Healthy, Active, Successful Ageing

Group of friends laughing in the sunset

Healthy, active, successful ageing determines quality of life and life expectancy. It is the aspiration of every DiscoverAge Activist into the Deep years.

Health is energy, vigour and strength, wellness, mobility and independence. It is complete physical well-being. A healthy body is a defense against disease and illness. Age, of itself, on its own, is not the cause of sickness and disease.

Hippocrates, hundreds of years ago, understood the importance of being active, ‘the body if exercised will become healthy and age slowly, if unused, it will be liable to disease and age quickly.’ Activity improves and maintains physical performance at every age.

Activity gradually declines as we age. How slow or how fast this happens depends on the individual’s lifestyle, is it inactive or active? The ‘use it or lose it’ phenomenon is real. If passive and inactive, the decline and deterioration of the body is rapid, and the ‘shuffling’ replaces walking. The unused inactive body becomes slow, stiff, weak, and then frail. The older the body, the greater the challenge to be active and the greater need.

The evolutionary purpose of the fantastic body has always been survival and procreation. For the age qualified procreation is past tense and survival has taken on new meaning. Historically, life was much shorter, we ate natural foods and were physically active but we lived in a time of  infectious diseases and inadequate public health services. All of this changed in the twentieth century. We invented tractors, cars, soft sofas, etc. We invented manufactured, foodlike substances. We became less active and adopted unhealthy diets, a dangerous health mix and little is done to prevent or change this.

The benefit of activity is evident from the following examples. A University of Birmingham study of 125 amateur cyclists between fifty-five and seventy-nine who had cycled as a hobby for twenty-five years and more had avoided changes usually associated with ageing.

In the famous ‘Dallas Bed Rest Study,’ a group of healthy twenty-year-old men were paid to stay in bed and encouraged to be inactive. After three weeks, they had the bodies of forty-year-olds: their bodies had aged twenty years. After a period of strenuous physical activity, their bodies recovered, rejuvenated, and returned to their younger physical selves.

Writing about healthy active ageing is expected, but adding successful is probably not. It is the DiscoverAge slant, and it’s important.

Historically, health happened to you. This is no longer the case. Today you happen to health.

The New Old are the first generation ever to be educated and to know the benefits of nutrition and activity – the first to know the harmful effects of inactivity and a diet of unhealthy foodlike substances. To have knowledge and choice, is new.

Health has become a ‘commodity.’ It is something to achieve. Healthy active ageing is ambition. To achieve health, to be active, requires determination and discipline, it requires endeavour. In a world where normal day to day physical activity is often minimal, activity requires mindfulness and effort.

We live in an age when food is massively available, affordable, manmade and not nutritious. Every time we are hungry, there is a choice: unhealthy or healthy.  We choose to be healthy or not to be healthy? We make decisions many times, every day. Health is a personal choice, it is individual responsibility.

Health, as in diet and activity, is no longer ‘natural.’ It is unnatural. We choose success or failure.

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