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Chapter 6. Good Health and Physical Well-being

“The greatest wealth is health.”

—Virgil

In 1960 the average life expectancy in the United States for a man (at birth) was about sixty-five years. For a woman, life expectancy was seventy-two years. Those statistics sound low to us today, but they were a huge improvement over life expectancy in 1900, which was forty-seven years. Most of the jump during the first half of the twentieth century can be attributed to advances in medicine, which dramatically lowered the rate of infant mortality. Additionally, antibiotics allowed more children to reach adulthood, and better sanitation enabled more women to survive childbirth.

“No drug … holds as much promise for sustained health as a lifetime program of physical exercise and proper nutrition.”

—Dr. Walter Bortz, Dare to Be 100

By 2015, life expectancy had jumped to around seventy-seven years for men and over eighty years for women.11 The more recent jump can also be credited to medical technology, but for a different reason. Today, when someone has a stroke, a heart attack, or gets a cancer diagnosis, their prospects for continuing to live are much greater than they were in 1970. Medical science has found numerous ways to keep us alive, well beyond the medical event that would have killed us in previous years. According to the Social Security Administration’s actuarial tables, the average sixty-five-year-old man, in 2015, had better than even odds of living to age eighty-three and beyond, and the average sixty-five-year-old woman had an even greater chance of living to eighty-five or more.

Most of us want to live into our eighties or nineties—as healthy, functioning human beings. For those of us without children, staying fit and mobile takes on an even more critical notion as we face the challenge of continuing to be independent for as long as possible. We need to keep ourselves as healthy as possible by staying active, keeping our weight at a reasonable level, eating healthfully, and keeping stress levels in check. For some, retirement opens up an opportunity to make healthful changes. Brett made a radical lifestyle change when he left his job:

Brett worked as a truck driver from age twenty-two until he quit at age sixty-one. He worked for a small company, and in addition to driving the delivery truck, he managed the warehouse, the inventory, and did some of the accounting. By the time he hit sixty, he ached every day and dreaded going to work in the morning. One day he had a falling out with his boss and decided he had had enough. Brett quit the company that day and went home to take stock of his options.

Brett and his wife, Lynn, are child-free boomers. Lynn had built her own business, which was thriving, producing enough income for them to live comfortably. They decided Brett’s working days were over and he became a self-described “house-husband.” They let their housekeeper go, and Brett took on all of the home chores. To Lynn’s delight, he also developed an interest in cooking and started to experiment in the kitchen. Their dinners, which had been mostly take-out, were now inventive and (usually) excellent.

After six months of cooking, cleaning, and running errands, Brett started to put on weight and realized he needed to burn more calories and get into better cardiovascular shape. During his last physical, while he was still working, his doctor had put him on blood pressure medicine and told him to buy a blood pressure cuff and take a daily reading. After he quit work, Brett tried doing without the blood pressure meds, but found his blood pressure only remained under control with the meds. So, Brett joined a gym and experimented with all the machines and classes offered. Through a couple of personal training sessions, he discovered he also needed to work on his flexibility and balance and keep his upper body strong. The gym had a pool suitable for laps and Brett started to work out in the pool daily. He also sampled the classes and found both yoga and Pilates provided him with the opportunity to work on muscle strength, flexibility, and balance. The classes coupled with the swimming provided Brett with the perfect package for regaining the fitness he had lost over the years of hard work.

After another six months had gone by, Brett felt like a new person. He had lost fifteen pounds, had more energy, and had made some new friends at the gym—people with whom he now goes out to lunch or coffee. Brett, now sixty-three, enjoys his new life tremendously. He loves being the house-husband, spends about two hours a day at the gym, and has a whole new set of friends to hang out with while his wife spends her day at work. As a bonus, when he saw his doctor for his most recent annual physical, his blood pressure had dipped so low his doctor recommended discontinuing the meds.

As Brett’s story illustrates, it’s never too late to start. Fortunately, we can still correct some bad habits, lose weight, and find an exercise routine to enjoy later in life. I know many people who, during their working years, never managed to find the time to get the exercise they knew they needed. Like Brett, many fifty- and sixty-something men and women discover the joy of hiking or biking or swimming or tennis after leaving their full-time job. Search the Internet and you will find tale after tale of people who lost the extra pounds, lowered their blood pressure and cholesterol, and became much more physically, emotionally, and mentally fit after age fifty. Physical health is not a one-size-fits-all arena—you are the one who must figure out what you need and what works for you.

“To keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.”

—Buddha

Here are some tips to get you started:

 Get plenty of sleep. How much is enough? Try to get seven to nine hours a night. If you have trouble falling asleep in time to get in a sufficient number of hours, try modifying your food intake in the evening. Spicy foods might be the culprit. Caffeine may be a bad idea any time after noon, and an evening meal heavy on carbohydrates and light on proteins can be helpful. If you have trouble staying asleep or wake up several times a night, your mattress may be past its prime and no longer supporting you. You may need to try different sleep positions or talk to your doctor about adjusting your medications. If you sleep with someone who snores, try earplugs. Studies have shown that people who sleep with someone who doesn’t snore (or whom they can’t hear) have higher quality sleep and sleep for about an hour more than those who sleep with snorers.

