Myths About Happiness and Aging

Studies have shown that there’s a strong link between your happiness and aging. People who are happy don’t age as fast as people who just don’t enjoy their lives. One of the reasons for this is because people who are happier tend to be healthier than people who aren’t.

They’re healthier because they’re proactive with their lives rather than simply accepting what will be will be. They don’t give in to all the myths about happiness and aging. There are a lot of common myths floating around about aging and far too many people buy into these myths as the truth.

One of the myths is that there’s nothing you can do about your body’s aging. This isn’t true. There are plenty of things you can do to make sure you help protect the length of your telomeres, which are a good indicator of your lifespan.

You can protect the length by eating right, exercising, getting rid of stress and focusing on things you enjoy and that make you happy in life. Another common myth is that as you grow older, you’ll experience worsening emotional health.

This isn’t true. You can be proactive and do things that make you happy. It’s also a myth that once you grow older, you should retire because you’re no longer as desirable to employers as younger people are.

Keeping a part time job can be beneficial to older people because of the social interaction and the boost in happiness. There are plenty of employers who are looking for older people because they know older employees are more mature and less likely to blow off showing up for work.

Getting older equals become crabby or negative is a myth. Older people don’t automatically become snappish and unhappy. As you get older, you’re going to have trouble with your cholesterol and your blood pressure is another myth people buy into.

Happiness is what affects your health, which in turn affects your aging. Happier people have lower blood pressure and tend to take better care of themselves, which means better cholesterol management.

It’s a myth that growing older means you can’t have plenty of experiences, both extraordinary and ordinary. As someone who’s growing older, you know the value of the big moments and the little moments in life.

You know that it doesn’t take a lot to be happy, that you can find enjoyment in all areas of your life. A myth about aging says that when you grow older, you need to start limiting what you do.

They say you shouldn’t travel and you shouldn’t get involved in activities like volunteering, mentoring or teaching. But growing older gives you a great opportunity to travel, to start a second career and to do things you enjoy.

It’s a myth that you need to be careful with your body as you get older, that because you’re aging, you shouldn’t engage in cardio or high intensity workouts. You can exercise and you can exercise heartily.

Many older people discover that they can get in better health in their 60s than they were in when they were in their 20s. Exercising can prevent cells from dying off. Be as active as you can be.

Another myth is that you should spend most of your free time with your family. Limiting social interaction isn’t good. You need to have a circle of friends outside of your family. People who do this find that it boosts their happiness level.

It’s a myth that you shouldn’t engage in group activities. Getting involved in regularly scheduled activities with other people not only helps prevent cognitive decline, but staves off loneliness and boosts happiness.

When you get older, it’s too late to be in a committed relationship if you’re not already is a myth. Having someone in your life that you can partner with can raise your level of happiness.

You should just live however you want with no goals in mind is a myth. When you have a reason or a sense of purpose to your days, it can raise your level of enjoyment out of life – especially if you’re helping do something for others such as volunteering to help tutor teens or serving food to the homeless.

Other common myths are that it’s too late to give up a bad habit such as smoking or excessive alcohol consumption. It’s too late to start exercising. It’s too late to change your life. It’s okay to let yourself go. It’s never too late to reach for happiness and in the process extend your life expectancy.

How Caloric Restriction Contributes to Your Longevity

Of all the things we can do for ourselves to prevent aging problems, cutting calories rates at the top of the game. Recent strides in understanding genetics and the biochemistry of aging has revealed that the best way to add years onto your life expectancy is to restrict calories that put on weight and age the body and mind.

Since most people have a problem with sticking to a highly caloric restricted diet for more than a few ways, further research reveals that intermittent fasting can offer the same results as caloric restriction, but able to complete with less discipline.

With this plan, you can practice fasting for three to five days at a time and the benefits of restricting calories on a daily basis continue – even though it’s not a good method to lose weight.

Most people tend to compensate for the three to five days of fasting by gorging on food after the fast and gain all the weight back. Another plan that seems to have more lasting benefits of weight loss is caloric restriction for five days and then resuming your normal diet plan.

