One more piece of advice: stop dying. You lose 5% of your skill points each time you keel over, unless it was within 10 minutes of the last time you keeled over.

Ways to not die:
Always have 3 food buffs, with none of them flashing. The increased health and stamina you receive from the food you eat decays over time; it's close to 50% of the buff at 10% duration; ie when a 10 minute food is down to 1 minute. You can eat the same food again when you've had the buff for half the duration, which allows you to keep higher health and stamina for more of the time.
Upgrade your weapons and armor as much as you can. Unlike skills, equipment doesn't lose the work you put into it when you die. The extra damage and durability is well worth the material investment; it's important to upgrade your workbench/forge/cauldron etc as soon as you can.
Stay rested. The rested buff grants 50% health regen, 100% stamina regen, 50% XP gain, and 100% Eitr (mana) regen. If you are currently resting, it adds another 200% health regen and 300% stamina regen, so rest as often as you can; any time you can drop a campfire under a roof, you can be resting. Troll caves, burial chambers, and even crypts give shelter, so drop a campfire in any and all of those when you go in... just watch the smoke.
Only sprint when you have to. Same for swimming. Stamina is a resource, in this game, and you should treat it as such. Conserve it as much as possible, so when you need to, you can tear off across the landscape to get away from the bigbad you wandered around the corner into... or block that big hit.
Speaking of blocking, use a shield. Not only does it decrease damage, but if you time the block properly, you can parry most enemies. Parrying causes them to get stunned and knocked back, at which point you can step forward and smack 'em with a guaranteed crit. hit 'em a couple times before they recover, and you can stun them again. You can take out surprisingly large targets with a stagger/crit/crit/stagger/crit combo.