 Get moving. Find an exercise routine you like and incorporate it into your lifestyle. By now you know if you start something too aggressively, you won’t follow through on a regular basis, so find an activity you can ramp up incrementally. Make a commitment to spend at least thirty minutes a day at an activity that raises your heart rate. Start by walking, gradually increase the distance, and then add hills to make it a good heart workout.

 Be mindful of your stress level. Take measures to reduce stress if you find you are frequently anxious or worried about something. Stress reduction classes, books, and workshops are available in every corner of the United States today. Take advantage of classes and group support in your community to fix this issue.

 Avoid added sugar. The soft-drink habit can be a major source of problems for older adults. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, kidney stones, and osteoporosis have all been linked to sugar in the diet. Sugar-free or diet drinks are not much better. Kicking the soft-drink habit may allow you to enjoy other foods you have been denying yourself, or to lose some weight.

 Eat more fiber and drink more water. This one is easy to adopt and doesn’t involve sacrifice. Experts have been telling us for years about the value of dietary fiber. Beans, fruit, vegetables, whole grain breads and cereals, and most nuts are all fiber rich as well as tasty and good for you. Water keeps you hydrated, which keeps your skin moist and aids in kidney function.

 Go for prevention. Get a physical every year after sixty. Get a flu shot each fall. Ask your doctor about other vaccines that may be right for you. Older adults are much more susceptible to shingles and pneumonia. Vaccines exist for both of these diseases and most insurance will cover them. Make sure you get the appropriate vaccinations for travel if you like to go to more exotic locales. If you are sexually active and not in a monogamous relationship, get checked for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) on a regular basis. The rates of STDs in people over fifty have skyrocketed in the last fifteen years.

 Pay attention to your teeth. Ignoring your dental health in later life can have disastrous implications. Although you are probably less susceptible to decay at this point in your life, you are more susceptible to gum disease, which can affect your overall dental health. In addition, old fillings and caps break down over time and you may need to have them replaced. See a dentist for a checkup at least once a year.

Leaving or changing your job may be the perfect time to embark on a new way of living. Changing a habit is often easier when your daily routine is in flux. If you are in the process of retiring from your midlife career or cutting back your hours, this may be the ideal time to adopt new and healthier habits, physical, mental, and spiritual.

Ken Druck, in a NextAvenue.org essay based on his book, Courageous Aging, conceived of seven steps for self-care in later life:12

1.Make the decision to change the way you take care of yourself. This is a promise to yourself that you will do whatever it takes to become a happier, more fulfilled version of yourself.

2.Define your end goal. Get clear about your desired outcome and what it looks like. Write it down.

3.Make a list of the things/people you need to say “no” to. Stop over committing to people and things that don’t contribute to your well-being and don’t make you happy.

4.Lighten you load, unburden yourself and allow yourself some pleasure. Delegate tasks to others, talk about your journey and goals, and give yourself permission to be happy.

5.Listen to yourself. Take the time to just be. Listen to your inner voices. Quiet the negative voices, yours or others’.

6.Find or create self-care opportunities in all your relationships. Manage your relationships; don’t let them manage you.

7.Pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Take note of small changes and triumphs while allowing for new ideas and modifications of your plan.

Approach your quest for optimum health as a change to your entire ecosystem. Dr. Hendrieka Fitzpatrick, medical director of the Integrated Health Medical Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico adopted the term “ecosystem” to replace the expression mind-body connection. Dr. Fitzpatrick says “in any sustainable ecosystem, there is absolute dynamic interaction at every level. Thus, mind, body, and spirit are all reflections of our internal ecosystem, which is … a single

inseparable entity.”13

What does that mean? It means you will have the greatest level of success in attaining optimum health if you are in touch with how your thoughts and belief system coincide with your physical health. There are many ways of approaching this. Yoga is a good example of a well-integrated exercise system. As any practitioner of yoga knows, in addition to stretching and toning muscles, yoga involves training the breath and the mind—major components of yoga as a discipline. Taught and practiced in the traditional manner, yoga is as much a meditation practice as a physical activity. Many people find a yoga session clears their mind, leaving them calmer and less stressed.

Many other physical disciplines also incorporate a spiritual and emotional component. In fact, just about any physical routine can be crafted to address the entire ecosystem; yoga and some others (e.g., tai chi) simply have it built in.

For those without children or other close family around a fitness routine or practice can have the added benefit of helping build a support network. The seeds of many strong friendships have been sown in a Jazzercise class, a walking group, a fitness club, on the tennis court, or on the golf links.