You don’t feel that you’re starving and aren’t uncomfortable – and maintain your normal energy level. Most researchers agree that calories are the single ingredient, which indicates whether a person will live a long life – or not.

If you’re getting the necessary nutrients, caloric restriction can extend your life, help you lose unwanted weight and prevent or slow down some debilitating diseases. A diet designed to provide the nutrients you need to increase longevity will include restricting protein and consuming fat calories.

On day one of the calorie restricted, 5 day diet plan, 1,090 calories are consumed and on days 2 through 5, 725 calories are consumed. So, the diet tends to be mostly fat. Avocados (2 per day) are recommended on this short diet plan.

In studies using middle-aged mice who were given the calorie restricted diet for 4 days, two times per month, lived up to 11% longer than mice who were fed the calorie-restricted diet plan.

Another unexpected advantage of the mice-test was that their cognitive and memory levels were increased and they kept more lean muscle mass and less visceral fat. The mice tended to perform on a higher, more energetic level and had lower fasting blood sugar.

More studies are being conducted to see if a calorie restricted diet can work for humans to increase longevity and help prevent age-related diseases such as arthritis, heart disease, strokes and type-2 diabetes.

You Can Improve Your Mental Clarity as You Age

There are witty sayings on cards, popular characters bemoaning forgetfulness, and social media quips ripe with zingers about getting older and forgetting things. But the truth is that forgetfulness isn’t a laughing matter – especially once you start to experience it for yourself.

Far too often, we just accept something as part of life and we don’t realize that it’s not even the normal. We’ve been taught to believe that there’s nothing that we can do about getting older – that as we age, we’re going to forget things and won’t be able to make our own decisions.

But don’t believe what you hear about a lack of mental clarity and aging. You don’t have to lose brain function or memory function just because you’re getting older. There are reasons that mental clarity is impaired as we grow older, but it is completely fixable.

Your body is full of cells that help keep it healthy – and that includes your brain. As you grow older, these cells also age. They’re susceptible to damage – the kind of damage that can affect your brain’s ability to remember.

But, thankfully, there are supplements that can help your brain. These supplements act like little sentinels protecting the brain from experiencing cognitive impairment. They work to help the brain because they contain anti-aging properties.

You’ll want to take supplements that are loaded with nutrients that boost your brain and fight aging. These supplements can boost your brain’s ability to remember things regardless of if you’re already struggling or not.

The supplements that you want to use are the ones that are made with nutrients just like the kind of nutrients your brain already uses. These nutrients found in the supplements help to fight the aging processes in your brain that can lead to memory loss and loss of cognitive skills.

As time passes, your body and your brain have already been slowly aging for years. You might not even realize it at first. So it can be quite scary to suddenly realize that you can’t remember all the things that you once knew.

You might have trouble recalling how to spell words that you knew by heart. You might see someone you know and for the life of you, your brain just will not bring up their name.

Because this type of situation is so common, most people and many doctors simply call it aging, getting older, or cognitive impairment. There are several things that can take a toll on your mental clarity.

Damage from free radicals is one. Not getting the right amount of sleep or having nutritional deficiencies from a poor diet is another. Hormonal imbalances can also play a part in causing a loss of memory function. But whatever the reason may be, just know that you don’t have to accept it as part of getting older. You can fight memory and cognitive decline.

How to Achieve Better Brain Function

You may have experienced times when you can’t remember what you were about to do. Maybe you’ve experienced struggles to recall specific events or people. It can be too easy to pass this lack of mental clarity off as just part of life – especially if you’re growing older.

But if you’re having problems of any kind with mental clarity, that’s not normal – regardless of how old you are. There are many reasons people struggle with their thinking processes.

Sometimes, health issues can play a role in the inability to remember certain things. While it’s true that your family genetics do play a part, there’s no reason that you can’t be as sharp minded as you once were.

The key is found in not accepting a lack of mental clarity as something that happens and become proactive to achieve a better brain function. You want to start with what you put into your body.

The way that you eat and what you eat can help fight back against the things that can derail your brain’s ability to function. By eating right nutritionally, you can fight inflammation that can cause cognitive slow down.

