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5 Easy Ways to Lower Your Cholesterol

Your cholesterol numbers aren’t where they should be, which means you’ve joined the nearly 94 million Americans who have high cholesterol, one of the primary risk factors for life-threatening heart disease. Medical providers around the country are urging patients to better manage cholesterol levels by losing weight, exercising more, and eating healthily.

Sure, these recommendations are on point and represent the most effective ways to improve your cardiovascular health, but those six words are enormous challenges for most people.

The team here at Temecula Medical Group, which includes Dr. Richard Rawson, Ryan D Rowan, PA-C, and Armanda L Alvarez, FNP-C, understands the importance of lowering your cholesterol numbers, but we recognize how difficult this can be.

Through our concierge primary care, we work on individualized plans for lowering cholesterol numbers that consider lifestyle, goals, medical history, and other factors that should be part of your heart-health equation.

To give you an idea of some of the easy-to-implement suggestions we come up with for our patients, here are five examples:

1. Swap out your chips for nuts

You want an easy snack you can munch on in the car or at your desk, and chips or pretzels often fit the bill. Instead of these processed foods, why not eat a handful of nuts instead? Nuts are satisfying as a snack and contain good fats that increase your high-density lipoprotein (HDL) levels. Your HDLs are good cholesterols and are critical for lowering your low-density lipoprotein (LDL) levels.

2. Track your steps

You’ve been told to exercise more, but where do you start? A great place is to track your steps with your smartphone or fitness watch. You want to aim for 6,000-10,000 steps each day, and having a daily target will make you more likely to find ways to meet it. 

For example, perhaps you’ll park farther away from the store entrance or take a quick spin around the block after dinner. Or, instead of taking that phone call from your couch, you get outside and walk and talk.

3. Identify and eliminate trans fats

There are different types of dietary fats; the one you should avoid to improve your cholesterol levels is trans fats. These fats raise bad cholesterol levels and lower good ones, so you should take an “identify and eliminate” approach to all trans fats. In brief, trans fats stem from hydrogenated oil found in fried foods and many processed baked goods.

4. Focus on fish

If you love a good hamburger or steak, we suggest you find ways to ditch red meat in favor of cholesterol-improving proteins like fish. Fatty fishes like salmon and tuna contain omega-3s, which are great sources of HDLs.

By swapping any red meat you eat with a fish alternative, you’re doing double duty for your cholesterol levels — you’re avoiding the more dangerous fats in red meat and substituting them with healthier fats that improve cholesterol numbers.

5. Add strengthening exercises

There’s no better way to meet the “exercise more” and ”lose weight” recommendations for lowering cholesterol than by building muscle. The more muscle you have, the more calories you burn, even when you’re not exercising.

If you think you have to go to the gym to build muscles, think again. You can grab a gallon jug of water to use as a weight or work in a few lunges and squats in front of the TV. For more easy, at-home strengthening ideas, click here.

Again, these are just five of the many ways you can lower your cholesterol levels and improve your cardiovascular health. If you’d like a more personalized plan, please contact our Temecula, California, office to schedule an appointment.

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