Health Tip: Get Heart Healthy

(HealthDay News) -- If you want to improve your heart health, it may require a long-term commitment to changing your lifestyle.

The American Heart Association offers these heart-healthy suggestions:

• Replace your bad habits with healthier habits.

• Creating new habits takes time, possibly as long as 90 days.

• Approach these changes as replacing bad habits, rather than as depriving yourself.

• Create several small, short-term goals out of one big one.

• Be accountable to a friend you trust.

• Let yourself indulge every once in a while.

• Replace TV with daily exercise.