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Laurence got his start in fitness fairly late in life when his 5th decade was just on the horizon. So while most folks consider their 40s to be “past their prime” Laurence was just getting started and aiming to make some big changes in his health and fitness.
I’m 55 years old and I would imagine in the next 10 years or so i’ll be starting to approach what people think of as old age! Mind you when I was a kid they had seniors’ menus at restaurants that stated food for over 55’s.
Every pound of extra weight we carry puts four pounds of stress on our knees. Heartburn can be caused by the pressure excess weight puts on our stomach. Obstructive sleep apnea is caused by being overweight and a good night’s sleep is important if we want to remain healthy into our old age.
If you have excess body fat to lose, at first just shoot for a five percent reduction in body weight. Reducing your weight by this relatively small amount has been shown to lower your risk for diabetes and heart disease while improving metabolic function in your liver, fat and muscle tissue.
It kind of makes you think they thought 55 was old and as a kid I might have thought the same but now I know better how your body ages is not fixed to the number of years you’ve been alive it’s more connected to how you’ve lived those years and by making a few changes we can slow down the aging of our body.
The first area I want to look at is our skin, our skin reflects how healthy we are on the inside. Exercise improves blood flow to our entire body including our skin providing with oxygen and nutrients as well as removing waste products including free radicals which are unstable atoms that can damage cells causing illness and aging.
Exercising outdoors can improve our mood as sunshine naturally boosts serotonin levels in the body but when it comes to our skin, we have to be careful too much sun will cause DNA changes in our skin that can lead to premature aging and skin cancer.
So, if you’re a bald guy like me make sure you wear a hat and if you’re out for any length of time sunscreen is a must.
Smoking harms our skin affecting its colour elasticity and causing it to wrinkle it also damages teeth and gums increasing our risk for cataracts and brittle bones one of the reasons for this is because it causes blood flow to be restricted.
When we quit smoking blood flow improves and we can improve it even further by adding in exercise this helps to give us a healthier looking complexion.
Of course, smoking also increase our risk of heart and lung disease but once you quit smoking the body immediately starts to repair itself and within 24 hours. Your risk of heart disease cuts in half and after 10 years of being smoke free, and your risk of lung cancer is the same as someone who has never smoked.
Maintaining a healthy body composition will protect us from a lot of different health risks things we might think of like high blood pressure or risk of diabetes and some things we might not think of like protecting our joints.
The more often you can prepare your meals the easier it is to control what’s in them and make healthy choices like including vegetables at every meal and let’s not forget the importance of water!
It helps to keep our energy levels up and as always everything in our bodies is connected and improving our water intake can help to make our skin look younger and healthier because we will in fact be healthier.
Making smart choices when shopping for food or going to a restaurant will not only help us keep our weight in check it will also affect how our body ages. The best change we can make is to avoid all processed foods and drinks as this will immediately eliminate added sugars from our diet.
These foods are anything that comes in a bag or a box except for single ingredient foods like nuts, eggs, olive oil, or even lean ground turkey. Even though I included ground meats, processed meat should be avoided like hot dogs sausages, and deli meats as these have been associated with a higher risk of heart disease primarily because of the high levels of sodium and chemical preservatives.
