What’s the problem? Many of us in our 50’s and 60’s are starting to look so old! Oh, I realize some of us don’t want to flame our hair red or wear contact lenses or high heels or short and sassy skirts. But that’s not the reason.
Bad habits are often the culprit.
Smoking
Smoking looked very cool when I was a sweet young thing. A rail-thin beauty with a sexy voice told us to ‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.’ A feminist icon spoke boldly: “You’ve come a long way, baby!”
Indeed we have! Over the years, smoking shrivels the skin and gives women a manly tone to the voice. That’s because smoking does serious damage to the mouth, throat and lungs. Smokers’ skin begins to wrinkle up noticeably as we get older, bones get brittle and the next thing we know, We’re a wrinkled prune pushing a walker. You’ve come a long way, baby!
Eating terrible food
It tastes great, and I really don’t have time to cook from scratch! Most of it is filled with sugar, fat and grease, and we soon begin to look like what we eat. Overweight is certainly aging, and not just the outward appearance. What is going on inside can be deadly. Diabetes 2 comes to mind.
You can’t say no
It’s a very short word, but some of us can’t say no to overtime at work, or overtime at home. This might get you ahead at work (the proverbial gopher) or get you depended upon unnecessarily at home, but you may fall behind in mental and physical health. The person who invented the term ‘me time’ was very astute.
You don’t find regular time to exercise
Of course not! You are too busy on the job, you are overweight and tired most of the time or just sitting down and having a cigarette sounds a lot better.
Regular is the key word for fitness. Some people only begin exercising to guilty exhaustion when some event comes up – like the class reunion. I want to look like the sorority girl I was!
That’s not how the body works. The body responds to regular training.
Drinking too much
Oh, but I only drink on weekends! We can amend that statement to ‘I only drink too much on weekends.’ What is a ‘too much’ amount of alcohol?
Probably three or four drinks. That’s pretty easy to do as you become the life of the party. Alcohol dehydrates the body and a woman who is a heavy drinker can be easily spotted. Dry skin, wrinkles, skinny, aged. Why skinny? Why eat, when you can drink? It makes perfect sense for weight control.
Not really.
Posture
One of the reasons we look so old is the factor of hunching. You know, that ‘lead with the neck’ posture that many of us have habituated to? Enough of that! Stand up as straight as possible when walking and be mindful of it. The muscles holding you all together will get it together with practice.
How so?
Poor posture can be remedied with awareness. Take a close look at your profile in a full-length mirror. Use a hand mirror to view it exactly. It looks awful? Mine did. I made a conscious effort to stand up straight every day. Sometimes I forgot and slouched. But gradually, my muscles got accustomed to the new position and I succeeded. It takes time.
Speed of gait
So how’s that? Many of us move oh-so-slowly – from the chair, out the door, to the car. We look like a film in slow motion. Everything we do is deliberate, time-consuming, monotonously lagging.
Some of us even rock from side to side like large crabs! What’s the issue? Well, many of us are overweight, for starters. That worked okay with momentum when we were younger, as we had the muscle power and balance to kind of push things along. But not now!
Did you know that speed of gait indicates the potential for longevity? I can vouch for that. My mother sped along like a busy ant for years, and I was hard-pressed to keep up with her when she was on a mission. She lived to be 92, by the way.
Scientific American states that: ‘A new analysis shows that—down to the tenth of a meter per second—an older person’s pace, along with their age and gender, can predict their life expectancy just as well as the complex battery of other health indicators.
So instead of a doctor assessing a patient’s blood pressure, body mass index, chronic conditions, hospitalization and smoking history and the use of a mobility aid to estimate survival, a lab assistant could simply time the patient walking a few meters and predict just as accurately the person’s likelihood of living five or 10 more years—as well as a median life expectancy. ‘
Walking speed can determine the difference in your chronological age and your biological age. It’s amazing how constant a person’s walking speed can be, too. Walking speed, of course, is determined by many factors, such as the level of muscular function and balance, for instance.
Will commanding a terse, ‘Pick it up!’ elevate a person’s mood?
Walking as consistently and rapidly as possible has been shown to be a definite mood elevator. Some studies showed it worked as well as antidepressant medications when done consistently. Improved mood is shown to have a strong bearing on how healthy a person’s immune system can be. Other studies confirm what most of us know: walking lowers blood pressures and glucose levels and eventually, weight. In fact, lowered glucose levels is nothing to sneeze at if a person is type 2 diabetic. Scientific American states that habitual walking has been linked to slower memory decline and reduced risk of certain cancers, all part of the cluster flack associated with type 2 diabetes.
Replacing bad habits with good habits is a well-known formula for success. Give it a try!