By Priscilla Ayodele

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away” as the axiom goes, means being deliberate about adopting healthy habits and avoiding unhealthy ones helps to achieve a quality lifestyle that liberates from being a regular caller at the physician’s.

Here are little foxes – unhealthy habits – to avoid to stay away from evitable health complications:

Stifling A Sneeze

Sometimes, in the quest for being ‘tush’ or ‘posh’, you hold your nose and press your lips together to avoid sneezing in public. For every such single attempt to look cool, you risk:

• the burst of an eardrum
• a rupture to the throat
• a brain aneurysm (the ballooning of a blood vessel in the brain) which can pop and result in a  hemorrhage.

Now, that is a price too much to pay for being a classic queen. So, let that sneeze out with no iota of shame.

Holding Your Pee

Now, this is Nigeria – a place where you might not always find a restroom readily available whenever you need to use one, and where available, it might prove unusable. However, that doesn’t in anyway change the possible consequences of making it a habit to hold urine for a long time. Such consequences include:

• abdominal pain
• urinary tract infections as a result of bacteria buildup
• urine leakage, painful urination or blood in the urine due to bladder burst.

When next you feel nature calling, do not hesitate to yield her call. You can do well to plan daily for pee breaks and how to handle delays that can arise due to unavailability of restrooms.

Skipping Breakfast

Yas, queen! This right here is for you. It should interest you to know that skipping breakfast or any other meals, out of many of its evils, increases your chances of gaining weight rather than reduce it as you desire. How? After skipping breakfast, you tend to indulge your cravings for more rations of food as well as food high in calories than you will usually do when you have a healthy breakfast rich in protein and other nutrients.

Other things you can avoid when you stop skipping breakfast include:

• Mood swings and low energy level
• Migraines resulting from low blood pressure caused by a dip in your glucose levels.
• Reduction in memory and cognitive level.

You should therefore learn to nourish your body with the required and deserved nutritious first meal of the day after about 12 hours of fasting from the previous night till dawn.

Passive Smoking

I know you don’t even smoke, at all! You’re just not the judgemental type, hence you see nothing wrong with hanging out with your friends when they smoke. After all, what are friends for?

Your body system does not follow your pattern of non-judgemental reasoning and tolerant disposition, though. Therefore, the smoke you inhale as a secondhand smoker is enough to put you at increased risk of the following:

• lung cancer
• acute lower respiratory illnesses such as pneumonia
• heart attack as a result of the effect of smoke inhalation on the heart and blood vessels.

These are a few out of the dangers of the smoke you inhale. So, know what to tolerate and what to stay away from if you wish to stay healthy.

Dear friend, habits are like little embers that can be fanned into a fire which is useful in preparing a meal or keeping one warm, and can destroy a whole city if left unchecked. Watch your habits, be deliberate about picking up and keeping healthy ones as well as eliminating the unhealthy ones. You will be surprised at how healthy you get each day and how much health issues you can chase far away from you.