By David Lereah
We can’t bypass the aging process, but we can avoid aging too quickly. So, why not be proactive and take steps to avoid the pitfalls that could accelerate aging? A successful aging path includes addressing the health of your body and your emotions. Even as you confront the marks (inconveniences) of aging and accept the inevitable changes, you can still practice healthy habits to meet the needs of an ageing physical body.
Here are some good suggestions to keep your body as healthy as possible.
Simplify your life. Staying too busy can be stressful. Trying to complete an endless list of doctor appointments, errands, visiting grandkids, and socializing with friends can be overwhelming. Chronic stress triggers the release of cortisol into your bloodstream. Cortisol causes an increase in your heart rate and blood pressure. Keeping life simple and stress-free helps prevent aging too quickly.
Maintain a healthy weight. Maintaining a healthy weight is important for your overall well-being. If you are too heavy, you run the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
Exercise. Regular exercise yields many health benefits including having more energy, feeling happier, strengthening your muscles and bones, and reducing your risk of chronic disease, to name a few. For some older people, exercise includes resistance training (e.g., lifting weights) as well as aerobics (e.g., briskly walking).
Get enough sleep. Insufficient sleep on a nightly basis is associated with a greater risk of health problems (e.g., diabetes), which obviously are more critical as you grow older.
Keep structure in your life. For some people, retirement means a less-structured life compared to the structure of a regular 9 to 5 job. Having little structure in your life can result in a directionless existence that brings with it its own set of emotional issues. Working part-time is a good option, but if you don’t want to work you need to find some form of structure in h our life. Put yourself on a schedule: wake up at the same time every morning, go for a walk, exercise, read, volunteer at community centers, and so forth.
Practice proper posture. This is something that never occurred to me—but I recently read that poor posture can be harmful to your health as you age. This is because poor posture deviates the spine from normal alignment, which results in abnormal stress on muscles, disks, and bones. Poor posture is a primary contributor to pain and fatigue in older adults. Good posture involves training your body to stand, walk, and sit in positions where the least strain is placed on supporting muscles, ligaments, and bones.
Stop sitting all the time. Staying in a sedentary position for a prolonged period—like when you sit on a couch for hours binge-watching television—is an unhealthy activity (or should I say, inactivity). People who are sedentary are at risk for kidney disease and cardiovascular disease—not to mention obesity.
Visit professional health practitioners regularly. This goes without saying for older adults. Regular doctor visits help maintain health, address age-related changes, and manage chronic conditions. Doctors help you monitor your blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and examine your skin on a regular basis, looking out for any unusual tags, moles, etc. Unfortunately, some older adults lack the motivation to see their doctors regularly, especially if they don’t have transportation to get there. This is where social support is key in an older person’s life.
Be aware of your nutritional needs. Focusing on changing nutritional needs is a crucial step in managing senior citizens’ health and well-being as we age. It’s obvious that our nutritional needs change as we age. Here are some reasons why: older people become less mobile and lose muscle; metabolic rates decrease with age; requiring fewer needed calories; poor teeth/dentures make it more difficult to eat solid foods; diminished taste/smell/eyesight could result in less enthusiasm for certain foods; gastrointestinal changes may result in avoidance of healthy foods; and memory loss or other cognitive issues may result in forgetting to eat. Getting the right nutrition in your meals and supplementing them with vitamins are steps that every older adult needs to follow. You should be getting plenty of iron, omega-3 fatty acids, calcium, and vitamin D in your diet, as well as B12 and potassium.
Healthy choices lead to healthy aging. However, elderly seniors—people in their 80s, 90s and 100s, may need a nudge and some oversight from family and/or caregivers to stay on a healthy trajectory.
David Lereah,
President, United We Age
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