it's very important to understand that your high blood pressure numbers are simply a reflection of your body trying to adapt to you being unhealthy so as you do the following 10 things that I'm going to show you research has figured out approximately how much your blood pressure will go down on each of them and if you do all of them you can significantly lower your blood pressure by Major numbers we're talking 40 points on the systolic and 10 to 15 points on the diastolic how much you weigh contributes to your blood pressure in the following ways research has shown that for every 2.2 lbs that you're able to lose your systolic number can go down one point in other words 1 kilogram for one point here's where this is important losing 2.2 lb or 1 kg doesn't seem like a lot but when you figure that some people could lose 20 kg or 44 lb you can significantly lower your blood pressure the reason why the weight contributes to your high blood pressure is because fatty tissue the adapost tissue requires oxygen and your heart has to work that much harder in order to pump blood to all that extra tissue if that tissue was shrunken and the blood vessels are no longer needing to supply as much oxygen and nutrients to those fat cells then your heart doesn't have to work as hard and as a result your blood pressure will go down now the million dooll question is how do you go about losing weight there are many philosophies and I know that you probably have found some that don't work and some that do so in the comments section you may want to help others and let them know how you lost weight for some people it was changing to a whole food plant-based diet other people it was a total carnivore diet for a lot of people it wasn't either extreme it was simply eating less calories less food less food on the plate for every time you sit down and eat a normal meal if you only ate 75% of what you normally would eat you could lose weight that way literally by not changing your diet at all now there are carnivore diets there are keto diets there are ketovore diets there's Whole Food plant-based there is a Zone Diet there is a South Beach Diet there's the Atkins diet there's a lot of different diets out there and sometimes it's confusing to figure out which diet should you follow and the answer is it almost doesn't doesn't matter because every diet has had success they are actually more similar than they are different when you think about it because they're all infighting of what the best food is but all of them agree that you probably should not be eating a lot of ultr processed foods the more processed food you eat the more likely you're putting just chemicals and bad calories into your body even a person who eats nothing but steak is still not eating a highly processed food on the other side of the coin a person who's only eating plants is also not eating High highly processed foods by losing weight however you want to do it is vital because very often it's not the diet per se that maybe changed your blood pressure it was simply the weight loss salt in intake and blood pressure can be controversial and I'll explain all the details right now but here's what you need to know in terms of what the research shows you and that is if you can reduce the amount of salt that you intake by only 1 gram you can reduce your blood pressure by 5 mm of mercury now the average American eats 3.4 gram of salt per day the recommended amount is 2.3 gam of salt per day now where this gets confusing is when people start changing their diet and they find out that salt or reducing salt doesn't make that big of a difference that does happen with some people because they were not eating that much salt to begin with but if you start to reduce salt usually what you're doing is you're not reducing the salt in the salt Shaker by salting your food what you're doing is you're reducing the amount of ultr processed foods that contain salt so by going on a diet any diet and eating more natural foods you end up reducing salt to begin with usually to a normal level therefore if you eat Natural Foods it's okay to Salt your food because it's unlikely that you're getting much salt in the natural foods to begin with I'm going to give you an example if you were to start a carnivore diet where you only eat steak let's just do the extreme version of it you're only going to eat a ribeye steak once a day well there's not enough salt in that one ribeye to amount to anything so in that particular case if you start noticing side effects of following the carnivore diet or an extreme carnivore diet like that where you you are starting to get muscle cramps and you're getting dehydrated and you're getting Twitches in your eye and your facial muscles and you're having electrolyte problems it's okay to Salt the steak and the reason why is because you're simply not going to be consuming 3.4 gram of salt in one meal but when you eat a highly processed diet very often there's so much salt in that type of diet that just reducing the salt shaker usually doesn't make much difference so don't be afraid of consuming salt be afraid of consuming an excessive amount of salt and research has shown that one gram of salt reduction reduces your blood pressure by 5 mm of mercury increasing the amount of potassium research has shown can lower your blood pressure if you can just consume about 5 G of pottassium per day you will lower your blood pressure by 5 mm of mercury now sodium and potassium I have kind of this LoveHate relationship when people eat an excessive amount of salt or sodium chloride and they usually are eating highly processed foods which have a low amount of potassium and so in the kidney this becomes a problem and can affect your kidney which thus that's how it what affects your blood pressure so by reducing the amount of salt and increasing the amount of potassium you can have a one two punch so if you increase the potassium and lower the amount of