Look years younger by ditching health-sapping bad habits

By Yanjun

It has been shown repeatedly that bad habits are detrimental to a person’s health. Whether this involves smoking or using smokeless tobacco, drinking in excess, not exercising, eating high fat and calorie food, or any number of myriad of other bad habits, they can actually shorten the lifespan of that particular person. In fact, in some cases, these bad habits can take a dozen or more years off their lives.

Adds years to a person’s looks

Many people do not realize how their health is affected by their habits until a crisis occurs. This can cause them to reevaluate their lives and, in the course of this insight, realize that they should change some of their less than beneficial habits. An added bonus that many people do not realize is that they can easily add to their looks when they ditch these habits.

It is no secret that smoking adds years to a person’s face. From the motions that are used to smoke, the face often develops a series of wrinkles such as those around the mouth and the eyes. These can make people who are in their 20s look a decade or more older.

Drinking excess alcohol, lack of exercise and eating fatty foods has a tendency to pack on the pounds, making a person look year older. In many cases, the stereotypical ‘spare tire’ that is attributed to a middle age slump in metabolism actually has its roots in these bad habits.

Not just for vanity’s sake

Of course, a person’s looks are not the only aspect that is affected by their bad habits. Such bad habits have been shown to significantly shorten the lifespan of the people in a large study of British adults. In this study, almost 5,000 people were followed for 20 years. Researchers made a note of which of the study participants engaged in four key behaviors: smoking, poor diet, lack of exercise and drinking too much.

The results showed that, over the 20 years of the study, 29 percent of those participants who engaged in those four key bad habit died. In contrast, only 8 percent of the people who did not engage in the unhealthy habit died during the study. The two most common causes of death among those people in the study who had those unhealthy habits were heart disease and cancer.

The takeaway from this groundbreaking study is that eating unprocessed foods and exercising regularly, in addition to quitting smoking and reducing alcohol intake, can help keep people healthy, both in matters of health as well as the way they look. It is recommended that any changes be made slowly, however, as this approach makes them more likely to become good habits that eventually replace those bad habits.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.womansday.com

http://institutefornaturalhealing.com

http://www.wellsource.com

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