Health Tests to Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

The number of medical conditions that are caused due to an unhealthy lifestyle are increasing every day. This New Year as you make a resolution to maintain a healthy lifestyle, make sure that you keep to your promise by monitoring your progress with a home cholesterol test, a home diabetes test or a stress test. It is estimated that about 17 percent of adult Americans have high cholesterol. Diabetes, also a lifestyle and/or hereditary condition, is estimated to have an incidence of about 6 percent. And there is almost no guessing the incidence of a condition like stress that almost all of us face each day. The manner in which each of these tests can help you monitor your health has been described below. Home cholesterol test High cholesterol puts you at a higher risk of heart diseases like a heart attack or arteriosclerosis. As you decide to eat healthy and ensure that you stay away from foods high in saturated fats like junk food, make sure that you know how you are faring. Not only will this help you ensure that you do not go beyond a certain limit, a home cholesterol test can be a great motivator. You can for example buy a cholesterol test kit that contains two tests. Do one which will give you the results of your total cholesterol in about 10 minutes, and do the other a month later to see how well you’ve done at lowering your cholesterol. Home diabetes test One of the most important tests that physicians prescribe if you are at a high risk of contracting diabetes or are already suffering from the condition is the hemoglobin A1c. This is a test that most diabetic patients tend to ignore since it does not calculate the blood sugar levels. This home diabetes test is actually a hemoglobin test that enables the physicians to understand the consistency of the blood sugar levels maintained by you in the last 3 months. Therefore this home test is one of the best ways to understand the fluctuations in blood sugar levels so that better management is made possible. Stress test If you have been plagued by stress and feel that you have just had it with all the tension and the pressure, then it might help you to understand that a little bit of stress is beneficial for peak performance. The body reacts with secretions of DHEA and cortisol and it is the balance between these two that is critical for stress management. Only when the cortisol test gives results that are benchmarked with the population can one understand the level of stress that one is going through. A simple saliva sample can help you do the stress test at home so that you can later discuss the results with your physician and ask for a strategy for stress management. You can make as many New Years’ resolutions as you want. But unless you follow it up with proper implementation of a plan, your resolutions may come to naught as so many others. Make sure that you put a plan in place for a healthier ‘you’ and work towards it with a controlled diet, exercise and a positive attitude towards life too. Make sure to complement the plan and use home test kits like the home cholesterol test, the home diabetes test and the stress test.