When you’re eating foods that are good for your body, it also helps your body to be able to use the insulin produced. Besides making sure you have the right nutritional intake, you want to make sure that you stay active.

How you stay active is as important as making sure you do. Regular exercise, while helpful, doesn’t give your brain the same boost that getting involved in HITT or High Intensity Interval Training does.

When you move, give your brain a break. When you have to concentrate for long periods of time, your brain can’t function as well. Take breaks, go for walks. Brain function also benefits from a form of meditation.

When you meditate, you clear all of the things clamoring for attention. Because it can be so easy to become overloaded mentally in today’s busy world, taking the time to focus can help to improve not only your memory, but all your cognitive function as well.

Even if you can only do a few minutes a day, you’ll still reap the benefits of meditation. You might have heard that you need to get plenty of sleep to help your brain function well.

This advice is true. When you sleep, your brain gets to decompress. This rest allows your brain to relax and to get rid of waste products. Taking a supplement to improve sleep and brain function can also help. These supplements can boost energy and mental clarity.

Click here to learn how you can reverse brain aging in less than 10 minutes

How to Adjust Your Life to Avoid Metabolic Syndrome

With a metabolic syndrome diagnosis, it’s imperative that you make some lifestyle adjustments to avoid the development of serious diseases which can interfere with your lifestyle and shorten your lifespan.

If you’ve lived a life of inactivity and are obese, you’re likely to develop metabolic syndrome. Metabolic syndrome is linked to insulin resistance, which stems from your digestive system’s inability to break down the foods you eat and produce sugar (glucose).

The result in this inability is that your glucose levels rise because your body can’t control the glucose and keeps secreting more insulin. When your body becomes unable to produce enough insulin to keep the glucose at normal levels, diabetes may develop.

When you’re given a diagnosis of metabolic syndrome from your health care provider, it means that you have several conditions at once – high blood sugar, excess fat surrounding the waist, abnormal cholesterol levels and high blood pressure.

All of these conditions, when occurring at the same time, can increase your risk of heart disease, diabetes and stroke – but being diagnosed with one of the conditions doesn’t indicate that you have metabolic syndrome.

It does, however, mean that you’re at greater risk for these diseases. You’re at risk for metabolic syndrome if you fit into one or all of the categories below:

Over the age of 60
Hispanic or Asian
Diabetes during pregnancy or a family history of type 2 diabetes
Have or had nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, polycystic ovary syndrome or cardiovascular disease
Obesity (especially fat around the stomach area)

You can make aggressive changes in your lifestyle to prevent these metabolic syndrome diseases by adjusting your diet and exercise to lose weight and lower the harmful levels causing the problems.

Seniors should be on the lookout for symptoms of metabolic syndrome to avoid developing serious health problems. A low-caloric and low-carbohydrate diet plan can help you lose weight and a good regimen of exercise can help sculpt your body back into shape and burn the calories you do consume.

Include cardiovascular and stretching exercises for an overall workout of the body’s muscles and for good bone health. See your healthcare provider for a metabolic syndrome test if you have the symptoms of increased thirst, frequent urination, extreme fatigue and blurred vision. Also see your doctor if you have a large waist circumference. An “apple” shape of the body usually indicates a metabolic problem.

Get Better at Regulating Your Energy as You Age

One of the most consistent complaints of aging is the lack of energy. Age and fatigue just seems to be synonymous – so what is the connection – and is there anything we can do about it?

One recent report that’s good news about aging and energy indicates there are things we can do to boost our energy levels as we age. The Harvard Medical School Special Health Report, “Boosting Your Energy,” presents a plan to regulate your energy levels at any age.

Some of the steps on the plan include:

Get stress under control. Stress is the most common reason for chronic fatigue. If you have trouble controlling stress, try seeing a therapist or chatting with a trusted friend. Relaxation techniques such as yoga, tai chi and meditation also work wonders.

Say “no” to more obligations. Some of us are stressed because we have too much on our plates. Learning to say “no” rather than “yes” to every volunteer job, social activity or work project is one of the best ways to restore your energy levels.

