Aging is an inside job! Getting older is inevitable (and certainly better than the alternative). While you can’t control your age, you can slow the decline of aging with smart choices along the way. From the foods you eat and how you exercise to your friendships, your attitude and the goals you constantly go for — it all has an effect on how fast or slow your body ages. And the good news is that it’s never too late to get started. Remember, "No man can stop the clock, but every man can slow it's tick."
The Eating Habit
Eating is one of the habits we practice several times each day. Every meal or snack or drink we have provides an opportunity to reinforce healthy diet habits. Habits like portion control and choosing nutrient-dense foods. When you make healthy food choices, you are establishing good habits that will stay with you your entire life.
Good nutrition plays an increasingly important role in how well you age. Eating a low-salt, low-fat diet with plenty of fruits, vegetables, and fiber can actually reduce your age-related risks of heart disease, diabetes, stroke, osteoporosis, and other chronic diseases.
Even small changes in body weight can have a big impact on health risks. Losing just 5 percent of your body weight has been shown to reduce the risk for diabetes and heart disease and improve metabolic function in liver, fat and muscle tissue. It might be necessary to lose more than 5 percent, but how about starting with a goal of the first 5 percent, keeping it off, and then continuing until your healthy body weight is achieved?
The Want of Proper Exercise
Research shows that many of the changes attributed to aging are actually caused in large part by disuse. It's new information, but it confirms the wisdom of Dr. William Buchan, the 18th-century Scottish physician who wrote, "Of all the causes which conspire to render the life of a man short and miserable, none have greater influence than the want of proper exercise."
Endurance exercise is the best way to improve cardiovascular function. It helps keep the heart muscle supple and the arteries flexible, lowers the resting heart rate, and boosts the heart's peak ability to deliver oxygen-rich blood to the body's tissues. A related benefit is a fall in blood pressure.
Endurance exercise is also the best way to protect the body's metabolism from the effects of age. It reduces body fat, sensitizes the body's tissues to insulin, and lowers blood sugar levels. Exercise boosts the HDL ("good") cholesterol and lowers levels of LDL ("bad") cholesterol and triglycerides. And the same types of activity will fight some of the neurological and psychological changes of aging.
Endurance exercise boosts mood and improves sleep, countering anxiety and depression. In addition, it improves reflex time and helps stave off age-related memory loss. All in all, many of the changes that physiologists attribute to aging are actually caused by disuse. Using your body will keep it young.
Relationships
Over the years your friends influence your happiness and habits—whether you’ll smoke or drink, work out, stay thin or become obese. New research found that the importance of friendship increases with age. This works both ways—quarrels with friends, it suggests, are tied to chronic health problems. The key is to keep friendships in good order. You may need to repair, or replace, friendships as you age.
Valuing your immediate family is good for your health and happiness at any age. But the older you become, the more important it is to have strong friendships. You're happier and healthier when they're happy -and you're more likely to be sick when you don't value friendship or your friendships are in trouble. “Friendship quality often predicts health more so than the quality of other relationships.”
"By exercising control over a few healthy habits, people can live longer, healthier lives and slow the process of aging." - Albert Bandura
Comments