The Healthy Matriarch
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Many of us enter our 60s without major health problems and have refined our strategies to sustain that health as long as possible. What are the top 5 things you are doing toward a healthy you? Mine are:
- Take at least 12,000 steps per day (using a Fitbit
to measure ‘steps’)
- Sleep 7-8 (but not more than 8) hours per day (also measured by the Fitbit
- Eat a healthy diet - lots of fruits and veggies, some meat and grains, some fat (olive oil and nuts) - and take reasonable supplements
- Sustain or reduce weight to ‘normal’ for my height
- Continue a high level of continuous learning
OK - I combined a whole lot in the ‘eat a healthy diet’ item and the ‘continuous learning’ items.
Eating a healthy diet requires tweaking. Your food should help you feel good - not bloated, tired, or break out in hives! Supplements are the backup of diet - not the main event. Take supplements for those vitamins and minerals that you cannot get through diet and keep up with the research. For example, recently there has been quite a lot in the media about the pluses and minuses of taking calcium supplements…with the minuses currently winning when it comes to people that do not have bone density issues already.
‘Continuous learning’ makes it to my top 5 for sustaining health because healthy mind is so closely linked to healthy body. Whatever one does for ‘continuous learning’ needs occasional tweaking too. This year I have added Coursera to my regime and reduced the number of physical books that I read (even though the net books read is about the same…it is just a shift in media type). And I am on the lookout for volunteer activities that will be ‘learning experiences.’
The gist of all this is - articulate what you are doing to sustain your good health. It’s a way to make sure you are focused on the things that are right for you.
