You are Responsible for How You Age
How do you see yourself at an older age, say 70 plus? Do you see yourself slim, strong, fit and active? Is it important to you that you have a high quality of life? You probably would also like to be totally independent and living in your own home. You would like to be able to perform your daily tasks easily, enjoying your leisure activities and have no major health problems.
Is this just wishful thinking or do you think you have any control how you will live out your golden years?
Do we just wait and hope that all of this will happen by some stroke of luck? Does it not make sense that we should prepare ourselves properly for our later years rather than just waiting and hoping for that miracle to have a strong mobile body as we age?
The myth is that we have been conditioned to believe that as we grow older it is normal to get weaker, feeble and more prone to suffer illnesses and aches and pains. We see others around us getting older and slowing down, and we assume that losing our strength is just part of the natural aging process. Muscle weakness, bone loss and sluggish metabolism are changes that accompany aging but that doesn’t mean that are caused by it.
The fact of the matter is many of these symptoms are the symptoms of inactivity, or disuse, of from using our bodies and our muscles less. This can happen over a long period of time (years or decades) as we slowly but surely slip into a sedentary lifestyle.
Without the challenge of weight-bearing exercise, the body has no stimulus to renew itself, tissues grow old and frail and become prone to injury and disease.
Poor health is not an inevitable consequence of aging. We now know that inactivity is the