Exercise on a regular basis. When we exercise, we inundate our bodies with fuel for energy to do more. You’ll also be building capillaries, the blood vessels which carry oxygen to the cells. Exercise also creates the stress hormones, norepinephrine and epinephrine, that help us feel more energized.

Get enough sleep. The aging population often complains of lack of sleep as part of the reasons for lack of energy during the day. It’s best to use natural methods rather than sleeping pills. Changing your lifestyle such as drinking less alcohol during the evening hours and avoiding heavy meals before bedtime can enhance your sleep experience.

Spend your energy wisely. Spend some time setting goals that will bring enjoyment to your life and fill your mind with determination to meet the goals. Prioritize your days so that you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment when the day is over.

Adopt an energy-inducing diet. Diet becomes even more important as you age. Energy foods such as fruits and vegetables are paramount to maintaining energy and keeping your body healthy so it’s ready to meet the challenges of aging.

Sometimes aging is more a state-of-mind than the state of our bodies. Find something you enjoy doing and make sure you prioritize those activities into your daily plans. Surround yourself with positive people who enjoy doing some of the things you love and you’ll be more energetic and ready to meet life head on.

Five Day Fasting for Better Metabolic Health

Fasting has been a health and anti-aging method for centuries. Not only does a five day fast provide a boost to the immune system, but it also reduces your risk of cancer and cardiovascular diseases.

A five day fasting plan was recently introduced which doesn’t completely cut out all food, but restricts calories to either a third or half of your usual daily consumption for five days.

Improving your metabolic health by fasting can give your body a boost, which will slow the aging process and help you enjoy long term health benefits by regenerating the complete immune system.

But, complete (no food at all) fasting can be dangerous and few people can stick to a long term fast of eating nothing. You can choose a fasting diet which restricts calories, but triggers the same results in your body that a complete fast can do.

A new fasting diet has emerged through many studies which can have the same effect as all-food restricted fasting. Named “Fasting Mimicking Diet (FMD),” this diet involves following the diet plan for five full days per month and then eating what you want the remainder of the month.

The diet consists of the following caloric and nutrition input:

Day 1: 1,090 calories (10% protein; 56% fat; 34% carbohydrates)
Day 2 through 5: 725 calories (9% protein; 44% fat; 34% carbohydrates)

The amazing results for this diet plan on a group of people indicated that within three months, the group had reduced biomarkers connected to cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and aging.

The people had also reduced overall body fat and lost unwanted pounds. The study also had the participants eat as they usually did on the remaining 25 days of the month. They were not to change their diet habits at all – good or bad – they ate as they normally would.

Positive results were achieved and maintained even after the end of the 25 day period. A same study conducted on young mice with the equivalent of the restricted diet fed to humans showed a regeneration of the stem cells in the organs.

During this time, the brain created new neurons which tend to improve learning ability and memory. When the same study was conducted on middle-aged mice, the results showed the immune system was boosted, cancer risk factors and inflammatory conditions were lowered and the cognitive abilities of the mice were improved.

Researchers believe the FMD plan virtually tricks the body into a slower aging process by reprogramming it and rejuvenating stem cells. For those who can’t stick to a complete no-food fasting program, this plan has been found to have the same results and is much easier to complete.

The most popular rule of weight loss is completely wrong

Bummer, I was about to crank up my exercise program to get to my weight goal by mid september but it now appears I will have to either review my exercise plan or my weight loss goal for even burning 3.500  calories per week is not going to get me there, check out the excerpt of the article that debunks the calorie myth:

There’s a popular rule you’ve probably heard before about losing weight: for every 3,500 calories you shed from your diet, you’ll lose a pound. But just because everyone, including nutritionists with graduate degrees, keep repeating this doesn’t make it true.

In fact, it’s a total myth.

“I see dietitians using it all the time, making recommendations based off of it,” said Kevin Hall, who is a researcher at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. “Unfortunately it’s completely wrong.”

