How to Make Good Lifestyle Choices for the Rest of Your Life

      Do you remember the song about how all our bones are connected? “The foot bone’s connected to the ankle bone…” Hearing it as a kid was the first time I thought about the concept that everything in our body is connected to everything else. You only have to stub your toe to understand this, as the pain shoots right through to your teeth.

     It doesn’t just apply to bones.

     Every area of our health affects every other area, and brain health is central to all of it.

     Throughout my life, I’ve made both good and bad decisions about my health. I remember the time I decided I hated going to the dentist so I wasn’t going to do it any more. Yeah. Bad decision, which I paid for when I finally did go back. Now I am the poster child for good dental care!

     As we age, bad decisions have a bigger impact. They take longer to recover from, and sometimes, you can’t. More than ever, elders become aware of how everything is connected.

    So here’s my challenge: Make good choices.

1. Choose healthy foods most of the time. Limit salt, sugar, and bad fats. Have the occasional treat, but ensure it’s “occasional” (maybe once a week) and a “treat” (not something that’s a regular part of your diet.) Use the Canada Food Guide as your source for most meals.

2. Stay hydrated. Dehydration in elders is sneaky and insidious. Most of us don’t drink enough, and have trained our bodies to expect less, so we don’t feel thirst, even when we are approaching dehydration. As the picture above says, make water your drink of choice, but make it palatable. I’m not keen on plain water and couldn’t drink it all day, but I enjoy a peach flavoured water (no calories) and I allow myself one caffeinated coffee and one diet soda a day. I’m also a little addicted to an almond flavoured herbal tea. I stay hydrated!

3. Air quality. This time of year we don’t think of it, but air quality becomes a concern in the summer, or in industrial areas. Be aware of air quality indexes, and keep windows closed if they are high. Buy an air filter, or even one for each floor. Change the filters regularly.

4. Exercise. You knew I was going to get to this, right? I wear an Apple Watch, which motivates me to get up, get moving and exercise every day. I need to do at least 30 minutes of exercise which raises my heart rate over 60% in order to close the exercise ring. Even through three surgeries, I have been able to close my rings every day. I don’t love exercise. For the most part, it weighs heavily on me until I get it done. But I do it, because I need to close those rings. Whatever works. Find something you like. Or, as my son said, “I don’t love running. I run so I can eat lasagna.”

5. Stay connected. The pandemic taught us how much we need connection, and our relationships with friends and family are as important as the air we breathe. If you can’t physically be with them, FaceTime, call, text or Zoom.

6. Sleep quality. This one used to frustrate me, because although I knew the importance of sleep, I couldn’t make it happen. I couldn’t make a decision to sleep better and then do it. I generally slept poorly. However, after my last hip replacement surgery, I went through three weeks where I slept maybe one to three hours a night. I don’t know the cause (I took the same drugs for pain the other two times without that effect) and it was frustrating and frightening. I wasn’t nice to live with, either. I discovered a patch made of natural products and that turned my life around. The first night I could stay in bed the whole night, I cried. Besides affecting every area of our bodies, sleep is essential to our well being.

7. Stress management. “You’re retired. What are you stressed about?” Truth is, worry and anxiety can creep into our lives at any age, and it’s not healthy. Use exercise, meditation, or whatever other distractions help you to manage it.

It’s never too late to make healthy changes which turn our lives right side up and take us on a journey toward health.

1. https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/
2. Some materials from PowerPoint by Arash Rashidi, RD, PhD