change behavior

Chronic diseases are obtained from an individual’s way of living. Individuals that have had a family history of these diseases, however, have a significantly large chance of obtaining them compared to others who do not have a family history of the same. From my family’s health history, I have learned that we have a history of diseases such as Diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, asthma, cancer and obesity among others. This brings out great possible concern for my future health because it is clear that the possibility of getting these diseases is very high because we share similar genes with my family members. Many people usually share a family health history of at least a single chronic disease. In my case, I have a number of close family members who have chronic diseases, which increase the risk of me developing the diseases because more than one of my family members has the disease even at their younger ages.

I learned that there is a need for improvement of my health practices after completing the college health assessment. I acquired this understanding because, among all the tests I took, there was a significant need to improve on my way of living. This depicts that I am putting in little efforts to ensure that I am living a healthy life. From the scores, it is clear that I scored poorly in the nutrition, spirituality and the values, physical activity, self-care and intellectual wellness categories. This implies that there is a great need to get involved in the activities that will help in the improvement of these scores, especially in the nutrition, which I scored the least. It is, therefore, imperative to ensure the intake of a balanced diet to avoid doing well in some areas and poorly in others. This aspect is likely to cause deterioration of my overall health wellness.

The outcome of the college health assessment was similar to my expectations because I only invest more in ensuring my safety while I have been relaxing on the rest. I believe that there is a need to ensure I make a positive investment in my overall health wellness to ensure balanced results.

Having a family history of chronic diseases simply implies that my genetic makeup makes me vulnerable of attaining these diseases. Since I cannot change my genetic makeup to eliminate this vulnerability, I should focus on the improvement of my current and the future health by concentrating on changing my nutrition. In this, I will focus on the elimination of the poor eating habits by ensuring that I consume foods that contain a balanced diet. The other area that I feel I should focus on to improve my current and future health is ensuring that I engage in physical activity. This can be achieved through engagement in the games and supports, which will greatly aid in keeping my body active.

Since I have a family with a health history of a number of chronic diseases, one of the actions that I might take as a response to this understanding is the adoption of a different improved lifestyle and ensuring that I go for screening tests regularly to determine my progress. Adoption of a healthy lifestyle will greatly aid in reducing the risk of attaining these diseases despite my family’s historical facts. On the other hand, screening tests such as hypertension and the diabetes screening will greatly aid in the detection of the early signs and the symptoms of the disease. Identifying the existence of a disease within an individual before he or she has been infected for a long time makes it easy for the disease to be fought through medical care and a changing of the way of life. Prevention of a disease is also cheaper compared to the cost incurred during treatments. Since taking regular tests helps an individual, understand the conditions in his or her life that might lead to attaining the diseases, the results of the tests help people establish ways through which they remain healthy and free from infection by those diseases. The prevention process costs much less compared to the treatment process of the diseases.