salt you can improve your blood pressure by 10 mm of mercury but if you keep the salt steady and just increase your pottassium you'll only decrease it by five now how does one start to consume more potassium there's numerous ways just to give you an example there's the DASH diet there's the Mediterranean diet and there's the Zone diet these diets tend to be very salt restrictive because they don't emphasize processed foods and the foods that they do allow you to eat which are vegetables and fruits tend to have a lot of potassium in them in addition to that and I'll put links down below in the description if you want to look at these there are salt substitutes so instead of using the salt shaker with sodium chloride you could use pottassium chloride now there is a different taste to potassium chloride and very often people don't adapt to it but if you can adapt to it that would be even better now because of the taste issue if you cannot stomach the potassium chloride as a salt substitute you can always get a mix now at the end of the video if you hang tight right here at the end of the video I'll have a uh video where you click the box and I did a number of salt substitutes to tell you which ones worked better and which how they tasted and everything so hang tight for that at the end but nonetheless you can experiment and get a half sodium chloride potassium chloride they sell these so when you're when you're salting your food you can't tell the difference between table salt salt sodium chloride and potassium chloride sodium chloride mix so it's a wonderful substitute and it's a great way to get more potassium in your diet magnesium can play a major role in controlling our blood pressure 400 milligrams of magnesium can lower our blood pressure by 1 to 2 mm of mercury that doesn't sound like a lot but when you combine it with other things that you're changing in your life to lower your blood pressure it can have a significant effect and the reason why is because magnesium plays such a major role in many functions of our body such that if you are deficient in magnesium it starts to Cascade itself into a problem with metabolic issues that can then uh raise your blood pressure so for many people I recommend that the eat a diet full of foods that have magnesium and or take a supplement and how can you improve the amount of magnesium that you consume you can simply eat more vegetables during the course of a day or you can eat fruits that have magnesium such as an avocado things like that there are foods that have not a lot of magnesium unless you purchase the correct type so for example if you're going to eat meat you want to get a grassfed type of animal where the meat came from that will have more magnesium therefore the animal itself is eating the grass or the vegetable and that's how you get more magnesium if you're trying to follow a diet where you're restricting the amount of vegetables that you eat for whatever reason magnesium supplementation is often necessary simply because organic food and grass-fed meats can be expensive many people cannot afford these things so a supplement can bridge the gap in addition to that the soil isn't as strong in some farming communities as it used to be so even if you are eating vegetables you may not be getting as much magnesium as you normally think you should one of the telltale signs of a magnesium deficiency is high blood pressure so it's worth trying a magnesium supplement for 30 to 60 days to see if you can get enough magnesium now the recommended dose is often lower than what's in a magnesium supplement because you want to take a little bit more so that you can make sure you're absorbing that properly one gram of fish oil taken per day research has shown can lower your blood pressure by about 5 mm of mercury fish oil plays a major role for a number of reasons first of all it has omega-3 fatty acids which will help the blood become thinner aspirin and fish oil work in totally different ways the mechanisms are different but essentially it does thin your blood in a similar way this is why if you've ever had surgery a major surgery or even a minor surgery for that matter they want you to stop your aspirin 10 days before the surgery but they also want you to stop taking any omega-3 fatty acids because when you have surgery and they cut you open you need to clot clotting is a good thing clotting is looked at as bad from a cardiovascular perspective because we never want to have blood clots we don't want a clot that goes to our our brain or our heart causing a stroke or a heart attack however when you have surgery that's how your skin and the insides heal is you need to clot and fish oil can interfere with that when you've had surgery but unless you're having surgery you should be taking a at minimum a gram of fish oil per day now there's many different fish oils that I like I'll just show you this one this is from metagenics right here if you want I'll put a link Down Below in the description uh so if you can look at it if you want to get that one it's very simple I take two tablets two tablets or or soft gels gives me exactly a gram of fish oil sometimes I'll use the spoon uh it's up to you on what you want to do one of the side benefits just so you know of fish oil is that your skin tends to be very healthy uh it doesn't become dry your hair isn't dry it's very oily type of hair uh the nails are very good so these are all side benefits But ultimately we're talking about blood pressure and just by taking a fish oil supplement and changing nothing else you can lower your blood pressure by 5 mm of mercury that sounds like a win to me what is alcohol's effect on blood pressure here's what the research knows that if you drink no alcohol or have only one glass of red wine your blood pressure can go down about 4 mm of mercury anything more than that starts to have a negative effect and the reason why is because it's possible that the