Staying fit and being healthy as we get older usually requires work. There’s always the tale of someone who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day, drank a six pack every night, ate whatever they wanted, sat on the couch and lived to ninety years. A few people having amazing genetics and nothing affects them, but this is not the norm. Most people need to take an active approach to life including fitness, diet, rest, and stress. Health is about paying attention to our lives and reducing harm as well as maintaining our bodies and minds.
Your Body is Like A Car
My favorite analogy is that our bodies start out like new cars and generally are like that until we reach adulthood. A new car needs fuel and very little maintenance to keep it running well. If you do not wreck it, the car will run smoothly for our younger years. As the car ages, more and more routine maintenance is needed and as it gets older, major overhauls are sometimes necessary. When we are young, we feed the body and let it run and generally it will be healthy. As a young adult, we need to start doing some general health care such as monitoring our cholesterol and blood pressure, and start purposefully watching things like what we eat, our exercise, and make sure we sleep and reduce our stress. After we turn fifty, technically the body is in old age range, and maintaining our health is needed to keep us running smoothly.
In the 1800’s, the average life expectancy was between forty and fifty years of age. Death was due to injury, trauma, infections, heart problems, cancer and multiple other issues of the time. Since then we have learned how to stay alive such that the modern life expectancy has risen to about 80 years. The caveat however is the body has not evolved much in the last 150 years, so it takes much more work to keep an old body healthy.
How to Stay Fit
Staying fit and healthy does take some work and affects a variety of aspects of your life. If it were easy and simple, everyone would know the secrets and live long without problems. The reality is that it does take effort to be healthy, and everyone is throwing in advice on ways to live. The books, diets, pills, retreats, and machines available for a price to make you live longer and happier are countless. Understanding our history can possibly help us understand our needs into the future.
Exercise is one of the most basic concepts. In the past, we did not sit at desks all day. Rather, we were very active and often constantly moving. Since our sources of survival and income have changed, our amount of activity and movement has plummeted. As we age, exercise to maintain our bodies are essential. Daily stretching for 10 minutes or more is necessary to keep the flexibility of muscle and joints and the health of these tissues. Stretching markedly reduces stiffness and associated pain from muscles, ligaments and joints.
Strengthening is the next pillar needed to maintain the health of muscles as well as bones and other structures in the body. Light strengthening three times a week for 20-30 minutes is needed to maintain muscle and bone health as well as to reduce injury from unexpected events like falls. Lastly, the body needs aerobic conditioning to maintain health including for the heart, blood pressure, muscle endurance, weight control, and to reduce pain from increased endorphin levels and stress reduction. The overall recommendation from the American Heart Association is 30 minutes of exercise 5 times a week, from a simple walk to an intense workout.
Diet and Sleep
Our diet is the fuel that runs our bodies. If we put the wrong fuel in our cars, they won’t run, and it is the same with our bodies. It is becoming clearer that our nutrition plays a huge role in our health. As a doctor, unfortunately we learn very little in out training about diet and nutrition. Curiosity about the subject has slowly been very enlightening. Eating better does take more planning and understanding, especially about processed food, sugars, fats, carbohydrates, and other essential nutrients. Spending some time to read and understand healthy diets helps improve the ability to control the fuel entering your body. Even an old doctor can educate himself; using my drive time to work and back, I am spending time listening to courses on nutrition.
Sleep is one subject we know we need but understand very little about. The purpose of sleep, how much we need, and whether the measures we have are helpful and accurate is debatable. Children need more sleep than adults, and adults often need more than we get nightly. Somewhere over seven hours is recommended every night for adults. Sleep is used by the brain to restore functions, to clean up waste products and to rest the whole body. What constitutes as “quality sleep” is not very clear and those sleep trackers that monitor body motion at night are not accurate, according to most experts. Feeling well rested the next day is probably a reasonable sign of adequate rest.
Lastly, having good mental health is necessary to stay fit. Society tends to ignore our mental health needs. Good mental health is needed to stay physically healthy. The body is dependent on the brain for good function. Emotional health is the part that emanates from the brain that allows us to function well physically. When we are stressed, anxious, depressed, or suffering psychologically, we often cannot put in the energy to maintain physical well being. Once we improves our psychological state, we often can focus our energies to pay attention to the rest of our life. Whether it is meditation or medication that is necessary for good emotional health, without paying attention to our psychological selves, maintaining good physical health is difficult.
Staying healthy and fit as we age requires work on our physical and mental well being. There are multiple pillars that keep up our health and as we age we need to pay more attention to these important aspects of our lives. From sleep, rest, exercise, diet and mental health, they all provide strength and structure to keep going as we age.