The Regular Medical Checks You Need In Your Life

As you’ll know from being on a weight loss journey, staying healthy involves some effort. Aside from watching what you eat and doing exercise to ensure you burn off the calories, there are a myriad of illnesses you can develop through no fault of your own.

To ensure you can live a healthy and full life, it’s super important that you regularly get check-ups and tests done, so you can nip illnesses in the bud before they start adversely affecting you.

With that in mind, here’s our guide to the health tests you should be getting done regularly. 

Some people like to see their doctor once a year for a general check-up. During this process, a doctor will ask about your health and lifestyle, weigh you, listen to your heart and lungs and ask about your family history of medical illnesses.

This probably will come as an obvious one to you if you’re on The Man Shake, but every time you get a checkup, it’s worth getting your height and weight checked. The doctor may be keen to check on your BMI, to ensure you’re in what they perceive to be a healthy weight range. However, as this blog points out, your BMI may not be the be-all and end-all when determining your ideal weight.

Blood pressure refers to the pressure of blood pushing against the walls of your arteries. It's expressed through two numbers (e.g. 120/80). The top number is the pressure in the arteries as the heart pumps out blood during each beat, while the bottom number is the pressure as the heart relaxes before the next beat. As a rule, normal blood pressure is considered less than 120/80, while high blood pressure (known as hypertension) is around 130/80 or higher.

High blood pressure is a key factor in heart attacks, strokes and kidney disease and doesn’t have any symptoms, so you should get it checked regularly. A healthy person over the age of 18 should get it checked at least once every two years.

Blood tests involve extracting your blood to check for any early signs of disease, often before the symptoms arise. Blood tests can be used to identify signs of cancer and autoimmune diseases — so they are important. Generally, you would get them every five years as a younger adult, but your doctor may advise increasing the frequency as you age. 

Cholesterol is a type of fat in your blood, which, in high levels, can cause heart disease and stroke. People aged 20 or over are advised to get their cholesterol checked once every four to six years but may need to get it looked at more frequently if they are overweight, elderly, have a family history of heart disease and high cholesterol, or have diabetes. 

This one is a little gross but it’s super important. For the initiated, a colonoscopy is a procedure during which a doctor shoves a camera up your rectum to check for symptoms of colon cancer including blood or growths called polyps. For healthy people, doctors advise getting these tests in your mid to late 40s, once every three years. However, if you have a history of bowel cancer in your family, you should get this done a lot earlier.

This is a test to check whether you have diabetes or are at risk of diabetes. It involves measuring the level of sugar in your blood. People generally start having this test around their mid-40s, but it may be done sooner if the patient is overweight, has high cholesterol or high blood pressure. 

This is especially important when you live in a sun-drenched country like Australia. Some experts say that people should self-examine skin once a month for changes to any moles or freckles, and ensure they aren’t showing signs of potential skin cancers.  If skin cancer runs in your family, you should regularly visit a doctor to have your skin examined.

This is one that you usually start getting done regularly in your early 50s. It’s a test that checks your prostate glands for signs of cancer. That said, you may want to get it looked at earlier if prostate cancer runs in the family.