alcohol itself is not healthy for you we know that it's a it's a it's a negative when it comes to the liver and the kidneys and thus when the liver and kidneys start to go bad you start to develop an entire metabolic issue where your blood pressure goes up it may be that it's the other things in the red wine that tends to lower a person's blood pressure the equivalent alcohol in a shot glass of tequila or vodka does not have the same effect so many people are confused about alcohol and I agree that it is confusing because some research says one glass a day is acceptable other people say zero other people say it doesn't matter like alcohol doesn't make any difference in your over all Health you know I know people that drink a case of beer every day these are not healthy people so it's hard to be convinced that drinking more than a glass of wine would be considered healthy and I think you know the answer so if you can refrain from having any alcohol whatsoever it can only help you but if you want to drink some alcohol the research shows red wine it's probably the best for you what is the effect of exercise on high blood pressure here's what research has shown a certain amount of exercise can lower your blood pressure by 5 mm of mercury and the amount of exercise is 150 minutes of cardiovascular exercise per week this means that if you walk for 30 minutes five times a week that is perfect or if you want to ride a bicycle at about 5 to 9 mph for 150 minutes per week that's perfect as well the exercise does work better if you divide it up so it's not enough to go and ride your bicycle 150 minutes and say I'm done for the week it's best to do it a little bit each day now the research also shows that high-intensity interval training might be a little bit better than cardiovascular training under certain circumstances and those circumstances are the person has to be healthy to begin with to do high-intensity training your heart has to be strong enough and you have to be healthy enough to withstand the high-intensity training so for many people is trying to start their health journey by trying to get in shape and lower their blood pressure it probably would be wise to start out with cardiovascular exercise at a low intensity build yourself up so that you can do 150 minutes per week and then once you're at that level you can then start incorporating high-intensity interval training so I'm going to give you an example and there's one other type of exercise I'm going to tell you about that lowers blood pressure and it's a lot easier than all of these but here here's the thing that you need to know when it comes to for example walking 150 minutes per week the improvements might be here like this when you start running and doing a high-intensity more High intense exercise the improvements might be like this so there you get that much margin the problem with running is it's so hard on some people's knees and hips and feet spine and there's so many injuries that I see from running that that you just don't get with the walking so if you're new to this I would suggest just start walking there's no pressure to start running same thing with cycling if you want to ride a bicycle and ride a bicycle for a low intensity at 5 to 9 miles hour that's great for your heart riding a bike 25 mil hour sure it's a harder exercise but there's a lot of consequences if something goes wrong crashing at 9 mph is a lot different than crashing at 25 mil hour you can you can trust me on that one there's another type of exercise that is very useful and has been shown to be very effective at lowering your blood pressure and this is great for people that cannot do cardiovascular exercise or they cannot do any type of high-intensity interval training it's called isometric training and what this means means is you can take for example a tennis ball and squeeze it you can do wall sits which I'm going to show you right now exactly how that's done so you can see right now I just go up against the wall and it's as if I'm sitting in a chair but I'm not sitting in the chair I'm just leaning up against the wall and using my thigh muscles isometric means that your muscles are Contracting without any movement at all there's planks there's lots of different isometric exercises that can be done however uh you have to do what makes what's fun and so for many people going for walks riding a bicycle tends to be more fun than isometric training but you figure out what you like to do and that's the thing that you'll probably stick with and if you stick with it the research shows you can lower your blood pressure meditation deep breathing what is the effect on your blood pressure the answer answer is if you can do meditation or some type of deep breathing exercises once per day research has shown it has the potential to lower your blood pressure by 5 mm of mercury now there's tremendous amount of research for this you can just Google it and read about it it's very fascinating that even with all the diets and the exercise very often just taking 30 slow deep breaths or finding a way once a day to take a break relax not think about all your problems and just breathe now there are certain things that can improve your breathing such that you will lower your blood pressure even more and I'm going to tell you about those in just a minute but sometimes I think to myself I wonder if it's just the fact that you took 5 minutes off from worrying about every problem that exists in in the world and just being conscious and aware of where you are right now so what I like to do is I like to either lie down or sit down in a comfortable position and what you can do is breathe in through your nose now this is very important because if you breathe in through your nose research has shown that your body will produce more of a gas inside the arteries called nitric oxide and when your body produces more nitric oxide it allows the arteries to become