty soft.
I’ll add to my post weekly to see if it does help out a lot.
More to come!
Week 1
So this past week, I started off with a BP of 129/87. I thought to myself “ok, let’s try to do this 6 times this week. Go Health!” This simple decision to use the breathing exerciser had the cascading effect of wanting to change a few more things this week as well. Since this is about getting healthier, I thought I should try to eat better this week and…probably work out more.
I know it’s not scientific. From a scientific standpoint, the only change I should have made was the breathing exerciser and see if that makes a difference.
I ended up using the breathing exerciser 5 times this past week. I also upped my workouts from 2-4 times this past week.
The food part…that was a different story. My daughter likes to bake and made an apple pie as I started this challenge. I really overdid it on the apple pie. She also made cookies that the whole family enjoyed. I over did it on the cookies as well.
I say this because despite using the breathing exerciser and upping my workouts, my BP shot up during the week. It was weird. It went as high as 142/92. I thought it was strange and thought all those sweets was the culprit. After doing a quick google search, there are a bunch of articles on how sugar might be as bad as salt when it comes to significantly increasing blood pressure.
I didn’t know that. So this next week, I am going to really cut down my sugar.
I like to think positively so maybe the breathing exercises and extra workouts helped reduce it from even higher BP numbers.
I did end the week at BP 125/84.
So many variables to think about when it comes to your health. I hope I can have a better more stable experience this upcoming week.
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