How To Stay Fit As You Get Older
If you envision getting older means getting feeble and weak, so as you age, you do less and less, and you’re completing a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of being active, which would help you stay fit, you succumbed to inactivity, fearing that exerting yourself could cause injury. Rejoice that you’re getting older because it means you’re still alive. On the other hand, it’s vital to maintain your health with nutritious meals, plenty of exercise, and adequate sleep so you don’t look and feel older. It won’t guarantee you’ll live longer or feel better, but it gives you a huge advantage.
Sarcopenia is age-related muscle loss.
As you age, your hormone levels drop. Unless you intentionally intervene with exercise and a healthy diet, that causes a gradual drop in muscle mass. Reduced hormone levels make rebuilding or maintaining muscle mass difficult but not impossible. The loss of muscle mass affects bone density. The stronger your muscles, the harder they tug on the bone. That triggers calcium absorption by the bones to keep them strong and not break against the tug. If you don’t exercise, calcium leaches from the bone, and if enough leaches without replacement, you develop osteoporosis. Walking for a half hour daily can help prevent it.
Years of chronic inflammation can lead to serious illness.
You need to eat nutritious meals throughout your life and cut out highly refined foods, food with added sugar, and fried foods. Eating high-calorie foods that contain no nutrition and add extra calories leads to weight gain. The addition of sugar also causes inflammation and other damage to the body. Chronic inflammation plays a role in heart disease, diabetes, and a host of life-altering illnesses. It also speeds up advanced glycation end products—AGES. The sugar combines with skin collagen. That causes wrinkling by reducing firmness.
It’s never too late to start.
Living a healthy lifestyle can change your future. You may not look like you’re in your twenties again or run as fast as you did, but you will improve your fitness. Even though you won’t look 20, you’ll look and feel younger, too. You’ll have more energy than you did previously. Start increasing your activity level slowly by walking. One study showed that HIIT—high intensity interval training—combined with strength training improved health at the cellular level. A study noted the most improvement came in groups aged 65 to 80.
- Exercise and a healthy diet can improve your potential longevity by helping you lose weight. Excess weight contributes to heart problems, diabetes, cancer, and high blood pressure. It also can cause painful joints.
- Getting adequate sleep is vital for heart health and helps maintain mental clarity. You also need to maintain hydration. Even mild dehydration can cause seniors to have episodes resembling dementia and UTIs.
- The body uses stem cells to make new cells throughout the body. Increased physical activity also increases the body’s production of stem cells, which continues throughout your lifetime.
- Mental fitness is just as necessary as physical fitness. Exercising regularly, getting adequate sleep, and eating fewer refined, deep-fried, and sugary foods can improve brain health.
For more information, contact us today at Wellness On A Dime Coaching
Someone may have recommended you start a clean eating program to lose weight or become more fit. If you don’t know what clean eating is, you won’t know where to begin. Not all the food at the grocery is a healthy choice. Some food is nothing more than white flour and sugar with a few other ingredients to hold it together. It lacks nutrients. Eating clean means eating whole foods closest to their natural state, with minimal processing, which may include washing, freezing, cutting, cooking, and canning.
People often tell you how important breakfast is. You hear it on TV and probably heard it from your parents or a teacher growing up. Is that true, or is it an outdated belief? In earlier days, when people had to work hard in the fields, factories, and homes, breakfast gave them the energy to keep going. Today, with all the modern conveniences, including in fields and factories, eating a big breakfast isn’t as necessary for everyone. Eating breakfast may be vital for some, but not for others.
You can make exercise fun by doing it with others. That doesn’t necessarily mean joining a Jazzercise or other group exercise class. It could mean joining an adult sports league or meeting with people for a less formal, but consistent, sports competition. Playing, whether you’re playing softball or paintball, keeps you active. It also provides social interaction and makes exercise fun.
If you’re from Louisiana, you know that many foods everyone loves aren’t always healthy and won’t build muscle. There are healthy foods that do build bulk that are delicious and ones you’d want to eat even if you weren’t getting stronger or bulking up. The most effective muscle-building diets are well-rounded and are higher in quality protein. That’s true even if you follow a vegan diet. The increased protein provides the materials necessary to build muscle tissue.
You know you should exercise more. Your dryer keeps shrinking your pants, and getting out of your chair is harder. Starting may be your problem. How do you motivate yourself to get fit? Lack of motivation is one of the biggest reasons people don’t exercise or lose weight. They often put it off until the time is right, which usually never occurs. Make time to start a fitness program and consistently stick with that plan.
One of the biggest groups in the workforce today is millennials. They’re the group of people born between 1981 and 1996. They’ve witnessed many changes in the workplace and how they workout. Exercising and fitness is a top priority. A recent study showed it was almost as important as family is for millennials. Since many fitness changes came while they were young, millennials aren’t locked into a particular program by habit. They consume healthier meals, smoke less, and exercise regularly. Eating healthy is more important than dieting to most millennials.
Most people don’t understand the benefits of true relaxation or just what relaxation is. It’s the opposite of the fight-or-flight response both mentally and physically. If you’ve had a long day and lean back in your chair to relax, but your mind is going a hundred miles an hour trying to solve a work problem, you’re not relaxing. Your body and brain relax right before you fall asleep. It’s the first stage of sleeping. However, relaxation doesn’t always end in sleep. It sometimes just energizes your body.
Rather than finding ways to treat an illness, you should do the things that improve your health in the first place. It’s much easier to spend an hour a day focusing on health than spending hours in the doctor’s office or the hospital. It’s also far less expensive. Your body heals itself, but only if it has the right tools. It requires the appropriate nutrients, plenty of sleep, adequate hydration, and exercise. It also needs protection from toxins and abuses, which include illegal drugs, cigarettes, and too much alcohol.
It’s difficult to shed those extra pounds, especially with so many theories and diets you find available. In Louisiana, people are turning to carb counting. Any type of diet can be unhealthy if taken to extremes. The same is true for carb counting. Reducing carbs can be done healthily by focusing on low-carbohydrate foods like vegetables and eliminating simple carbs, like cake and other products with added sugar. Here is a guide to counting carbs that will keep you healthy.