Diet and Exercise for High Blood Pressure?

My sister has really good luck following the DASH diet recommended to her by her doctor. Her doctor emphasized the fruit/vegetables and dairy components of DASH when she first started.

I do not know a ton, but I know increasing fiber intake can help with that. I would gradually increase it though, you don’t want to get the excess fiber uh… bathroom trips

Yes.

My blood pressure used to be borderline to high, now it's solidly normal, sometimes low normal.

Personally, I changed less than what you mention. I didn't significantly change exercise. (I was already quite active, when I had high BP). I didn't change the range of foods I ate all that much, mostly just the portion sizes, proportions on the plate, and frequencies of some calorie-dense/nutrient-sparse foods. (My nutrition wasn't terrible before, though: Mostly I just ate too much.)

As I lost weight, my BP came down. As I've stayed at a healthy weight (6+ years now), BP's stayed reasonable.

If you're inactive, getting more active can help. If your nutrition is sub-par, improving that may help. (I'd especially look at soluble/insoluble fiber, micronutrients (or just veggie/fruit intake).)

For me, just losing from class 1 obese (183 pounds at 5'5") to a healthy weight (mid-120s pounds) was enough to bring BP down and keep it there.

If you have reasons to suspect a genetic predisposition to high BP - such as slim relatives with high BP - YMMV, though.

Been dealing with this for about 6 months now - went to donate plasma one day and couldn't because my bp was too high - asked the numbers and was shocked! Scared me a bit, as I had no clue.

Most of mine is caused by stress, which I have had good reasons to be crazy stressed the past 3 years, but it was still a wake up call. I'm sure had I been at a doctor they'd have wanted to put me on meds, but I knew there were things I could before going that route.

One of the big things diet wise is your Omega-3's, which has been proven to help as much as most lifestyle changes, so I made getting a good Omega-3 supplement a priority. I get mine through 1st Phorm since I trust their products and the quality is always fantastic.

Lowering sodium, exercising more, losing some weight (slow going as I only have about 20 pounds max to lose at this point).

Stress - well, that one is more difficult, but I started some things at the very end of last year that have helped, along with that, reading some resources that helped me lower my worrying (for example, I was stressing over a particular financial situation, and accepting that I can control things, one at a time, and I'm the one in charge, and I just have to do the next step at this point, blah blah blah) really helped me as well.

Some days I get a totally normal reading, I have stabilized at normal to slightly high but not scary high anymore, and generally can figure out my worse days are days when I'm stressing about something on some low key level.

I still need meds to control my HBP but it's now normal with meds...before I really got into good living it was still high with meds, just not out of control. For me, the composition of my diet didn't really make a ton of difference directly...indirectly changing the composition of my diet allowed me to lose weight pretty easily. After I lost about 10 Lbs there was a noticeable difference in my BP. When I started exercising regularly, that's really when I saw a major decrease in my BP.

Even now with a healthy diet, if I get lax on my exercise I start to see it creep up as outside of exercise and active recreation I'm pretty sedentary with a desk job. I've also noticed that having two to three days of moderate or more strenuous exercise makes a big difference vs just getting in steps or walking. By that I mean adding in two or three days of spin or long road ride or Zwift workout on the bike. Also, there have been more and more studies coming out about the benefits of resistance training on BP and that it may be just as or even more important to normalizing BP as cardiovascular exercise.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pressure/in-depth/high-blood-pressure/art-20046974#:~:text=Losing even a small amount,pounds) of weight you lose.

...Weight loss is one of the most effective lifestyle changes for controlling blood pressure. Losing even a small amount of weight if you're overweight or obese can help reduce your blood pressure. In general, you may reduce your blood pressure by about 1 millimeter of mercury (mm Hg) with each kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) of weight you lose.