more pliable and they will expand with every heartbeat thus the systolic number in particular will go down of all the things that you can do that can lower blood pressure the systolic number is the most variable based on stress so let's say a person has blood pressure of 120 over 80 and you give them a lot of stress that day day their systolic will go up sometimes significantly up to 40 points based on stress their diastolic might follow a little bit but not go up as high so if you're having a problem with the systolic number in particular for many people it can be related to stress so taking just 5 minutes off per day and breathing in through the nose can do that when you inhale there's diaphragmatic breathing there's chest breathing there's combinations of both I personally have found that when you inhale through the nose you don't worry so much about whether your chest is moving or your belly is moving you just try to fill up the lungs as much as you possibly can so it's as deep of a breath as you possibly can what this does is it stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system which is that part of your central nervous system that allows for relaxation and better digestion so if you're also having digestive troubles in addition to high blood pressure problems very often some form of meditation a calming time that you do every day where you breathe in through the nose you could breathe out through the mouth or the nose if you like that's fine can have significant improvements the last thing that you should know about breathing thing is research has also found that humming tends to vibrate our nasal passageways and the roof of our mouth such that it also improves more nitric oxide production so things like that I know it sounds really weird and I know for many people it sounds new age and different and it doesn't sound like you but if you try it for 30 days it's something you can do for free and it doesn't seem to cause any ill problems with your body you could literally take your blood pressure before you do the breathing and then after you take the breathing and tell me what happens in the comments section when you try it it takes about 5 minutes or approximately 30 cycles of breathing how much does our attitude cause high blood pressure well no one's really studied it but they have studied stress reduction strategies and it amounts to about 5 millimeters per Mercury so in other words if you go and start to reduce your stress you can reduce your blood pressure by about 5 millimeters of mercury but something I've often thought of is certain people tend to be stress cases and certain people tend to not be I used to be stressed I think I've solved it I'm not sure if it's really uh worked that well most of the time but what I've found is that as I've lived my life I've started to realize that attitude sometimes is everything and having a bad attitude and H being negative all the time and looking for the negative and watching the news seems to just for me it just pisses me off and a lot of times you just need an attitude adjustment I have found that the book by Dale Carnegie called how to stop worrying and start living is a fantastic book to read it was written I think 85 years ago but a lot of the principles are still valid today now I have to warn you if you do read that book you cannot get offended because you have to understand the dude wrote the book 85 years ago there's a lot of offensive uh things that people think is offensive today by today's standards but that's the way they they did it back then but it's still nonetheless a great book to read because it teaches you how to have an attitude about things in your life that if you just change the way you view things very often you don't seem to stress over it everything anymore and I got to tell you it's a wonderful way to live to not have as much stress as everyone else now one can argue that you're putting your head in the sand that you're not current with things but what value is it to be current and have high blood pressure it's not of any value they say that stress reduction reduces your blood pressure by about 5 millim millimet of mercury I would venture to Guess that it's probably more but there's only one person that it that matters and that's you so you can read the book try stuff out worst case scenario if you want to go back to your old stressed ways go back I'll put the link to the book down in the description with everything else that I've used to lower my own blood pressure there are some high-powered Foods namely beets spinach almonds and there's a number of others that have a high amount of nitrates in them natural nitrates that can lower our blood pressure in fact research has shown that beetroot juice just 6 ounces of beetroot juice can lower your blood pressure within 3 hours and last up to 24 it's bloody amazing the effect of beetroot juice and for example spinach and almonds they also have nitrates in them and what happens is and this is a central theme in lowering people's blood pressure is that anything that you can do that would create more nitric oxide in your body the better off you're going to be so for example breathing can help you develop or stimulate nitric oxide certain supplements can help stimulate nitric oxide but just eating foods that have nitrates in them is supplying the raw materials for your body to create more nitric oxide so you can breathe in through the nose and hum as much as you want you need to supply the nutrients so that your body can produce the nitric oxide to lower your blood pressure those are the 10 things that I've been doing to lower my personal blood pressure I probably have missed some so please in the comment section if something has worked for you maybe you can help someone else by making your suggestions so let us know in the comment section what you have done to lower your own blood pressure so we all can benefit and get healthy [Music]