The adage dates back to the 1950s, when medical researcher Max Wishnofsky measured how much energy a pound of fat tissue represents, and found that it was 3,500 kilocalories, otherwise known as calories. Theoretically, he had calculated how many calories a person had to burn—or forego—in order to lose a pound of fat. But Wishnofsky made a couple spurious assumptions.

First, he assumed that when you lose weight you only lose fat tissue. “That isn’t true,” said Hall. “It’s a relatively minor error, because a lot of it is fat tissue, but it still isn’t true.”

The much bigger mistake Wishnofsky made was misunderstanding how our bodies react to weight loss. As soon as we start cutting calories from our diet, the number of calories our body expends begins to fall. “It literally starts happening on the first day,” said Hall. “And it continues to mount as you lose weight.”…

Read more at this link

Coffee Is Good For Your Brain

Are you a coffee drinker? and what about you taking care of your brain health? you could already be exercising your brain with well known brain games like lumiosity but now another study confirms once again that drinking coffee could be really good for your brain aswell:

I know by now news on coffee research is a little hard to swallow, considering how often new studies come out with contradictory conclusions. But don’t give up on coffee science just yet — a theme has emerged from the more credible studies, and the latest study in the dogpile is a worthy example.

So let’s get right to the point: according to the latest study, drinking a consistent, moderate amount of coffee each day significantly reduces the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a precursor to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

hot coffee

The research team evaluated 1,445 people, ages 65-84, participating in the Italian Longitudinal Study on Aging, a population-based sample. They found that people who kept their daily coffee intake steady at one cup a day were in the best mental shape compared to others with more erratic coffee habits. Here’s the full breakdown:

People who increased their coffee consumption over time to more than a cup a day (in other words, they were at some point one-cup drinkers and gradually inflated their habit) had twice the rate of MCI as people who reduced their habit to one or less cups a day.

Those who increased their habit also had a one and a half times higher rate of MCI than people with a steady one-cup-a-day routine.

People who consistently drank one to two cups a day had a lower rate of MCI than people who rarely or never consumed coffee…

Read more at this link:https://onforb.es/1IOLapd

Get up for your heart health and move for your waistline

Well you definitely might want to reconsider your current sitting down vs walking around or standing habits for a new study shows changing to the latter could seriously improve both your waistline as your chances of avoiding diabetes and heart diseases:

Just two hours of pottering around your house or office each day could take three inches off your waistline, a study suggests.

Those who spending less time sitting and more time walking are more likely to be thinner, healthier and at lower risk of diabetes and heart disease.

Using activity monitors, researchers tracked 782 men and women for a whole week, calculating how long each participant spent lying down, sitting, standing or walking.

They compared the activity data with each volunteer’s blood pressure, height, weight and waist circumference, and took blood samples to check their sugar, fat and cholesterol levels.

The team, led by the University of Queensland, Australia, found that people who spent more time standing rather than sitting had, on average, lower blood sugar, less fat in the blood and lower cholesterol levels.

People spend nine hours on average sitting down – 60 per cent of the time they spend awake.

But the study, published in the European Heart Journal, found that those who spent two hours longer each day walking rather than sitting had waistlines that were smaller, on average, by 7.5cm (nearly 3 inches) and body mass index that was 11 per cent lower.

For a woman of 5’6’’, the drop in BMI is equivalent to a 1.5 stone weight loss, from 11 stone to 9 stone 7lb.

Researcher Dr Genevieve Healy, senior research fellow at the school of public health at Queensland University, said: ‘We found that time spent standing rather than sitting was significantly associated with lower levels of blood sugar and blood fats.

‘Replacing sitting time with stepping was also associated with a significant reduction in waistline and BMI.

The associations it reveals are consistent with what is known already about the benefits of a non-sedentary lifestyle. More work is needed to understand cause and effect.’

The authors suggested that office workers should be encouraged to walk around at work – and use stand-up desks rather than sitting for hours in front of a computer screen.

Dr Healy added: ‘These findings provide important preliminary evidence that strategies to increase the amount of time spent standing or walking rather than sitting may benefit the heart and metabolism of many people.

‘Get up for your heart health and move for your waistline….

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